Deadline: May 31, 2024
Contact: Jada Ach
Email: jada.ach@asu.edu

CFP: Western Literature Association Conference, Tucson, Arizona, Oct. 2-5, 2024

This ASLE-sponsored panel asks us to give attention to—and take seriously—diverse expressions of environmental maintenance and repair in literature, film, or other media set in the North American West. Who, or what, maintains or manages lands in the North American West, and what is the nature of those engagements? What is the relationship between maintenance, repair work, and environmental justice? What kinds of ideologies get maintained or reified in narratives that center innovation, and how can we tell better stories about repair? We invite proposals that respond to these or other related questions.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to Jada Ach (jada.ach@asu.edu) by Friday, May 31. Since ASLE is sponsoring this panel, its placement is guaranteed.

Topics might include:
-self-maintenance and rest
-gender and maintenance work
-communities of labor in the American West
-Indigenous-led land management and stewardship
-Indigenous fire science
-justice-oriented repair work
-repairing broken technologies or systems
-conservation and preservation in literature
-maintaining culture
-maintaining and/or repairing infrastructure
-maintaining (urban) deserts
-innovation narratives
-joy of maintenance or repair
-queering maintenance work
-rewilding and repair
-envirotech histories of the American West
-care, repair, and environmental justice
-storytelling as repair work
-maintenance as ritual
-maintaining the status quo
-radical repair work
-maintaining (or undoing) settler-colonial environmentalisms
-roadmaking and repair
-ethics of repair
-geoengineering, terraforming, and repair
-dam and water literatures
-maintaining the archives
-maintaining traditional ecological knowledge

Posted on May 9, 2024