Call for Proposals for “Futures of the Arctic” Stream at SASS 2015.
REMINDER: DEADLINE NOV. 1, 2014
The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Ohio State University in collaboration with Scandinavian programs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of Wisconsin-Madison welcomes the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study (SASS) to Columbus, OH for its 105th annual meeting to be held from May 6-9, 2015.
STREAM 3: The Futures of the Arctic
While the Arctic has often been conceptualized as unchanging, pristine and outside of time, it has also been the site of profound aesthetic, political, cultural, policy and environmental utopian and dystopian imaginings of a number of possible future(s). In this stream, contributors will address, whether through aesthetic texts (literature, film, television, digital media, etc.) or through sociological, political or policy perspectives, “The Futures of the Arctic†as it has been both imagined and codified in the past and the present. Examples of this imagining come from a long history and are as diverse as: Medieval imaginary conceptions of the North through Old Norse sagas, and imaginary travel narratives from the Nordic countries; 19th and 20th century accounts of how the inclusion of parts of the Arctic region is central to the cultural and political imaginary of various European and North American nation-states; architect Ralph Erskine’s designs for Arctic living in Sweden and Canada; and the future-oriented policy positions of NGOs, nation-states, corporations and supranational organizations in regards to what the future of the Arctic might and ought to be. This stream seeks to break away from simplistic accounts of the Arctic as unchanging or primordial, seemingly unaffected by human agency on and through its populations and environments, to focus on how its futures have been continuously recast in both utopian and dystopian ways in art, culture, and politics.
Presentations from a wide variety of disciplines, and inter/trans-disciplinary approaches are encouraged. For questions and more information about the stream, please contact Prof. Scott MacKenzie, Department of Film and Media, Queen’s University at mackenzs@queensu.ca. Submit all proposals as 300 word abstracts in response to the stream directly to the SASS conference organizers at sassin2015@gmail.com by November 1, 2014.
Critical Studies in Television: The Medical Issue (Summer 2016)
Medical and health programmes have been a broadcasting staple since the early days of television, often providing educational and informative content as well as entertaining audiences. In Britain, this was fulfilled by a mixture of factual and entertainment programming ranging from long running surgery documentary Your Life in Their Hands (BBC, 1958-1964) to serial hospital drama Emergency Ward 10 (ITV, 1957-1967), forerunners of familiar contemporary fly-on-the-wall documentary series, reality shows, dramas and ‘medicated’ soaps.
In what will be the 30th anniversary of the landmark BBC hospital drama Casualty (BBC, 1986-present), this special issue seeks to ‘take the temperature’ of medical television in the twenty-first century. On flagship UK channels BBC1 and Channel 4 healthcare oriented programmes ranging from high-end Sunday night drama Call the Midwife (BBC, 2011-2014) to reality formats One Born Every Minute (Channel 4, 2010-date) and 24 Hours in A&E (Channel 4 2011-date), are routinely the highest rated. Discourses of crisis and controversy surrounding healthcare leading up to the passing of the Health and Social Care Act in the UK, and the implementation of “Obamacare†in the US, have thus been accompanied by an apparent renaissance in medical and healthcare television. And issues, strands and clusters have correspondingly emerged in particular forms, registers and modes with noticeable regularity. We are therefore particularly interested to receive submissions that address:
1) Bio-ethical issues, affective labour and neoliberalism – i.e. issues faced by health workers and carers working in neo-liberal medical/domestic environments, and concerning care of vulnerable groups in society across a wide range of formats, e.g. Getting On (BBC, 2009-12), 23 Week Babies: the Price of Life (BBC, 2011), and in the US context Nurse Jackie (Showtime, 2009-present), Breaking Bad (AMC 2008-2013), Miracle Workers (ABC, 2006), and The Advocate (CBS, in development).
2) Nostalgia – i.e medical dramas set in the past and/or with a nostalgic affective register, e.g. Call the Midwife, Doc Martin (ITV, 2004-present), Breathless (ITV, 2013), The Royal (ITV, 2003-11) and The Indian Doctor (BBC, 2010-present)
3) Documentaries and reality/factual series – especially about the state of a nation’s health or health services, e.g. Keeping Britain Alive (BBC, 2013), 24 Hours in A&E, and US cross channel fundraiser Stand Up to Cancer.
4) Body image TV – i.e. programmes featuring sensational medical and health conditions, e.g. Embarrassing Bodies (Channel 4, 2007-present), Bodyshockers (Channel 4, 2014) or medical makeovers e.g. Extreme Makeover (ABC, 2002-7), Supersize vs. Superskinny (Channel 4, 2008-present)
5) Dedicated healthcare channels – e.g. SisterTalk.
6) Celebrity healthcare professionals – e.g. Dr Robert Winston, of The Human Body (BBC, 1998) and Child of our Time (BBC, 2000-present), Dr Christian Jesson of Embarrassing Bodies, Supersize vs. Superskinny, Drugs Live (Channel 4, 2012)
We invite 500 word proposals to be submitted to j.hallam@liverpool.ac.uk and hannah.hamad@kcl.ac.uk by 30th November 2014.
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Deadline for 6000-8000 word essays (including endnotes) will be September 30th 2015 for publication in Summer 2016.
According to a report issued by the World Wildlife Fund, the Earth has lost half of its wild animals since 1970.
The Living Planet Report was produced by the WWF in partnership with the Zoological Society of London, the Global Footprint Network, and the Water Footprint Network.
As stated in an article in The Guardian:
“We have lost one half of the animal population and knowing this is driven by human consumption, this is clearly a call to arms and we must act now,†said Mike Barratt, director of science and policy at WWF. He said more of the Earth must be protected from development and deforestation, while food and energy had to be produced sustainably.
“The steep decline of animal, fish and bird numbers was calculated by analysing 10,000 different populations, covering 3,000 species in total. This data was then, for the first time, used to create a representative “Living Planet Index†(LPI), reflecting the state of all 45,000 known vertebrates.“
Alaskan composer John Luther Adams has won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in music for his symphonic masterpiece Become Ocean. The committee that awarded the music prize describe the work as “a haunting orchestral work that suggests a relentless tidal surge, evoking thoughts of melting polar ice and rising sea levels.” To listen to excerpts of the symphony and an interview with Adams, check out this interview with National Public Radio reporter Tom Huizenga.
Adams is perhaps best know for Inuksuit, a piece he composed specifically to be played by percussionists in outdoor settings. According to the information accompanying the YouTube promotional video for the piece, the New York Times has described Inkusuit as “the ultimate environmental piece.”
For someone like me, who is used to analyzing somewhat more direct visual representations of ecological issues in film and television texts, it is very encouraging to be able to turn to the work of ecomusicologists. For those interested in pursuing work this field, which “considers musical and sonic issues, both textual and performative, related to ecology and the natural environment” (according to the Grove Dictionary of American Music), be sure to check out the wide range of information, calls for papers, and resources available at http://www.ecomusicology.info/, an excellent website moderated by Aaron S. Allen.
Conference CFP: “What Lies Beneath Monster Movies: Exploring Ecohorror Cinemaâ€
“What Lies Beneath Monster Movies: Exploring Ecohorror Cinema†is a panel proposed for the ASLE Eleventh Biennial Conference, June 23-27, 2015, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID.
Ecohorror reveals our fears about the natural world. In it, animals become monsters; landscapes become nightmares; environmental practices lead to apocalyptic destruction. In this panel, we are interested in exploring cinematic versions of these narratives and the ways in which these films help us grasp our own cultural anxieties, our relationship with particular species and ecosystems, and past and current environmental politics and policies.
Because horror is a genre concerned with dark and often hidden fears and desires, ecohorror provides a promising space for discussion of ideas relevant to this year’s conference theme of the underground. Ecohorror may engage with repressed anxieties about the natural world or environmental issues, resistance to the environmental status quo or to environmental change, or monstrous hybrid species and landscapes.
We are particularly interested in proposed papers about monster movies, but we are open to a range of ideas on ecohorror film.
Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to both Christy Tidwell (christy.tidwell@gmail.com) and Carter Soles (csoles@brockport.edu) by November 1, 2014.
This is a call for papers for the Climate Change in Culture Conference to be hosted by the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, May 28-31, 2015.
As climate change becomes arguably the most pressing issue of our time, with evolving implications for societies in every cultural context, we seek to enhance our understanding of the ways in which culture and climate intersect with and animate one another. Cultural responses to and representations of climate are particularly compelling at a time when catastrophic weather events are becoming more commonly manifest and are inspiring a wide array of cultural and interpretive responses. Paying particular attention to the cultural implications of climate and to cultural, political, and societal responses to climate change, this conference explores how humanities-based scholarship can be brought to bear upon the evolving reality of climate change. Conference events include keynote talks given by internationally renowned climate and culture scholars, traditional academic papers and presentations, and a variety of interdisciplinary and multimedia performances. We thus invite submissions from scholars from across the humanities, broadly defined, who are dealing with any aspect of climate and climate change in a cultural context.
Possible topics, include, but are not limited to:
literary and artistic (visual, filmic, photographic, etc) representations of climate and climate change
social and historical understandings of climate, weather, and the role of human agency;
climate change and ethics
climate change and questions of social justice including the differing questions of climate change posed by identity categories such as gender, race, disability, class, and citizenship
understandings of climate and the environment in antiquity and the classical world
cross-cultural interpretations of, and responses to climate and climate change
the implications of climate change on the production and reception of art, whatever the form
the roles of denial, fear, skepticism and rejection vis a vis climate change
threats to linguistic and cultural communities posed by climate change
teaching climate and climate change in the humanities and social sciences
the evolving place of the environmental humanities in curricular development
islands and their particular vulnerability to climate change, island-based narratives and representations of climate
The conference is hosted by the University of Prince Edward Island, home of the Atlantic Climate Lab and the Institute of Island Studies. UPEI is situated in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island on the east coast of Canada.  As the capital and principle city of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown is a vibrant cultural destination, home of the world-renowned Confederation Centre of the Arts Performing Arts Centre and birthplace of Canadian confederation. Prince Edward Island is known for its breathtaking natural beauty and charm, thus making it an especially apt location for a conference on climate change and its human implications.  Â
Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words to jmcintyre@upei.ca by January 5, 2015.
 This online chat “EH Book Chat 3: Ecologies of the Moving Image” was shared on YouTube on Sep 14, 2014. It is the third edition of the Environmental Humanities Book Chat the topic is Adrian Ivakhiv’s Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature, 2013. Anna Ã…berg, Royal Institute of Technology, and Seth Peabody, Harvard University, discuss the book with moderator Hannes Bergthaller, National Chung-Hsing University and Würzburg University.
Ecologies of the Moving Image was published by Wilfred Laurier University Press as part of it’s Environmental Humanities Series in 2013. For further details, visit the publisher’s website at https://wlupress.wlu.ca/press/Catalog…
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Anna Ã…berg defended her PhD in 2013 at the Division for the History of Science, Technology and Environment of the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, Stockholm. Her thesis, “A Gap in the Grid,” explores the role of natural gas in late 20th century Sweden. She recently received the Fernand Braudel post-doctoral fellowship for a project on fusion energy research in France and the Soviet Union in which she will examine the narrative and imaginative strategies used by different actors to promote, criticize and interpret technological development. In April 2014, she organized a combined film festival and conference, “Tales from Planet Earth,” as a cooperation between KTH’s newly-formed Environmental Humanities Laboratory and the Center for Culture, History and the Environment at the University of Wisconsin.
Seth Peabody is a graduate student at Harvard University’s Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, where he is working on a Ph.D. thesis on German “Mountain Films” of the Weimar Period. He has been affiliated with the Berkeley-Tübingen-Wien-Harvard, BTWH, research network on modernity in German culture since 2009, and spent the past year as a research fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. His research focuses on German cinema.
Hannes Bergthaller is associate professor at National Chung-Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan, and currently an Alexander von Humboldt research fellow at the University of Würzburg. He is the author of Populäre Ökologie: Zu Literatur und Geschichte der modernen Umweltbewegung in den USA, Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2007, and co-editor of Addressing Modernity: Social Systems Theory and US Cultures, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011; with Carsten Schinko. He is immediate past president of EASLCE and book review editor of the journal Ecozon@.
The deadline for submissions for the 2015 Conference on Communication and Environment (COCE), Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication which will take place in Boulder, Colorado June 11-14, 2015 has been extended.
The new deadline is October 15, 2014, which gives you an extra month.
Before then, we hope to be able to announce our keynote speakers and provide more information about accommodations and fees.
Check the COCE 2015 web page for updates.
If you haven’t seen the call for submissions yet, please have a look. We are inviting submissions of abstracts of scholarly papers, practice reflections, panels, workshops, posters and artworks. This is a conference for artists and practitioners as well as academics and students.
Many of you have already sent in your submissions and we thank you for those. Now you can bask in the warm feeling of having got that task done well over a month ahead of time!