CFP: Eco-Imaginaries Graduate Humanities Conference

Abstracts due June 15, 2014

Conference Date: October 10, 2014

As humans, we are continually examining how to position ourselves spatially, aesthetically, emotionally, intellectually, and practically in our environments. Today, we face these tasks with new urgency as the devastating impact of global climate change stimulates renewed scholarly focus on the environment. From Ecocriticism to Posthumanism to Deep Ecology studies, the humanities are engaged in a multi-disciplinary effort to understand how humans interact with natural and built environments. This conference aims to engage with and foster discussions around the complex and historically situated ways in which we imagine and inhabit the environment.

Conference Website: http://tuftsgradhumanitiesconference.wordpress.com/

The 2014 Tufts Graduate Humanities Conference seeks to bring together papers that attend to the ways environments are imagined, produced, and articulated in diverse contexts and mediums. Some questions to consider:

• How have humanistic discourses responded to environmental crises, past and ongoing?
• What are the aesthetic innovations that have helped represent the sedimented histories of colonialism, global capitalism, and histories of devastation?
• What role do the linked histories of racism, colonialism, sexism, and militarism play in our imaginings of, and relationships to, the environment?
• What is the role of art in depicting and understanding ongoing human and natural global devastation?
• What role does political economy play in discourses of environmentalism?
• How might we engage with indigenous knowledges when discussing the complex interactions between local and global, without fetishizing either?
• How do communities—large and small—articulate their identities in more symbiotic and reciprocal ways with their environments?
• How can we engage terms like ‘ecology,’ ‘environment,’ and ‘humanities’ in order to invite new modes of analysis and representation which more ably reflect histories of devastation, toxic activity, and violence—both human and natural?
• How might we re-imagine and re-articulate more equitable and sustainable futures for the environment?

Eco-Imaginaries welcomes papers, from all disciplines and fields, whose work participates in emergent conversations about the environment in the humanities. Please send your abstract of no more than 300 words, along with a short bio, to tuftsgradhumanitiesconference@gmail.com by June 15, 2014.

Topics may include:

Animal Studies, Anthropocene, Apocalyptic Narratives, Biopolitics, Conflict Zones, Eco-Feminism, Environmental Aesthetics, Environmental Justice, Environmental Racism, Food Justice, Green Washing, Native Justice, Nature Writing, Neocolonialism, Post-humanism, Science Writing, Sustainability Policies, Toxic, Colonialism, Transnationalisms, Utopias/Dystopias, Waste Systems, World Systems, Water Politics