FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE
EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF
LITERATURE, CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENT (EASLCE)
"Environmental Change - Cultural Change"
University of Bath, 1-4 September, 2010
http://www.thermaldegree.com/designs/easlce/conference
Call for Papers - Deadline 1 Dec 2009
Contributions are invited for an international conference on
'Environmental Change - Cultural Change'. The event is organised on
behalf of EASLCE and ASLE-UK, the European and British affiliates of
the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and
supported by the University of Bath's Institute for Sustainable Energy
and Environment (I-SEE), the Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences, and the Department of European Studies and Modern Languages.
Attention will focus on two aspects of the relationship between
environmental change and cultural change:
- the cultural, social and historical framing of environmental
communication, and in particular of discourses of climate change and
loss of biodiversity
- the challenge to contemporary environmental literature and film, and
their potential contribution to ecological education and consciousness.
Public understandings of and attitudes towards global warming and
other environment-related issues including GM foods, nuclear power and
wilderness preservation vary in sometimes surprising ways from one
country to the next. They also change over time. Apocalypticism, the
environmentalist master narrative of the 1960s and 1970s, has given
way, as Frederick Buell has written, to acceptance of environmental
crisis as a way of life. We have learned to live with a multitude of
daily ecological risk scenarios, preventing, mitigating or simply
accommodating ourselves to them. The assumption that sustainability
demands cultural change has been challenged by powerful resistance to
radical lifestyle change: in practice, environmental problems have
tended instead to be subjected to progressive reframings. Key
questions for the conference will be how historical experience,
physical circumstances and imaginative construction combine in the
cultural framing of individual issues, how norms and expectations
change, what cultural understandings of 'nature' and the human subject
have stood or still stand in the way of constructive engagement with
environmental change, what alternatives the reservoir of contemporary
and historical images and narratives of nature and culture has to
offer, and what rhetorics and art forms might be adopted as strategies
in facing environmental change today. The conference will seek to gain
new insights into the potential role of environmental literature, film
and other media in generating environmental knowledge (Peter Swirski).
Provisional acceptance has been received from the following invited
speakers:
Prof Sidney Dobrin (University of Florida, Dept of English; a
specialist in ecocomposition)
Dr Georgina Endfield (University of Nottingham, Dept of Geography; a
leading researcher in the historical conceptualisation of climate
change, social responses and adaptation)
Dr Robert Macfarlane (University of Cambridge, Dept of English; critic
and nature writer, author of Mountains of the Mind)
Dr Timo Maran (University of Tartu, Institute of Semiotics; a leading
writer on biosemiotics and Estonian nature writing)
Prof Robert Watson (UCLA, Dept of English; author of The Green and the
Real in Early Modern Literature)
Proposals for papers (EITHER standard papers 3000 words/20 minutes OR
contributions to paper jam sessions 1200 words/12 minutes) and panels
(3 papers OR 5 jam session papers) are invited. Topics will include
but not be restricted to:
* literary and filmic representations of environmental change in
different cultures/ media/ historical periods, and comparisons between
them
* myths, lead metaphors and rhetorical tropes in historical
conceptualisations of environmental change, and their role in
contemporary media communication or political/ popular scientific
discourse on the environment
* theoretical approaches, especially posthumanism/
postsubjectivism and biosemiotics
* the aesthetics of cultural responses to climate change: genres
(especially varieties of Nature Writing), narrative strategies, images
* environmental citizenship
* environmental activism between modernisation and resistance to
modernisation
* cognitive, emotional and cultural drivers of environmental
behaviour, and materialist and aesthetic, secular and religious
motivations
* the global and the local in theorisations and representations
of environmental change
* the contribution of environmental literature, film and art to
environmental literacy
* practical demonstrations of ecocritical pedagogy
The lingua franca of the conference will be English, but (following
practice at previous EASLCE conferences) proposals for panels in other
languages are welcome. Individual papers in languages other than
English will be considered if they can be grouped together in panels.
Accommodation has been reserved on the University of Bath's attractive
campus, which is about a mile from the centre of Bath, a World
Heritage City with Roman Baths and famous Georgian crescents. A half
day excursion is included in the conference schedule, and there will
be a further optional field trip on the Sunday after the conference.
Further details including conference costs will be announced in Spring
2010. Funding is currently being sought for bursaries to support
postgraduate/ unwaged attendance.
Please submit proposals for papers (title plus 250 words) to Professor
Axel Goodbody e-mail: [log in to unmask] and Dr Greg Garrard e-
mail: [log in to unmask] by 1 December 2009, indicating your IT
requirements
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