A Two-Day International Conference on Environmental Humanities: A Multidisciplinary Dialogue on Ecological Agency and Crisis

Organised by the Department of English, Women's Christian College, Kolkata (affiliated to the University of Calcutta),

in collaboration with the University of Notre Dame, Australia, Transilvania University of Brasov (Romania) & Spadina Literary Review (Canada)

DATES OF CONFERENCE: April 22, 2026 (WEDNESDAY) & April 23, 2026 (THURSDAY)

VENUE: WOMEN’S CHRISTIAN COLLEGE, KOLKATA, INDIA

MODE: HYBRID (both online and in-person)

CONCEPT NOTE

The proposed conference aims to open an ever-diversifying dialogue across multiple disciplines, myriad experiences and multifold territories of the world, with the view to carving out new perspectives on environmental humanities. In his article “Anthropocene Time” (2018), Dipesh Chakrabarty underscores how “humankind . . . rivals some of the great forces of Nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system,” (6) and has become “a global geological force in its own right” (6). Crutzen’s own article in Nature pinpoints the genesis of “the Anthropocene” and a note of warning as well: “It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present,...human dominated, geological epoch” (“The Geology of Mankind?”).

The crux of the argument is that trends in development are the basic triggers behind still-burgeoning environmental degradation and climate crisis. Thus, the implication of development is now largely problematic in the sense that the ruin of the environment has become the greatest threat to marginalized cultures and livelihoods like those of tribal people, nomads, fisherfolk and artisans, who have always been heavily dependent on their immediate environment for their survival. Moreover, in the book Ecofeminism (2014), Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva demonstrate how women are the worst-hit owing to the unstoppable depletion of biomass, especially those from marginal, landless and underrepresented families.

There is no denying that humankind has identified the potential threats across geological time but there is no one “single rational solution” (Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies” 13) to this problem. This is exactly what Chakrabarty maintains in “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change” (2012): “Precisely because there is no single rational solution, there is the need to struggle to make our way in hitherto uncharted ways”. His arguments are indicative of certain comprehensive interdisciplinary studies across “ontological and nonontological modes of existence” (14). Just as Donna J. Haraway in her enunciation of the “Chthulucene” (2016) sees the possibility of a revived tie between human and more-than-human entities, in the book Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (2017), Clive Hamilton perceives a kindred potential, optimistically earmarking humans as a ‘conscious force’: “the future of the entire planet, including many forms of life, is now contingent on the decisions of a conscious force” (27). All these, therefore, necessitate a re-situating of Hamilton’s “conscious force” or Chakrabarty’s “struggle” for “hitherto uncharted ways” in “a dynamic, discipline-crossing field that combines academic scholarship with environmental activism” (Hubbell and Ryan 127). J. Andrew Hubbell and John C. Ryan refer to this as “EH” in Introduction to the Environmental Humanities (2022).

Within the diverse topics environmental humanities encompasses, we especially encourage papers dealing with the question of agency. If we define agency as the capacity for self-governing, self-directed, sovereign behaviour with the potential to affect and thus shape the lives of other beings, then what should be the role of agency in our approach to animals, plants, fungi, ecosystems, and the biosphere? Moreover, how does the concept of agency transform readings of literary, cultural, social and political narratives concerned with, or rooted in, the environment? What forms of ecological agency are evident in environmental texts of diverse kinds—from indigenous and traditional to postmodern and experimental?

Works Cited

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Anthropocene Time.” History and Theory, vol. 57, no. 1, March 2018, pp. 5-32. doi: 10.1111/hith.12044. Accessed 8 Oct. 2025.

_ _ _. “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change.” New Literary History, vol. 43, no. 1, Winter 2012, pp. 1-18. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23259358. Accessed 8 Oct. 2025.

 Hamilton, Clive. Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene. Polity Press, 2017.

 Haraway, Donna J., Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.

 Hubbell, J. Andrew, and John C. Ryan. Introduction to the Environmental Humanities. Routledge, 2022.

 Malm, Andreas, and Alf Hornborg. “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative.” Anthropocene Review, vol. 1, no. 1, 2014, p. 66.

 Mies, Maria, and Vandana Shiva. Ecofeminism. Zed Books, 1993.

We invite paper presentations on the Environmental Humanities including but not limited to the following areas:

1. Environment, art and literature

2. Gender, sexuality, LGBTQIA+ identities and environment

3. Creative practices engaging nature and environment as agents

4. Environmental film, media and popular culture

5. Utopia/dystopia and environment in film and literary works

6. Phytopoetics, phytocriticism, phytosemiotics and dendocriticism

7. Environment, posthumanism and the posthumanities

8. Environment, postcolonialism and globalisation

9. Environment, meditation, spiritualities and religious traditions.

10. Traditional, folk, oral/aural and visual knowledge systems vis-à-vis environment

11. Indigenous people’s relations to environment and ecosystems

12. Planetary agency, sensing, behaviour, learning and cognition

13. Cognitive, epistemic, ontological ways and the study of memory and intelligence in environmental humanities

14. Environmental humanities and the Global North & Global South

15. Environment, race, class, Dalit, subaltern studies and literature

16. Politics about environment and environmental humanities

17. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): environment and literature

18. The recent diversification of environmental humanities into the blue humanities, plant humanities, geohumanities and other strains

19. EH as theory and praxis in East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia

20. The role of ecological agency in conservation theory and practice

Submission Guidelines:

Send your abstract (within 300 words) with five relevant keywords along with a bionote (80 words) in a single MS Word document to the email id . Kindly maintain the word limit.

Format for Abstracts: A title in bold. The author’s name comes in the immediately following line without any honorifics such as Mr, Ms, Mrs, Dr, etc., in MS Word document, Times New Roman, 12 points, 1.5 spacing, 1.27 cm margin. 

Important Dates:

Deadline for Abstract Submission: November 30, 2025

Date of Acceptance: December 31, 2025

Deadline for Registration: January 10, 2026 (Link to be shared upon acceptance of abstract)

Date of Full Paper Submission: May 22, 2026

An edited book will be published by either Lexington Books (imprint of Bloomsbury) series on Ecocritical Theory and Practice or Brill's African and Asian Anthropocenes. Articles will be considered for publication after being peer reviewed, subject to the approval of the concerned publishing house. The acceptance of the paper for presentation does not guarantee its shortlisting for publication. There will be no additional charges for publication. 

N.B. Failure to present the paper during the conference will automatically disqualify the paper from being considered for publication and the conferring of a certificate.

Registration Fees: (Both Online and Offline)

Faculty Members: 2000 INR

Research Scholars and Students: 1500 INR

Participation without Paper Presentation: 500 INR

Foreign Participants: 35 USD

IMPORTANT INFORMATION: 1.There is no provision for TA/DA/accommodation.

2. For any further clarification, kindly mail your queries to natlitcon.wcc@gmail.com