Apologies for cross posting

*Nature Matters:*

*Materiality and the More-than-Human in Cultural Studies of the Environment*

* *

*Call for Papers and Panels*

* *

*Toronto, Ontario*

*October 25-28, 2007*

*Hosted by the Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture*

*Faculty of Environmental Studies*

*York University*


Nature cannot pre-exist its construction, its articulation in
heterogeneous social encounters, where all of the actors are not human
and all of the humans are not ‘us,’ however defined.

-- Donna Haraway, “Otherworldly Conversations: Terran Topics; Local
Terms. /Science as Culture/ 3.14 (1992), 67.

Here’s how I’m reading the Face: it’s an address to the other with an
acknowledgement of our human-centredness built in, a salutary and
humbling reminder.

-- Don McKay, /Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry and Wilderness/
(Wolfville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2001), 99.


Having emerged from the 1990s “nature wars” that pitted so-called social
constructivists against putative deep ecologists, scholars interested in
questions of the relations between culture and nature (to use a
convenient shorthand) have begun increasingly to engage in research that
rejects both poles of that ultimately sterile debate: Nature may be a
social construction, but it is pure hubris to think and act as if human
beings are the only ones doing the constructing. For Haraway, the task
of acknowledging and working with the implications of this observation
about what she has called the “artifactuality” of nature is both
scientific and political; for McKay, as demonstrated by his own lyric
and metaphoric insistences, questions about nature, otherness and
language are also poetic and ethical. For most scholars engaged in
“environmental” work in the social sciences and humanities, the task is
all of these things and more. How do we think and write about human,
social processes and power relations in a way that also speaks to the
activity and alterity of the more-than-human beings involved? How do we
gesture, in our language and politics, to the ways in which nature is
both interlayered with and outside of our cultural understandings of
nature? What difference does it make in environmental cultural studies
that we take more-than-human actors as our points of inquiry and
conversation? In short: How do we make nature “matter” in cultural
studies of the environment?

This conference will address these questions by providing a
multidisciplinary forum for scholars interested in the broad field of
“environmental cultural studies” to come together to discuss just how it
is that nature *matters* in their work. *To be held in downtown Toronto,
hosted by the Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture in the
Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University from October 25-28,
2007*, the conference will include six plenary sessions highlighting the
recent work of prominent scholars in various corners of environmental
cultural studies – including environmental history, cultural geography,
ecological and feminist science studies, environmental justice,
environmental politics and philosophy, ecological literary criticism,
animal studies, and ecocultural studies – and concurrent sessions
designed to foster both intra- and cross-disciplinary conversations in
these and other fields.

In organizing this conference on the theme of nature, materiality and
culture, we recognize a large family of like questions that have arisen
in different disciplinary contexts, such as:


-       How do we in cultural studies research the influential
complexities of other-than-human “actants”?

-       What does it mean to consider nature as artifact? As landscape?
As text? How do we read this ecological “archive” in environmental
history, or interpret the relationship between land and literature in a
way that hears the voices of the creatures/places beyond the words?

-       How can attention to the sensuality of ecological experiences
enrich the cultural incisiveness of postcolonial and genealogical
environmental projects?

-       What can a reconsideration of the physical add to cultural
geography? How is life (human and more-than-human) constitutive of space?

-       What role might the natural sciences play in cultural analysis –
or, conversely, how can we understand natural sciences as particular
cultures of nature?

-       How do animals exist as subjects in matrices of power relations?
How are their presences in human cultures part of a largely unwritten
history of the humanities and social sciences?

-       How can we develop a practice of language and/or poetics and/or
ethics that respects the moments at which nature refuses its cultural
construction, the moments of alterity that permeate
human/more-than-human interactions?

-       How can environmental justice concerns more fully inform, and be
informed by, concerns about animal cultures or consciousnesses?

-       How do diverse environmental cultures offer a challenge to
Eurowestern bifurcations of nature and culture?

-       How are feminist reconsiderations of corporeality crucial
resources for the “incorporation” of nature in cultural studies?

-       How do we conceive of environmental studies as part of the
humanities and social sciences, and how might this conception both
complement and conflict with natural sciences?

-       How can conceptions of and interactions with the more-than-human
inform and construct human conceptions of the “good”?

-       How do ecological relations embody, reflect, and transform the
social relations of their production and reproduction?

-       How might green politics respond to a reconsidered materiality?


The conference will include opening and closing plenary sessions for all
participants on each day of the conference in order to provide us with a
developing common ground for conversation. Our plenary speakers are:


Stacy Alaimo, University of Texas, Arlington

Bruce Braun, University of Minnesota

Julie Cruikshank, University of British Columbia

Giovanna Di Chiro, Mt. Holyoke College

Patrick Murphy, University of Central Florida

Mick Smith, Queen’s University

Cary Wolfe, Rice University


We thus invite proposals for panels and papers from scholars in any
discipline whose work might inform, or be informed by, these or other
views of nature “mattering” in environmental cultural studies. In
addition to the specific questions listed above, areas of focus might
include, but are not limited to:


*     environmental literature and ecocriticism: text and nature

*     body practices and embodiments: nature, flesh and culture

*     environmental and natural history: land as archive

*     environmental ethics and epistemologies

*     ecopoetics and ecolinguistics

*     the implications of physicality for cultural geographies

*     animal/human animal communications and cultures

*     environmental justice, postcolonial, feminist, and/or queer ecologies

*     sensuousness and cultural materialism

*     science studies: (cross-)cultures of environmental research and
experiment

*     ecopolitics and political ecology: struggling into a landscape?

*     communicating (with) the Other: media and environment

*     addressing the Other: Derrida, Levinas and beyond


We invite proposals for fully-formed panels (three papers each, 20
minutes per paper, with a chair but no discussant), and also
enthusiastically invite maverick papers that have no particular family
of origin. Panel abstracts should include a general overview of the
panel plus abstracts for each paper (all 250 words or under); individual
paper abstracts should be no more than 300 words. All contributors
should include a one-page individual CV with their abstract. Graduate
student papers are welcome.

Contributions from artists, musicians, creative writers and performers
are also welcome; these contributions need not conform to the
three-person panel format. Please contact the organizers for further
information.

Abstracts should be submitted by *February 10* to:


Cate Mortimer-Sandilands

Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture

[log in to unmask]

and


Megan Salhus

Doctoral Candidate

[log in to unmask]

Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University
4700 Keele Street
Toronto, ON  M3J 1P3
CANADA


Presenters will be contacted in early March regarding acceptance of
their papers. Final abstracts will be compiled for the program in late
August and distributed in advance to conference participants.
Depending on the outcome of funding applications, some travel-related
costs may be supported for graduate students (these cannot be
guaranteed). Please indicate in your initial application if you would
like to be considered for a travel subsidy.