CfP: ASLE-UKI Postgraduate Conference

Deadline 31/3/18

Event Date: 5/9-7/9/18

Developing from the Postcards from the Edge event, at the ASLE-UKI Postgraduate Conference in Lincoln 2016, this conference seeks to provoke thinking about the meaning of both Place and Edge as they relate to current and emergent environmental concerns.  It will examine the ways in which attention to specific ‘edge’ places—from Plumwood’s ‘Shadow Places’ to island culture, from Heise’s eco-cosmopolitan holism to the wide glocal—their ecosystems, the people who live in them, and the stories told about them, might help us better understand humanity and its planetary home.  The organisers are especially interested in papers that: explore the various ways in which literature, art, and the humanities participate in this process of perceiving, understanding, and attending to the environment’s cutting and ignored edges; and contributions which consider the extent to which imagined landscapes shape the cultural view of, and attitudes toward, physical landscapes on cross-cutting peripheries, borders, and limits.

One can perceive edges not just as marginal boundaries of separation, but as meeting places offering the potential for creative interaction—between human and non-human species, local and global, technology and nature, past and future.  Orkney’s place on the edge has also placed it at the centre of technological developments, from its role as ‘Britain’s Ancient Capital’ in the Neolithic, to its current position at the forefront of developments in Marine Renewable Energy and energy storage technology.  In Orkney, where the markers of human time literally shape the view of the landscape, the organisers hope this conference will provide a space where disciplinary edges can meet and unlock the potential for creative engagement between those working in a broad field engaging with notions of periphery and centre: its present, and its future.

In this spirit, the organisers invite applications from postgraduate and early career researchers who would like to come together to exchange these dialogues across and between disciplines. In collaboration with the Orkney International Science Festival, the conference activities will include opportunities to engage creatively with other delegates, and the Orkney environment, with shared events as part of the Science Festival programme. The organisers also welcome proposals for presentations and readings from creative writers, artists and activists, and experimental work.

Suggested topics may include, but are not limited to:

• On the edge of deep time: the turn of the epoch
• Space, place, and time: human and natural temporalities
• ‘Glocal’ literature
• Nostaligia, pastoralism, solastalgia and its challenges to environmentalism
• Utopias, dystopias, heterotopias
• Landscapes of fear: eco-anxiety, ecophobia, ecogothic, ecohorror
• Energy challenges/sustainability/new technology/waste/pollution
• Island ecopoetry and ecopoetics
• Coastal and island legends and mythology
• The island—or the edge—as challenge to place-based writing
• The archipelagic
• Blurring ecologies: where blue meets green
• Species extinction and animal ethics: on the edge of the ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’
• Environmental law, politics, and activism: are we ‘running out of time’?

Individual papers will be 20 minutes long.  Please send a 300-400 word abstract and a 50 word biography to Rebecca Ford, Veronica Fibisan, and Michelle Poland - aplaceontheedge@gmail.com by 31^st March 2018.  Proposals for panels are also welcome: please send a 200 word summary of the rationale for the panel, in addition to individual abstracts.  Any further enquires can sent to the above email address. 

First published: 22 February 2018