As the flagship journal of Northwestern’s Environment, Culture, and Society cluster, Lime’s second symposium takes its thematic inspiration from a site familiar to all Chicagoans, and so too for our neighbors around the Great Lakes region. We seek to mobilize the productive multivalence of the shore, the collision point between formlessness and form, known and unknown, or the sanctioned and the unruly, as a metaphoric image for the transgressive encounters initiated by work in the environmental humanities. Simultaneously, we seek to queer, question, or otherwise confound efforts seeking to shore up, or conserve an existing state of academic knowledge production by continuing Lime’s mission to co-create a space for interdisciplinary experimental praxis in environmental thinking and research.

The editorial board of Lime at the Northwestern University Environment, Culture, and Society Cluster welcomes paper proposals from academics and practitioners across the Chicagoland area and the greater Midwestthat respond to the following questions:

• What points of convergence exist in the environmental humanities?
• What can emerge out of meeting points, sites of convergence, and hybrid/indeterminate zones?
• How do the environmental humanities come to constitute shores/shorelines?
• How do shorelines resist categorization and quantifiability? How can scholars and practitioners begin to embrace this coastline paradox?
• What power relations are mediated through shorelines? How do shorelines affirm or challenge academic epistemological structures? 

We invite original contributions which engage the structural framework of the shore as a model for the interrogation of edges, an emergent form of knowledge production demanded by the Anthropocene, and the epistemological imperatives it raises. Deeply engaged in our own sense of place on the world’s largest inland freshwater lake system, we also welcome work that mediates on physical shores like the Great Lakes and their roles in the colonial, commercial, and intellectual histories of the region. But, recognizing the inextricable interconnection of water systems globally, we also encourage proposals that meditate on the meeting places of waters, lands, fields, and actants from a variety of geographic locations and interpretive levels. Successful proposals will address one or more of the questions above with an emphasis on ecological flows and overflows, containment, enmeshment, reimagining intimacies and marginalities, porosity, and convergences. Proposals need not be directly related to water or its formations but should instead lean into the meeting points, cycles, and potentialities emerging from ecological sites like shores. We welcome paper and presentation proposals from scholars, activists, artists, writers, educators, and all practitioners at various disciplinary intersections. Additionally, both collective and individual proposals will be gladly considered.

The symposium will take place in person on May 2, 2026 with speakers from various universities, institutions, and initiatives. Presenters will be grouped according to affinities that emerge in the submission review process. Selected proposals will demonstrate rigor and ingenuity in their chosen topic, engaging deeply and creatively with the stated problem space. Preference will be given to those applicants whose research intersects with environmental justice and/or publicly-attuned work. The editorial team will also help participants adapt their work into a digital publication, to be published next Spring on the journal’s online platform: https://readlime.org/

Please submit proposals through this Google Form by March 20, 2026: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeo7L0_oYKVQZDYZnU030avJMAe5bL1...

Please include in your proposal a 300-word abstract, a brief C.V. or resume, and an optional additional work sample. Selections will be announced in early April. Any questions can be sent to Lime and symposium organizers at ecs-cluster@northwestern.edu. 

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