Author: yenchen
【Call for Papers】The 8th International Symposium on Literature and Environment in East Asia (ISLE-EA)
October 11-13, 2024
Sookmyung Women’s University, Seoul, Korea
Environmental Disasters and Disgust in the Planetary Crisis: Imagining Ecological Healing
October 11-13, 2024
Sookmyung Women’s University, Seoul, Korea
The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in Korea (ASLE- Korea) is pleased to invite proposals for its eighth International Symposium on Literature and Environment in East Asia (ISLE-EA), scheduled to take place from October 11 to 13, 2024, at Sookmyung Women’s University in Seoul, Korea. This symposium will be co-hosted with Sookmyung Research Institute HK+ Project and its central theme revolves around the concept of imagining ecological healing amidst the planetary crisis.
The symposium will delve into the repercussions of global environmental disasters in recent years, resulting from human activities, that have inflicted various wounds upon humanity. In a world where humans stand as both perpetrators and victims, the necessity for multifaceted physical and mental healing to surmount the gravest environmental crises has become apparent. The urgency to address the mental well – being of those affected by environmental disasters has never been more pressing.
The intricacies of environmental issues necessitate collective efforts spanning natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Integrated approaches across academic domains hold the promise of more potent responses to environmental crises, fostering personal healing in the process. Environmental humanities must transcend their conventional boundaries, encompassing all forms of existence, including non-human entities and ecosystems, to chart a course towards meaningful change. To achieve this, perspectives grounded in bioethics and ecological ethics must not only stimulate literary imagination and ecological sensibilities but also delve into philosophical inquiries to fathom the depths of life —both animate and inanimate—on Earth.
The well-being of the Earth is entwined with that of humanity. In moments of acute planetary distress, human stability falters across various realms, spanning the material to the cultural. The assessment of our precarious environmental situation profoundly informs strategies aimed at healing the physical and mental vulnerabilities of humankind. Concurrently, the climate crisis interlaces intricately with the pandemic crisis. Escalating global warming enlarges habitats for disease vectors, while wildlife habitats dwindle due to natural catastrophes and rampant development. In the wake of the pandemic, humanity faces novel crises, challenges, and choices.
As societal instability burgeons owing to pandemics, environmental crises, economic downturns, and conflicts, people channel their fears and uncertainties into expressions of hatred and discrimination. In an era where others are often viewed as lesser beings, and animosity and hostility pervade, it becomes paramount to seek ecological rationale and actions to counter this trend.
The symbiotic coexistence and solidarity shared by humans, non -human entities, and inanimate objects are innate to our planet. Nonetheless, biases like aversion towards materials and machinery morph into not just a disregard for non -humans but also humans, jeopardizing societal and ecological harmony. Hence, it is crucial to reexamine such biases from novel perspectives.
The above topics merely serve as examples of envisioning ecological healing in the face of a planetary crisis. We extend an invitation for papers, presentations, panels, and roundtable discussions that challenge conventional notions and practices to creatively reconstruct fresh outlooks and values for ecological healing. Possible presentation themes for ISLE-EA 2024 include, but are not confined to:
- Environmental disasters: trauma, resilience, restoration
- Bioethics or ecological ethics: literary portrayals, philosophical investigations,
- speciesism, multispecies studies
- Climate crisis: eco-grief, the Anthropocene, greenwashing, environmental fraud • Medical and environmental humanities: health care, disease studies,
- consumption, gradual violence, traditional lifestyles
- Ecological instability and pandemic: sustainability, body culture studies,
- environmental education, hyperobjectivity
- Environmental justice in an age of aversion and disgust: cognitive bias,
- ecofeminism, postcolonial ecocriticism, environmental inequalities , eco-socialism
- Aversion towards machinery and non-human entities: posthumanism,
- ecophobia, new materialism, Actor-network theory
We warmly welcome individual and panel proposals. Each submission should comprise a 300-500 word abstract with four to six keywords, a 100-word concise biography, and contact information (full name, nationality, affiliat ion), submitted in PDF or MS-Word format. Presenters have the option to select either an in-person or virtual presentation format (online such as Zoom). Please forward individual and panel proposals to aslekorea@gmail.com by January 31, 2024. Also, please indicate whether you will present online or in-person in your proposal.
【Call for Papers】ASLE 2024 Symposium “Green Fire: Energy Stories Beyond Extraction”
ASLE 2024 Symposium: Green Fire
University of North Florida
May 16-19, 2024
Green Fire: Energy Stories Beyond Extraction
Call for Individual and Pre-formed Panel Proposals
The concept of energy has a history that long pre-dates any dreams of resource extraction or electrification. Cultures around the world have viewed different energies, plural, as living forces. Depending on the context, the word “energy” might call up images of interconnected beings, landforms, species, and worldviews. Phases of existence have even been understood in terms of energy, since spirits of the dead are often thought to exert their energies on behalf of, or in opposition to, the living. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s explanation of the Potawatomi word puhpowee—“the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight”—pertains to conceptions of energy in many different Indigenous cultures. According to this paradigm, humans are just one of the many types of life-forms inhabiting a “world of being, full of unseen energies that animate everything.” Kimmerer stresses that humans have the responsibility to regulate our personal energies in reciprocal relationships with the energies of the nonhumans with whom we share the world. Aldo Leopold’s famous description of the “fierce green fire” leaving the eyes of a mother wolf he helped kill, along with his definition of land as “a fountain of energy” rather than mere property, shows how similar ideas have taken shape in Western cultures.
Yet, while the dream of “a world of being” has endured, it has mostly been eclipsed by the notion that energy exists to be harnessed. The extractivist way of thinking about and living with energy has resulted in forms of devastation and injustice that everyone concerned about the state of the Earth knows all too well.
We invite proposals—for papers, panels, roundtables, workshops, and creative new forms of dialogue—addressing what ecocriticism, the energy humanities, and other disciplines can do to help change the current situation. We seek contributions that explore different ways of understanding energy and being in the world. Scholars in any discipline are welcome to apply.
Guiding questions include, but are not limited to, the following:
Which alternative, Indigenous, or non-Western cosmovisions and cosmologies of energy do people living in extractivist energy regimes need to learn about?
How are day-to-day energetic practices changing in the so-called Anthropocene?
How can environmental humanists, activists, and ordinary people claim seats at an energy “table” dominated by scientists, technocrats, and billionaires?
What might scientific and spiritual energy practices have to learn from each other?
How do those who spend most of their time resisting the extractivist paradigm channel personal, cultural, and more-than-human energies in ways that help them avoid draining their own energies (in the form of burnout)?
How can recent scientific discoveries about how people and nonhuman beings experience energies inform our research and teaching as scholars in the humanities?
Which literary, cinematic, rhetorical, and other representational energies are doing the best work in changing how various publics think about energy?
How are energies being restor(i)ed as meaningful parts of everyday life-worlds?
The symposium will take place in person at the University of North Florida, in Jacksonville, from Thursday, May 16 to Sunday, May 19, 2024. (Scholars who seek alternative presentation formats may contact the co-organizers.) Friday and Saturday will be devoted to panels and plenary speakers, while Sunday will involve workshops at UNF (possibly elsewhere) and field trips and service activities in the ancestral homeland of the Mocama people, also known as the First Coast—site of the oldest permanent European settlements in what is now the United States.
Confirmed keynote speakers include Dr. Kendra Hamilton of Presbyterian College (author of the forthcoming book Romancing the Gullah); author and activist Janisse Ray (Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and numerous other books); and Dr. Heidi Scott of the University of Maryland (Chaos and Cosmos: Literary Roots of Modern Ecology in the British Nineteenth Century, Fuel: An Ecocritical History, and many essays).
To propose an individual paper, please submit an abstract of approximately 300 words and a brief speaker bio to the proposal portal link below.
For pre-formed panel and roundtable proposals, please list names and emails of panelists in the “co-presenter” field; include an overall abstract for the session, as well as titles, brief proposal descriptions and one-sentence speaker bios for each contributor (500 words total).
All proposals are due by by January 26, 2024.
Proposal Submission Form
To discuss ideas regarding workshops and non-traditional dialogues, or to ask about anything else relating to the symposium, please contact the co-organizers, Jennifer Lieberman and Bart Welling, at greenfireASLE@gmail.com.