Proposed Panel (in-person) at International Seminar on Cultures of Body, Bodies of Culture: Thinking Plurality Today, organised by the Department of English, University of North Bengal.

In compliance with Foucauldian perspectives, the body is scarcely regarded as a stable biological construct. Rather, it is viewed as a dynamic entity that changes performatively in response to socio-political forces, cultural norms, gender dynamics, and geopolitics, among others. The body provides a site for the play of cultures while also reflecting the continual changes a society undergoes over a given period. A body bears testament to the diseases, deformities, and scars of a community. In other words, a body encapsulates human vulnerabilities or “dynamics of extreme cultures” (Nayar 2017). Occasionally, situations of helplessness control the bodies experiencing vulnerability, and these helpless situations are determined by spatiality and other external factors. With the current environmental degradation, it is impossible to ignore its detrimental impacts on human bodies. The precarious bodies evolve from precarious environments – fragile mountains, vulnerable islands, depleted fluvial ecology, tumultuous oceanic shorelines, deforested landscapes, toxic industrial and economic zones, and so on. ‘Ecoprecarity’ alludes to events conventionally categorised as natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, and cyclones, as well as to anthropogenic activities that render the environment precarious (Nayar 2019). The man-made disasters include the Bhopal gas tragedy, Chernobyl disaster, and the relentless extraction of resources, causing resource scarcity.  Nonetheless, recent evidence shows that anthropogenic activities have contributed to the “increasing frequency of earthquakes, tsunamis, and other ‘natural’ disasters [and] the planet as such has emerged as a site of existential concern” for humans (Chakrabarty 2019). Thus, the planet, as an existential site, contributes to the evolution of precarious bodies bearing corporeal wounds that can transform into intergenerational trauma. Therefore, the panel invites proposals to explore the vulnerabilities of bodies in relation to ecoprecarity in literary and cultural representations. In this context, proposals can investigate how corporeal wounds and bodily traumas embody precarious environments, and how a body plays a mnemonic role in comprehending the consequences of climate precarity, which otherwise seems to have a ‘slow’ impact, “dispersed across time and space” (Nixon 2011). In addition, the proposals can examine the capitalists’ proclivity to de-nature and de-nurture nature through their extractive activities, which render the bodies of ‘ecosystem people’ (Guha 1997) vulnerable. Proposals for a 15-minute presentation are invited from professionals, research scholars, and students on any of the sub-themes mentioned below:

• Precarious body and man-made disasters
• Wounded body and trauma induced by ecoprecarity/natural disasters/man-made disasters 
• Contaminated body and toxic environment
• Disposable body and resource extraction
• Racialised body and resource extraction
• Subaltern body and ecoprecarity
• Gendered body and environmental degradation
• Diseased body/Disabled body and toxic environment

Timeline of the Seminar:

Last date for submission of Abstracts: 20th December, 2025

Notification of the acceptance of the abstract: 31st December, 2025

Seminar Dates: 17th and 18th January, 2026

Submission Guidelines:

Send the abstract of your proposed paper in Times New Roman and 12 Font.

Word Limit: 250 words.

Add two to three keywords and a short bio-note of 50 words.

Please follow the MLA 9th edition for formatting and citation.

Abstracts should be submitted via e-mail to: somasree.2008@gmail.com

Selected papers reviewed and approved by an editorial board will be part of a possible post-seminar book. 

Registration Fee:

• Students: INR 600
• Research Scholars: INR 800
• Independent Researchers: INR 800
• Faculty Members: INR 1800

Panel Proposer: Dr Somasree Sarkar, Ghoshpukur College, University of North Bengal