Association for the Study of Literature and Environment 2021 Virtual Conference

The 2021 Association for the Study of Literature and Environmentdigital convening invites creative and critical engagements around the broad but timely theme of EmergencE/Y. Within a present scoured by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, by intersecting social and ecological crises, including white supremacy and settler colonialist logics and frameworks, how can environmental humanists and ecocritics imagine, conceptualize, theorize, and represent these compounding crises?

The twelve streams and featured talks and performances of this all-remote convening merge in shared explorations of how creators, writers, critics, activists, teachers, collectives—past and present—have made sense of ruptures and crises and made space for being, creating, disrupting, solidarity, and change. We will ask: What is the time and history of the crisis of now? While crisis, like emergency, appears in the short term, its emergence is much longer in the making. How can work by ecocritics and environmental humanists work across these disparate, even divergent timescales? We will explore: How is crisis emplaced? How does it make and remake place? How do the dislocations forced by crisis—of human and nonhuman populations—reshape place attachment? What does attachment to a refuge feel like?

Organizers remind us never to let a good crisis go unused. How might work in the environmental humanities and ecocriticism think with movement insights and energies to catapult beyond the now, so as to emerge in a more just and welcoming place?

The conference will take place virtually, from July 26 -August 6, with a combination of asynchronous and synchronous events. Accepted presenters will be required to provide pre-recorded talks by June 22, 2021. The conference site architecture will include opportunities for commenting on and interacting with presenters’ work and with keynote talks asynchronously during the conference period. We hope this inclusive format will facilitate robust participation of all registrants, in all time zones.

Proposals for pre-formed panels and for individual presentations are welcome. Only one proposal per person is allowed. Please indicate your first and second choice stream for your paper/panel. Panels should be composed of at least three and not more than eight presenters (co-presenters are welcome, but would be counted in these totals), and have a maximum of 90 minutes of recorded content. We will make all efforts to accommodate preferences in preparing the slate of panels for streams and to form as inclusive a program as this digital architecture allows.

If you would like to release a call for panelists for your proposed panel proposal, please submit it to https://www.asle.org/calls-for-papers/, and we will help circulate it. Please set your submission date before the conference’s April 1 submission deadline,so that you will have time to organize the abstracts selected and then submit using the form links below.