Affective Habitus: New Environmental Histories of Botany, Zoology and Emotions
Fifth ASLEC-ANZ Biennial Conference, Humanities Research Centre, Australia National University
19-21 June 2014
Submission of abstracts (c. 200 words) to [email protected] by March 30 2014
Perceptions, values and representations of our relationship with the physical environment have been read anew in the Anthropocene century through the lens of ecocriticsm and affect theory. At present we are witnessing a turn in ecocritical theory to the relevance of empathy, sympathy and concordance, and how these move across flora and fauna; yet ecocriticism has not thorougly considered whether human and non-human affect are reducible to a theory of the emotions. This conference both seeks to refine that turn and to address the interdisciplinary shortcoming, while articulating the expansion of the analysis of the humanities, ecocritically.
Confirmed speakers include Philip Armstrong, Tom Griffiths, Eileen Joy, Ian McCalman, Michael Marder, John Plotz, Elspeth Probyn, Kate Rigby, Libby Robin, Deborah Bird Rose, Ariel Salleh, Will Steffen and Gillen D’Arcy Wood.
Areas for consideration include:
-Archives, encyclopaedias and images of the natural world
-Cultural studies: art, dance, film, literature, music, new media, photography, theatr
-Ecocriticism and Critical Animal Studies: theory and practice of empathy
-Emotions and the environment: learned feelings and historical variability
-Europa Terra Australis: adaptation and heritage; continuities and disjunctions
-Mappae mundi: emotional geographies and territories of affect
-Open to others: More-than-human worlds in non-western spaces
-Renaissance emotions: animals, minerals, plants
-Studio based inquiry climate change: botany, fauna extinction or fauna migration
-Anthropocene aesthetics
-Colonialism: pre-histories and the present
-Ecopsychology
-Environmental history: from the Middle Ages to the present
-Global ecologies
-Green pedagogy: agency, senses and the lifeworld
-Indigenous ecologies
-Seeds and seed banks
ASLEC-ANZ membership comprises writers, artists, cinematographers and musicians as well as academics working in and across several areas of the Environmental/Ecological Humanities, including ecocritical literary and cultural studies, environmental history and the history of science, anthropology and ecophilosophy. (You do not need to be a member of ASLEC-ANZ to participate in the conference. But we do offer a very affordable annual membership which we hope you may consider.)
Selected conference papers will be published in the Animal Studies Journal and the Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology.
Registration details available shortly.
For more details, see:
hrc.anu.edu.au/affectivehabitus
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