2014 EASLCE-NIES Joint Conference

The European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and the Environment (EASLCE) Biennial Conference

Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES) IX. Conference

Hosted by the Department of Semiotics
University of Tartu
Tartu, Estonia, 29 April–3 May 2014

“No meaning without a frame” thus one might boil down the insights yielded by a century of research in the humanities. To interpret something as meaningful is to put it into a context, into a frame of reference within which it can begin to make sense. This holds not only for human signification, but also for the processes of signification that occur in the natural world, as they have been studied by biosemiotics. In a double take on its title, this conference inquires into the multiple, complex ways in which humans frame nature and are in turn framed by it. It seeks to explore the figure of the frame as an ecological concept which draws attention to the way in which meanings are embedded in and sustained by environments that are at once material and semiotic. At the same time, it invites a closer examination of the strategies of framing and contextualization that are constitutive of ecocritical research, as well as a comparison of ecocritical methodologies with those of neighbouring disciplines in the environmental humanities….

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Confirmed keynote speakers:
Wendy Wheeler (London Metropolitan University)
Ernest Hess-Lüttich (University of Bern)
Steven Hartman (Mid Sweden University; Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) and Thomas McGovern (City University of New York)

To submit a proposal, interested scholars should send an abstract (up to 500 words) by e-mail to the address: [email protected]. The deadline for the abstracts is October 1, 2013.

For additional information and further updates please visit the conference website at www.ut.ee/SOSE/conference/2014_framing_nature/