Psychologists have learned in recent decades that there are various cognitive reasons for our collective inaction in the face of urgent humanitarian and environmental crises, ranging from the struggles of refugees to the daunting specter of global climate change. At the Oregon Research Institute in Eugene, Oregon, we refer to the complex of cognitive paradigms that describe human insensitivity to vital information as the Arithmetic of Compassion. Our failure to respond emotionally to information about serious crises is fundamentally linked to the human insensitivity to numerical information, especially to quantities of victims exceeding very small numbers—what this means is that the more significant a crisis is (i.e., the more human or nonhuman victims it involves), the less we care. Despite our worrisome tendency to be insensitive to information and desperately slow to respond to crises, we have many skilled communicators—journalists, literary artists, photographers, filmmakers, and others—who have developed strategies for piercing our emotional shells and investing potentially numbing statistics and technical descriptions with meaningful poignancy. The field of affective ecocriticism tends to focus on societal paralysis caused by eco-anxiety as a reason for our ineffective response to crises such as global climate change; in this lecture, I will argue that we need meaningful, energizing emotional responses to warnings about climate change and other environmental challenges.

–Professor Scott Slovic

演講主題
Atmospheric Sensorium

Ÿ 主講：Hsuan L. Hsu｜Professor of English, UC Davis｜Author of Air Conditioning（2024）
Ÿ 主持：陳宥廷｜中興大學外國語文學系助理教授
Ÿ 引言：周序樺｜中央研究院歐美研究所副研究員
Ÿ 時間：2024年8月20日（二）09:00~11:00
Ÿ 地點：Webex線上會議直播

主題簡介
This presentation will consider the role of atmospheres in orienting our everyday sensorial and affective experience, with a focus on thermal and olfactory media. I’ll discuss interdisciplinary critiques of air conditioning as an infrastructure of thermal normativity that contributes to social and racial difference across multiple scales, as well as a range of cultural texts that defamiliarize, critique, and explore alternatives to air conditioning. After considering the insidious capacities of temperature as a force of social differentiation and thermal violence, I’ll consider narratives that experiment with scent as a medium of sensorial worldmaking that can alter time, space, and patterns of human and more-than-human relation.

講者簡介
Hsuan L. Hsu joined the UC Davis faculty in 2008. His research areas include 19th and 20th-Century U.S. literature, Asian diasporic literature, race studies, cultural geography, sensory studies, and the environmental humanities. He is the author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, 2010), Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain, Asia, and Comparative Racialization (NYU, 2015), The Smell of Risk: Atmospheric Disparities and the Olfactory Arts (NYU, 2020), and Air Conditioning (Bloomsbury Object Lessons, 2024). He is currently working on a book that considers how artists and writers have been experimenting with smell as a medium sensorial worldmaking. He serves (or has served) on the editorial and advisory boards of American Literature, Literary Geographies, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, American Literary Realism, Genre: Forms of Dicourse and Culture; EurAmerica, Multimodality & Society, Venti: Air, Experience, Aesthetics, and the Broadview Anthology of American Literature, the Executive Council of the American Literature Society, and the Executive Committees of the MLA’s forum for Nineteenth-Century American Literature and for Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities. His research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Davis Humanities Institute, the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Arts Writers Program, Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies.

報名表單：https://forms.gle/n2h3tRj99Ns66PBQ7
活動網址: Atmospheric Sensorium

本次演講採視訊方式進行，請於 8/18(日)前填寫報名表參加，並確實填寫您的聯絡資訊，主辦單位收到報名表後將於演講前以e-mail回覆線上會議室連結。

有任何問題，請來信 farmforchange2022@gmail.com

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 February 2, 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.