Changing Nature: Migrations, Energies, Limits
The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE)
Tenth Biennial Conference, May 28-June 1, 2013.
University of Kansas, Lawrence
SUBMIT PROPOSALS BY NOVEMBER 15, 2012
Full Details at: http://asle.ku.edu/
The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) invites proposals for its Tenth Biennial Conference, to be held May 28th through June 1st, 2013, at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. The decennial conference theme is intended to reflect some of the most engaging current conversations within the environmental humanities and across disciplines, and to link those discussions to the transnational nexus of energy, labor, borders, and human and nonhuman environments that are so fundamentally “changing nature,” and with it the widely varied kinds of environmental critique we practice, art we make, and politics we advocate.
The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) invites proposals for its Tenth Biennial Conference, to be held May 28th through June 1st, 2013, at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. The decennial conference theme is intended to reflect some of the most engaging current conversations within the environmental humanities and across disciplines, and to link those discussions to the transnational nexus of energy, labor, borders, and human and nonhuman environments that are so fundamentally “changing nature,” and with it the widely varied kinds of environmental critique we practice, art we make, and politics we advocate.
We seek proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, workshops, and other public presentations that address the intersections between representation, nature, and culture, and that are connected to the conference’s deliberately broad and, we hope, provocative theme. As always, we emphatically welcome interdisciplinary approaches; readings of environmentally inflected fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and film; and proposals from outside the academic humanities, including submissions from artists, writers, practitioners, activists, and colleagues in the social and natural sciences.
Download the entire CFP document (.pdf)
The International Environmental Communication Association (IECA) and Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) are pleased to announce a call for papers for the 12th Biennial Conference on Communication and Environment.
Dates: June 6-10, 2013
Location: Uppsala, Sweden
Theme: Environmental Communication: Participation Revisited
Openings and Closures for Deliberation on the Commons
Deadline: Submission of extended abstracts by September 15,
2012 (new deadline)
For updated information about this exciting conference, go to the COCE page on IECA web site at: http://environmentalcomm.org/node/83
 I am pleased to announce the publication of Ecocinema Theory and Practice an anthology that offers a comprehensive introduction to the rapidly growing field of eco-film criticism, a branch of critical scholarship that investigates cinema’s intersections with environmental understandings. It references seminal readings through cutting edge research and is designed as an introduction to the field as well as a sourcebook. It defines ecocinema studies, sketches its development over the past twenty years, provides theoretical frameworks for moving forward, and presents eloquent examples of the practice of eco-film criticism through essays written by the field’s leading and emerging scholars. From explicitly environmental films such as Werner Herzong’s Grizzly Man and Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow to less obvious examples like Errol Morris’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and Christopher Nolan’s Inception, the pieces in this collection comprehensively interrogate the breadth of ecocinema. Ecocinema Theory and Practice also directs readers to further study through lists of recommended readings, professional organizations, and relevant periodicals.
SF scholars’ communities have pretty consistently derided Ridley Scott’s Prometheus since it opened this summer.
Having resisted the urge to read any reviews or critiques before my own screening, I came away feeling very positive about this film. Sure, some of my positivity can be attributed to the positive social vibe of screening it in a packed house of people who responded palpably to it. Not since screening Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, had I come out of a theater able to feel the physical stress that the film had conjured.
Now that my excitement about Prometheus has encountered the negative reception of others, I’m trying to organize and analyze my thoughts on the film, including what I see it doing within an EcoMedia context. I do so appreciate the entanglement of science, religion, and corporate capital of this narrative; I loved the extended opening of landscapes in 3D that may or may not be Earth, followed by the view from inside the cave of the scientists opening a hole in the earth as a way of formally structuring the entry to the film’s mysteries. And kudos are due to the vision of flipflops and ZhongShan Zhuang (“Mao Suit”) as David’s uniform–that’s exactly what I’d wear if zipping through outer space–in fact I’ve been known to wear this combination right here on Earth.
But the one thing I am continually frustrated by is the missed opportunity of the human-origins element of the narrative. While the discovery problematizes conventional ideologies of God-centered meaning, the film does not dare to depict an utter meaninglessness in place of this lost ideology. Instead, there is still someone–the hostile aliens–who cares enough about us to try to annihilate us, quite likely for our unecological tendencies as suggested by the consistent references to the Earth’s environmental problems. I would like to have seen the narrative without this replacement God, but the fact that the film did not, perhaps could not, go there is also useful for us, though, as ecomedia analysts.
I’d love to hear others’ responses to Prometheus.
Stephen Rust has kindly invited me to contribute to this wonderful blog, which I consider an especially good fit given my ongoing mission to extend ecocritical examination to modern digital games. I look forward to the conversations that might follow, and invite you to visit my other online home at http://growinggames.net.
First, a quick word about me. I’m a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, with a background in literature, film, and biology (another research topic I’ve been smitten with for years is nature documentary, so I’ve been thrilled to find all your recent work on ecocinema).
My dissertation, Playing Nature: The Virtual Ecology of Game Environments, proposes new methods and objects for environmental inquiry by engaging the imaginative worlds of contemporary gaming. Essentially, here’s the problem as I see it: though some of the most sophisticated scholarship on natural representation has evolved within literary environmental criticism, ecocriticism has tended to exclude designed landscapes and modes of mediated interaction perceived as detracting from direct experience of the natural world; at the same time, new media theorists and practitioners have generally overlooked the ways in which emerging technologies are implicated in and by natural systems. Most game researchers and designers, for instance, continue to treat game environments as simplistic vehicles for graphical spectacle or extractive resource management.
Rather than accept that the natural and the digital are realms inherently inimical to each other (on this see my reaction to Richard Louv’s The Nature Principle), I’d like to believe that games are structurally predisposed toward creating meaningful interaction within artificially intelligent environments, and should be well poised to model dynamics long at the core of ecological thinking—interdependence, limitation, nested organizational scales, flows of energy and biomass, feedback, and so on. Yet despite the present historical moment, in which environmental movements are often stymied in their efforts to depict the scale and urgency of global environmental crisis, games remain largely untapped in terms of their potential to allow players to explore manifold ecological futures.
If you’re curious, or looking to teach games… here’s a quick rundown of my forays into this area:
- The rough beginnings of an ecological philosophy of games can be found in my essay for a special “intersections of ecocriticism” issue published by the journal Qui Parle last year.
- Coming up in ISLE but already available online is my more recent (and somewhat embarrassing) rant over the ecological and sociopolitical fantasies present in farm games (like Zynga’s FarmVille).
- Most recently, I’ve been contemplating games’ ability to render scale (particularly the scale of environmental crises and their potential mitigations, in both space and time), by juxtaposing the game Spore with the 1970s Eames’ film Powers of Ten and the Futurefarmers’ recent variation on the theme.
I’d like to think that I harbor no illusions about the uglier environmental aspects of games (as amply evidenced in Stephen’s recent post), but I’m also hopeful that games can speak to the anxieties and desires of generations increasingly raised under the specter of irreversible, anthropogenic climate change.
Thanks for having me! Feel free to email me or exchange pithy sentiments via Twitter (@gamegrower).
Interdisciplinary Conference and Workshop at Yale, October 12-13, 2012.
Capture 2012 aims to enable a new interdisciplinary space for investigating the relationships among photography, human rights and the environment. Photographic documentation has become a key tool in the fight for human rights and against political violence, mediating responses to global zones of distress. Photography is often thought of as a way of disseminating evidence of human rights violations in order to call for immediate action. Capture 2012 proposes to divert attention to another aspect of these broadly circulated images: Human rights violations are never captured independently of their harmed environments. At the same time, violations reported around the world are directly related to the devastation of natural resources like air, light and water, whether interpreted as catastrophic events or gradual declines. Communities on the move after the Fukushima Daiichi explosion, or North African migrants landing in the Italian island of Lampedusa, were only tenuously represented in the media in connection to the ecological crises in the background of their flight. However, those visual representations suggest new understandings of the conditions of visibility, the environment and the relationships among them.
From another perspective, photography can be perceived as subjected to parallel environmental transformations, as in the case of smog darkening the photographic images coming from places like Linfen, China. We hope that by linking photography to the environment and to environmental critiques, we could start a discussion that enriches the discourse on human rights as a way of sharing the world and sustaining it. We wish to bring together challenges to the claims of human rights and critical analyses of photography. Therefore, we intend to include images and ideas in our conversation as a way of connecting theory and practice, scholarship and art, activism and writing.
Capture 2012 invites contributions and interventions from various fields and practices such as: international law, journalism, history of art, photography, political science, geography, literature, sociology and cultural studies.
Topics for textual and/or visual presentations may include, but are not limited to:
- Human rights and contemporary visual culture
- Cameras and activism: theoretical and practical perspectives
- Human rights and animal rights in dialogue
- Nature photography and the meaning of disaster
- The politics of earthquakes, floods and drought
- Environmental sensibilities in visual communication
- Visual representation of nuclear power in contemporary media
We seek short papers (10-12 pages) or visual presentations that will advance the conversation around the issues that Capture2012 embraces. If you wish to present your work at the conference, please send a 300-word abstract (Word format only) and a short bio no later than September 15, 2012, to capture2012.conference@gmail.com
Keynote speakers:
Anne McClintock, Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ariella Azoulay, Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, and Director of Photo-Lexic International Research Group, Minerva Center, Tel Aviv University.
Organizers: Laura Wexler (Professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Director of Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale), James Silk (Clinical Professor of Law, Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, and Executive Director, Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights, Yale Law School), Itamar Mann (Yale Law School), Noam Gal (Comparative Literature, Yale). Capture 2012 is supported by the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School, and by the Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale.
CFP: National Conference on “Ecocritical Perspectives on Water†in Tamil Nadu, India
(from Ecomedia Studies member, Rayson Alex)
26-27 October 2012, at Central University of Tamil Nadu, Tiruvarur, India.
Papers on any one of the following topics or even any other relevant topic are welcome. However, the paper has to interpret ecocritically the representation of water in any text, verbal or visual or aural. Please note that ecocritical interpretation means reading texts with the help of ecological or deep ecological principles (not any sociological or political or economic or any other principles/concepts). Scholars may want to read ecocritically films and other art works or textual representations of:
a. Indian Rivers
b. Wetlands
c. The Sea
d. Water War
e. Water Footprint
h. Water and Gender
i. Indigenous Worldviews on Water
j. Water and Religion/Spirituality
k. Water and Politics
l. Water and Economy (Water Use/Sharing)
Abstracts not exceeding 300 words have to be submitted before 28 September 2012 for acceptance. The contributors will be informed of the acceptance by 5 October 2012. Full papers, not exceeding eight pages and typed in double space in A4 following MLA style sheet, have to be submitted by 19 October 2012. Kindly note that a maximum of 100 papers will be selected for presentation. There is no fee charged for the registration. Only those whose abstracts are accepted will present papers. Invited delegates will be provided working lunch and tea on both days of the conference. A conference-kit also will be given to them at the time of registration. Delegates will have to arrange their travel, accommodation and food (except lunch and tea) themselves. The University regrets that it cannot allow TA and DA. However, delegates will be provided information pertaining to accommodation on request. In the case of papers written by more than one author, only the presenter (who is one of the authors) of the paper will be entitled to receive the certificate.
For enquiries please contact: Dr. Rayson K.Alex (9043433632) & Ms. V. Lalithambigai (9789172751) or write to cutnecoconference@gmail.com. Organisers: Dr. Nirmal Selvamony & Dr. Rayson K. Alex
Big Fish Games (based in Seattle) has recently created a graphic to represent the environmental impacts of video games. Of course, as a download based game company, Big Fish does have a stake in making console based games like Nintendo look bad. That said it’s a powerful representation of an issue the gaming industry (like the film and television industries) like to avoid – the ecological footprint of gaming.
UPDATE: Adam Melson, who works on online marketing for Big Fish, kindly contacted me to express appreciate for the repost and to remind folks that you can link to the original post at http://www.bigfishgames.com/blog/environmental-impact-of-video-games/. Thanks Adam!
