Deadline: September 30th, 2022
Contact: Davy Knittle
Email: dknittle@princeton.edu

This session at NeMLA 2023 (March 23-26, Niagara Falls, NY) will explore literary critical and environmental humanities methods for rethinking water justice and urban climate adaptation. We are interested in formal and informal relationships to water justice; representations of riverine and coastal cities; and readings of texts that help us consider governmental, private, and community-based strategies of water management. Topics might include representations of drought, flooding, toxicity and cleanup, water access, and water infrastructures. We welcome papers that use environmental humanities methods to read media forms including novels, poetry, creative nonfiction, film, and graphic novels and comics, as well as papers that use literary approaches to read policy and planning documents. We especially welcome approaches that address histories of predatory development, smaller cities, and/or cities in the global South.

We hope to engage the following questions: how can literary texts help us plan for climate futures in ways that respond to how communities define resilience? How might we use water justice narratives to move away from a monolithic understanding of climate resilience, and instead address the development histories and local dynamics of particular cities, neighborhoods, and urban regions? Additionally, how do the formal elements of literary texts help us pay attention to the infrastructural forms of cities? We hope that this session will provide participants and attendees with interdisciplinary strategies to imagine resilient futures.

This session is co-organized by Davy Knittle (Princeton University) and B. Jamieson Stanley (University of Delaware).

Please submit abstracts by September 30th, 2022 via NeMLA’s conference portal: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/CFP.

Posted on August 18, 2022