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Call for Papers - Under Western Skies 2: Environment, Community, and Culture in North America

Sept. 19, 2011

Mount Royal University
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
October 10-13, 2012

Submission deadline January 23, 2012.

See http://www.skies.mtroyal.ca for details.

Call for Panels, Papers, and Presentations - ALECC Biennial Conference: Space + Memory = Place. University of British Columbia, Okanagan and Okanagan College, Kelowna and Penticton, B.C. - August 7-12, 2012

Sept. 8, 2011

All places are astonishingly complex. They are finely and intricately laminated, not only with the immediate and personal, but also with what we don't see that is present, with what is past and future, even with what is somewhere else. With a little work, we can learn to recognize many more of these layers. When we do, our comprehension of what makes a place becomes immeasurably richer - not necessarily more comforting, but certainly more thorough.
- SueEllen Campbell, "Layers of Place"

In her book The Lure of the Local (1998), art critic Lucy Lippard has written famously that "space defines landscape, where space combined with memory defines place" (9). Noting that memory is neither simple nor singular (nor, necessarily, anthropogenic), SueEllen Campbell has also observed that places are sometimes not exactly what they seem to be: they can also be elements of other places, overdetermined by other times, or unrecognizable in the imaginations of others. With Lippard's and Campbell's resonant observations as an opening, we invite panels, papers and creative presentations for the 2012 ALECC conference that speak to "place" as an embodied, embedded, troubling, elusive, contested, personal, political and ecological site in which space + memory = place, and in an astonishingly complex range of ways.

We believe that the Okanagan, with its shifting and often contradictory identities, and complex relationships between development, environmentalism, tourism, wilderness, agriculture, and technology, all playing out across the land, is a fertile space and place for such questions, conversations and encounters. By holding the conference in the Okanagan, a place with an ancient and profound indigenous culture and a semi-arid region that has been remade and reimagined through irrigation as a rich agricultural paradise and wealthy leisure destination, we hope to create a place for ecocritical thinking, within a space that needs to be evaluated ecocritically. Teasing out the differences, however marginal or enormous, between space and place will be central to the work done at the conference, but we believe the question of memory to be as vital; indeed, the concept binds and braids space and place together, constituting and continually informing the ways in which we treat, approach and use our lands, our places.

Questions we might like to consider over the three days of conversations include, but are not limited to:

Does the practice of dividing and subdividing land into parks, conservancies, reserves for "nature" precipitate/enable/produce what Alexander Wilson calls "panoramas of amnesia"? Is amnesia a prerequisite for both development and preservation?
Why do some places have a better memory than others? Why are some memories valued more highly than others? What are the material conditions that enable strong memory? How are (specific) literary and other cultural texts part of these dynamics?
How does the work of remembering redraw relations between local and global understandings of place? What is the role of place in cosmopolitan experience and politics? How do orality, literacy and virtuality figure differently in globalizing relations among space, place and memory?
Can we sustain a collective memory of a place, and find great learning in the discrepancies between personal memories that pool into the collective memory? What forms of cultural and literary production contribute to collective memory? Considering both indigenous and diasporic collectivities, who is "we" in this understanding of place?
What consequences does misremembering have for the environment?
If we were allowed to imbue more spaces with memory, would we find it harder to perpetuate environmental harms, and damages, to these places?
In white, settler terms, we are still living with and coming to terms with the legacy of the first, great misremembrance: Canada as Terra Nullius ("land belonging to no one"). How does this original forgetting continue to inform Canadian relationships to this land? How do indigenous traditions (re) conceive the daily and inter-generational activity of remembering in ways that challenge this great misremembrance?
Can (re)remembering be a kind of activism? What are some of the specific roles literature and other forms of cultural production might play in this process?
Are there ways to remember without memorialising?
Are our memories "natural," or in ways seen and unseen implanted, influenced and conditioned by our culture? Are human beings the only agents who can be said to "remember" in a place? How do we encourage the surfacing of these other memories in our writing, teaching, and activism?
Is the twentieth-century ideal of both "saving" nature and "saving a place" for nature outdated? What memories might we have to re-examine/sacrifice in a reappraisal of "nature spaces"?
What places do you remember? Are some memories of place too traumatic to be remembered? How does trauma figure in the unfolding of collective place-memory?
What have we forgotten? What is the relationship between remembering and forgetting in environmental literature and politics?

Participants in the ALECC 2012 conference will have the opportunity to engage these questions of space, memory and place in a variety of ways, including keynote and panel sessions, readings and performances, workshops, field trips, hands-on activities, and participation in community-led environmental activities.

We invite scholarly papers, creative writing, performances, visual art, new media and hybrid presentations from across Canada and internationally to consider such questions as they relate to the Okanagan or other places and spaces in Canada or around the world. We particularly encourage the submission of pre-formed panels and creative presentations, as below.

To propose an individual paper, creative or other work, including a reading (20 minutes), please submit a 500-word (maximum) abstract along with a one page curriculum vitae that includes current contact information. Proposals should specify preferences for a scholarly, creative or mixed session, and should include any requests for AV.

To propose a pre-formed panel or creative session (three presenters, 90 minutes), please submit as a complete package the following: session title, 200-word session abstract, one page curriculum vitae each and contact information for the session organizer and (other) presenters, 500-word abstracts for each paper/presentation (as possible). Proposals should indicate clearly the nature of the session and all requests for AV and any other specific needs (e.g., space, moveable chairs, outdoors, etc.). We ask that panel organizers attempt to include a diversity of participants (e.g., not all from the same institution).

We are happy to consider proposals that do not easily fit either of these categories (e.g., workshops, roundtables, exhibits, performances); please contact the conference organizers directly in that case.

Proposals must be submitted by October 1, 2011 to: alecc12@yorku.ca

For further information, please contact:

Catriona Sandilands
President, ALECC
essandi@yorku.ca

Nancy Holmes
Local Coordinator, UBCO
nancy.holmes@ubc.ca

Anne Marie McKinnon
Local Coordinator, OC
amckinnon@okanagan.bc.ca

Norah Bowman-Broz
Local Coordinator, OC
NBowman-Broz@okanagan.bc.ca

Call for Papers - ASLE Off-Year Regional Symposium: Environment, Culture & Place in a Rapidly Changing North. University of Alaska Southeast, USA - June 14-17, 2012

July 28, 2011

For details visit the ASLE Off-Year Symposia website.

ASLE welcomes proposals for papers, interdisciplinary research, or creative work on issues related to literature and the environment, and also work that explores the North American North, addressing (but not limited to) the following themes: the North in the environmental imagination; global indigenous environmental movements; subsistence/food security/food justice/food cultures; traditional/local ecological knowledges; climate change; transnational North; animals/animality/wildlife; boundaries/borders in the North; migrations.

Submissions deadline: November 5, 2011.

Call for Conference Proposals: ALECC 2012

July 28, 2011

The Association for Literature, Environment and Culture in Canada/Association pour la littérature, l'environnement et la culture au Canada (ALECC) invites proposals from individuals and institutions interested in hosting the 2012 ALECC biannual conference. In August 2010, Cape Breton University (Sydney, NS) hosted the inaugural ALECC conference. Including approximately 75 participants from Canada and internationally, the conference, themed "The Ecological Community," included academic and creative panels, keynote speakers of local and national repute speaking to important issues of environmental literature and politics, readings and discussions by poets and other creative writers, and field trips for conference delegates to sites of broadly "environmental" interest (including, at CBU, everything from a national park to the Tar Ponds).

The ALECC executive seeks to expand on this excellent conference in collaboration with an institution that is willing and able to combine an interest in local environmental concerns with the scholarly trajectory of the organization's emphasis on literature, environment and culture in Canada. Specifically, we seek a partnership with an academic institution - large, medium, or small - to develop a conference to be held in August, 2012 that would combine local strengths with the institutional resources and aspirations of ALECC to produce a conference that would publicize, develop, and expand on the general theme of "environmental literature and culture in Canada."

ALECC would take the leadership role in developing and promoting the conference program, securing funding from governmental sources (SSHRC, Canada Council), and corresponding with speakers and other presenters; the theme and keynote speakers would, however, be decided collaboratively between ALECC and the host institution, with local needs and desires at the forefront of such decisions. The host institution, including a local coordinator, would be expected to take primary responsibility for organizing delegate accommodation, presentation rooms and other facilities (including AV), hospitality, and field trips, and would also be expected to organize on-site volunteers, advocate with the host institution for cash and in-kind support (as much as possible), and, ideally, liaise with the larger community with an eye to developing partnerships between ALECC and local environmental/literary organizations in the area. In particular, the conference should connect with the experiences of local First Nations and other regional articulations of Indigenous peoples' environmental concerns, and should invite, as much as possible, the participation of local and regional environmental and animal activists.

Potential organizers should contact any member of the conference organizing committee to request additional information, namely Keri Cronin (Brock), Nancy Holmes (UBCO), Richard Pickard (UVIC), Stephanie Posthumus (McMaster), and Catriona Sandilands (York). Because the event would be a collaboration between ALECC and the host institution, though led by ALECC, we do want you to think of this as a chance to host the conference that you'd want to host, not necessarily the conference that you think ALECC would want you to create.

A formal conference proposal would be a two- to three-page letter explaining your vision for the event, including the institution's confirmed support for hosting it. It should provide information adequate to evaluate the institution's ability to manage an event of this size (75-150 attendees), the location's suitability for an ALECC event, and the likelihood of finding local support (either financial or in-kind). Specifically:

While the conference theme would be determined in consultation between ALECC and the local organizers, do you have any ideas at this point for a potential theme, or for local speakers who would be particularly interesting for a national conference on literature, culture and environment?
How would your conference reflect local and regional Indigenous peoples' experiences, traditions and interests? How would it dovetail with other local or regional activist concerns?
What potential half-day or full-day field trips might be particularly interesting to ALECC members? These trips should include both "natural" and cultural/socio-ecological experiences, as relevant to the location.
Can you confirm general institutional support for the event, from a department chair, dean, or other administrator? Does this institutional commitment include support for student participation in the event as volunteers and/or participants?
Do you have any sense of whether other financial or in-kind support would be available to support hosting the conference? For example, are there institutional or other local funding programs we might be eligible to seek or apply for, or might secretarial or other administrative support be available, such as printing, a university-based conference website, and/or support for conference organization, registration and other participant hospitality?
What on-campus provisions for meals and accommodations would be available in August 2012? Are there off-campus facilities that might also be interested in supporting/benefitting from the conference?
In an era of climate change, conferences need to be meaningful: if we're going to fly and travel to be together, the expense in carbon and resources needs to be justified. What ideas do you have to make this conference a truly special event? What could we do together at your institution, that couldn't be done if we weren't all there together?

We look forward to hearing from you, and to seeing you in August 2012 at the institution whose proposal is successful in this competition. Formal proposals for the conference must be received by the ALECC executive on or before August 1, 2011, and can be submitted electronically to ALECC president Catriona Sandilands at essandi@yorku.ca.