Environmental Change - Cultural Change

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Environmental Change - Cultural Change

Veranstalter
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences / Department of European Studies and Modern Languages, University of Bath; EASLCE; ASLE-UK
Veranstaltungsort
University of Bath, Department of European Studies and Modern Languages, Bath BA2 7AY, Grossbritannien
Ort
Bath, UK
Land
United Kingdom
Vom - Bis
01.09.2010 - 04.09.2010
Deadline
01.02.2010
Website
<http://www.bath.ac.uk/esml/conferences/e-c-c-c/>
Von
Prof Axel Goodbody

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).

Programm

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 now 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 German and other European languages are welcome. Individual papers in languages other than English can only 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 via the conference website <http://www.bath.ac.uk/esml/conferences/e-c-c-c/>. 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: A.H.Goodbody@bath.ac.uk and Dr Greg Garrard e-mail: g.garrard@bathspa.ac.uk by 1 February 2010, indicating your IT requirements.

Kontakt

Axel Goodbody

University of Bath, Dept of ESML,
Bath BA2 7AY, GB

mlsahg@bath.ac.uk

<http://www.bath.ac.uk/esml/conferences/e-c-c-c/>
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