2014 Environmental Humanities Conference – Call For Papers

Affective Habitus: New Environmental Histories of Botany, Zoology and Emotions
The Fifth Biennial Conference of The Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture, Australia and New Zealand (ASLEC-ANZ)
Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra
19-21 June 2014

An Environmental Humanities collaboratory with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, and Minding Animals International.

Convenor: Dr Tom Bristow, ANU Research Fellow (June 2014).

Perceptions, values and representations of our relationship with the physical environment have been read anew in the Anthropocene century through the lens of ecocriticism and affect theory. At present we are witnessing a turn in ecocritical theory to the relevance of empathy, sympathy and concordance, and how these move across flora and fauna; yet ecocriticism has not thoroughly considered whether human and non-human affect are reducible to a theory of the emotions. This conference both seeks to refine the theoretical turn and to address the interdisciplinary shortcoming, while ecocritically articulating the contemporary expansion of the analysis of the humanities.

Invited speakers include: Tom Griffiths, Michael Marder, John Plotz, Will Steffen and Gillen D’Arcy Wood.

Areas for consideration include:

  • Anthropocene aesthetics
  • Archives, encyclopaedias and images of the natural world
  • Colonialism: pre-histories and the present
  • Cultural studies: art, dance, film, literature, music, new media, photography, theatre
  • Ecocriticism and Critical Animal Studies: theory and practice of empathy
  • Ecopsychology
  • Emotions and the environment: learned feelings and historical variability
  • Environmental history: from the Middle Ages to the present
  • Global Ecologies
  • Green pedagogy: agency, senses and the lifeworld
  • Indigenous ecologies
  • Open to others: more-than-human worlds in non-western spaces
  • Seeds and seed banks
  • Studio based inquiry in one of the following fields: (i) climate change; (ii) botany; (iii) fauna – either extinction or migration

ASLEC-ANZ membership comprises writers, artists, cinematographers, and musicians as well as academics working in and across several areas of the Environmental/Ecological Humanities, including ecocritical literary and cultural studies, environmental history and the history of science, anthropology and ecophilosophy.

Inquiries, and paper and panel proposals to: josh.wodak@anu.edu.au

The deadline for submission of abstracts (c. 200 words) is March 30, 2014.

Selected conference papers will be published in Animal Studies Journal, and Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology.