What, when & where
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland, Biennial Conference 2023
‘Transitions’
30 August – 1 September 2023, University of Liverpool
Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Brycchan Carey, Nandini Das, Caroline Edwards, Graeme MacDonald, Chris Pak, Craig Santos Perez
The 2023 conference for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland (ASLE-UKI) will be hosted by the Literature and Science Hub at the University of Liverpool. ASLE-UKI welcomes participation from scholars, readers, and creative practitioners interested in the relationships between literatures, environments and cultures – past, present, or future from anywhere in the world.
The theme of the 2023 conference is “Transitions“. At a moment of linked geopolitical and environmental emergencies, the sense of existing in a moment of transition is increasingly pervasive. But even if a transition is inevitable, its nature is not. Transition to where? How? For whom? What sorts of futures are possible or even imaginable against the negativity of apocalypticism or the ecocidal business-as-usual of capitalist realism? What can be learned from past articulations of cultures and ecosystems undergoing radical change – either voluntarily or through violence? What can traditional indigenous knowledges or transcultural stories of metamorphosis teach us about the possibility of reconfiguring self or environment?
As with previous ASLE-UKI conferences we are happy to receive papers on any aspect of literature, culture, and environment, but we particularly welcome responses to the following provocations:
A transition is a movement between places, a passage. This sense of transition has a particular resonance with Liverpool as the site of the conference: an imperial city built on the profits of enslavement, a major commodities port for the Industrial Revolution, and a key site in the ongoing history of crude oil and the petrochemical industry. We welcome papers that address histories and geographies of transit, travel and transmission – the still-unfolding consequences of the movement of peoples, commodities, and species: whether they be the drastic shifts in world-ecology instantiated by the transition to plantation monocultures and fossil capital; the movement of zoonotic diseases and toxins across bodies and borders as part of the slow violence of environmental injustice; or stories of intercultural encounter from the classical to the present.
Transitions are movements across time: across political moments, conceptual paradigms, energy regimes and geological ages. The University of Liverpool is home to the Olaf Stapledon Centre for Speculative Futures and the Science Fiction Foundation Archive, the second-largest SF collection in the world and a vast repository of imagined futures. With this in mind, we invite contributions on transitions-to-come: what sorts of social or, technological adaptations might emerge? How have past visions of the future shaped our sense of the possible? How will justice and ethics function in these managed (or cataclysmic) transitions?
Transitions are a change in state or being: We welcome papers – particularly about older periods and non-Eurowestern traditions – on what narratives of moral, infrastructural, bodily, climatological, or psychological change do for our understanding of ecology. How might they foster new ways of looking and feeling towards human and non-human others or at environments that are themselves in transition? What sorts of feelings and behaviours (e.g. solastalgia, petromelancholia, joyful militancy, doomer prepping, anticipatory grief) emerge as the affective correlatives to individuals and societies experiencing transition?
Critical and aesthetic transitions: What do different modes and genres (from the medieval dream vision to Hopepunk) offer in terms of imagining transition? What new formal innovations (e.g. ecopoetics, iDocs) arise in response to a world in transition. How is the field of ecocriticism itself transitioning due to its engagements with different critical traditions, institutional drivers, and ethical demands? What sorts of new critical formulations and scholarly practices (including, of course, “Transecology”) have and might emerge?
Deadline & how to apply
In addition to relatively traditional academic formats we wish to encourage experimental modes of presentation including creative proposals. Possible formats include:
- individual scholarly or creative-critical papers of 20 minutes
- preformed panels comprising three or four papers/dialogues/conversations/performances
- round table discussion panels with three to five participants
Please submit proposals via the following links. Include contact details, brief bios, and an abstract of up to 300 words by 1st June 2023.
- Submit a proposal for paper
- Submit a proposal for a preformed panel
- Submit a proposal for a round table
Other info, Links & conditions
The ASLE-UKI conference is the major in-person event for ecocriticism in the UK. However, we are able to facilitate hybrid attendance and presentation.
Registration will open by 1st July 2023. We will publish the registration fees on the conference website in early 2023.
All delegates must be members of ASLE-UKI or an ASLE affiliate association. Membership information can be found at https://asle.org.uk/membership/.
The ASLE-UKI conference has developed a reputation for outings, walks, and field trips that explore local environments and environmental issues. Trips at this conference may include The Liverpool Docks, Crosby Beach, a visit to Ness Botanic Gardens, and a creative writing workshop at Sefton Park’s Palm House. There will be wine receptions and a vegetarian conference dinner. More information about events and outings will be published on the conference website early in 2023.
For further information, please contact us at asleuki2023@gmail.com.
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