Calls for Papers

Reclaiming the Commons with Creative Collectives

Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons” July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

Organized by The Hazel Collective

Contemporary theorists of the common argue that the common is not a physical space or resource, but rather an activity: to common. Thus, the commons do not exist a priori, but are a process by which selves, collectives, and society might be remade. Yet few of us have been raised with such commoning practices. As we work to reclaim the commons, can the ...

International Steinbeck Society Conference

Dear ASLE Community,

I’m writing to share the Call for Papers for the International Steinbeck Society Conference in San Jose from March 22-24 2023.

You’ll find the full CFP below, but there are a few updates and details worth noting • Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis with a submission cutoff date of December 15 2022. • We welcome undergraduate submissions for a poster session of student work • To ensure an accessible conference experience, the conference will accept digital/hybrid paper presentations, which will be shared ...

Ecocritical Visual Cultures of the Commons

Guaranteed panel at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference “Reclaiming the Commons”, sponsored by the Eco-critical Visual Culture interest group.

July 9-12, 2023 in Portland Oregon

Topics might include:

— Land Commons and Enclosures — Gleaning and gleaners –imaging and re-imagining the commons –utopian commons/ communes / communities –wild food commons –wild animal populations as “resources” –ocean and shoreline commons: wrack, drift, ambiguity –Going to waste / landscape as “wasteland” –Commons as ruin or “resources” –“Improvement” and the clearances of industrial agriculture

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to Maura Coughlin, m.coughlin@northeastern.edu by ...

Anticolonial Modernity and the Global Commons

Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”

July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

As Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021) has noted, many recent critical reflections on the Anthropocene fail to consider the perspective of anticolonial modernization movements. Irreducible to mere mimicries of western modernity, such movements display an emancipationist – even spiritual – impulse that continues to shape political and economic aspirations across the “global South,” where the idea that the larger project of modernity ought to be abandoned is finding little ...

The Environmental Humanities: Ecofeminism, Environmental Justice and Ecological Health

Mohammed I University, the Faculty of Humanities, the Research Laboratory on Communication, Education, Digital Usage and Creativity, and the Oriental Center for Water Sciences and Technology organize an International Conference on   The Environmental Humanities: Ecofeminism, Environmental Justice and Ecological Health  January 5, 6, and 7, 2023 Oujda, Morocco 

Most critics believe that the world has inherited nothing from the dominant capitalist culture save social and ecological crises. Poverty, racism, sexism and other forms of social inequality have spread all over the world and with that the natural ...

Multi-Species Commons

Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”

July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

There is an implicit (and sometimes explicit) anthropocentrism in many accounts of the commons, understood as a place of shared resources. This panel will ask whether the commons can be reconceptualized, in ecological terms, as a space of multi-species relations. What is the connection between commons and habitat, nonhuman life-worlds, or Umwelten? How might theories and historical examples of commoning practices help us to rethink conflicts over ...

Ecocriticism and Ethnic Studies

Guaranteed ASA-Sponsored panel at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”

July 9–12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

Ever since Lawrence Buell drew his famous distinction between “first-wave” and “second-wave” ecocriticism (2005), the standard story about the field has been one of diversification: if ecocriticism emerged in the 1990s as the study of white nature writing, it evolved in the 2000s and 2010s by engaging different genders, sexualities, races, ethnicities, classes, castes, and more. A quick glance at a journal issue or a conference ...

Greening Modern Languages Research and Teaching: an international online conference, 24th-25th March 2023

The two-day international online conference ‘Greening Modern Languages Research and Teaching’ will reflect on the role Modern Languages as a discipline has to play in times of ecological crises, in rethinking our academic practice as educators, scholars and eco-citizens, and ways in which this intersects with current efforts to decentre and decolonise the curriculum. The conference will open a reflection on the place of Modern Languages in the Environmental Humanities and in collective action towards environmental sustainability and justice.

As a discipline that has ...

Political Animals: Reclaiming the Politics Beyond Humans

Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”

July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

“Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.” This statement of of Aristotle is often interpreted as nonhumans not being concerned with politics and that politics is a prerogative of humans only. Political associations in a human society are often restricted to humans. However, contemporary research in ethology suggests that nonhuman communities and their ...

Storying the Plantation(ocene) Otherwise

Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”

July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

Co-organised by Dr. Jill Didur (Concordia University, Montreal) and Priscilla Jolly (Concordia University, Montreal)

This panel examines how the ongoing legacy of plantation epistemologies and violence are made visible, critiqued, resisted, and imagined ‘otherwise’ through different modes of storytelling (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, visual culture, digital culture, popular media, and policy documents). Taking up Haraway’s call to ‘story otherwise’ for ‘Earthly survival’ (2016), we invite papers that explore ...