University of Falmouth
September 1-2, 2012
Submission deadline: March 31st.
What is the relationship between structures of dissemination and the environment that our (creative) practice is concerned with/seeks to convey? What is the relationship between the academic environment and the work we produce? How do we utter (repeat/recreate) our environment?
We invite poets and writers, artists, academics, social and environmental scientists, performers and musicians, and others, to submit proposals for 20 minute papers/presentations/performances that practically consider/reflect upon/perform ways of uttering environment. We seek work that explores the phenomenological sense of speaking with environment. We encourage the use of a diverse range of media as part of this dialogue. Participants are invited to find new ways of expressing their research and/or artistic practice in a conference setting that reflects upon this process of adaptation as a process of practical enquiry. For full details of this call please visit our website: environmentalutterance.wordpress.com.
University of Sciences
Philadelphia, PA
The assistant professor in Rhetoric and Composition should possess a doctorate in English (or a closely related field) with a specialization in college-level writing or rhetoric. Training or experience in writing across the curriculum, applied writing (including scientific, technical, business, and/or public relations), new media studies, or multicultural rhetorics is highly desirable. The candidate should have a minimum of three years’ experience teaching writing at an institution of higher education. Preference will be given to a candidate with teaching experience and/or a research specialization related to science or technology. An active research agenda is expected.
Duties include teaching first-year writing, professional writing, and general education courses. The individual hired for this position will be expected to actively contribute to curriculum development and assessment initiatives. Other duties may be assigned by the Director of Writing Programs. Graduate teaching is possible. Teaching load is 3/3.
Candidates should submit a letter of application, CV, unofficial copies of graduate transcripts, three letters of recommendation, a statement of teaching philosophy, and a summary of recent teaching evaluations.
Address your application materials to: Dr. Justin Everett, Chair, Rhetoric and Composition Search Committee, University of the Sciences, 600 S. 43rd St., Philadelphia, PA 19104. Submit application materials directly to asstprofrhetoric@usciences.edu. Review of applications will begin March 1 and continue until the position is filled. Only electronic applications are accepted.
We tend to discourage ranting on this site and aim for scholarly voice — but if I see another cross promotion for the upcoming Lorax film I, well, I will rant. The latest promotions include the Lorax selling a Mazda compact car that gets a whopping 40 mpg (notice the mounting sarcasm that is the sure sign of a rant), children’s meals at IHOP, and the Lorax sitting in as a guest judge on NBC’s reality music show “The Voice”. All told Universal Pictures has partnered with nearly 70 corporate sponsors – including the EPA. Apparently, Mazda agreed to donate $1 million to the National Education Association’s “Read Across America” Program in order to secure the rights to use the Lorax in commercials. But the car company has even sent agents out into schools to tell children that they will donate $25 more to the cause if their parents test drive a new Mazda. Child advocacy groups have recently called for consumers to boycott companies attempting to capitalize on the classic environmental tale. In fact, Universal dramatically downplayed the film’s environmental messages in promotional materials and only added an environmental education component to the film’s website after students and teachers started a petition to protest the studio’s oversite. If you’re feeling nostalgic, here’s a link to the 1972 CBS television version of the 1971 book by Dr. Seuss.
Update: Now in its second weekend, The Lorax is once again topping the US box office and has already earned more than $100 million domestically. It was produced for around $100 million.
Finally, here is the Colbert Report’s take on the film:
With SCMS annual conference about a month away (March 20-25), I thought I’d post my quick look-see at eco-related panels and papers (see below).
Four explicitly designated eco-panels
Thursday, March 22, 2012 03:00PM-04:45PM
H1: Eco-horror, Defined; Room: Alcott
Chair: Drew Beard (University of Oregon)
Stephen Rust (University of Oregon), “Postmodern Eco-horror and Youth Dysculture in The Wall (1982)”
Kendall Phillips (Syracuse University), “Eco-horror and the Nation-State: Imperial Gothic in the Films of Neil Marshall”
Tiffany Deater (State University of New York, Oswego), “From Supernatural to Unnatural: The Rise of Eco-horror”
Drew Beard (University of Oregon), “Defining Eco-horror, or, Why It’s Always Shark Week”
Friday, March 23, 2012 09:00AM-10:45AM
 J22: Ecocinema 1: Objects, Objectives, Objections
Room: Winthrop
Chair: Salma Monani (Gettysburg College)
Salma Monani (Gettysburg College), “From Cuts to Dissolves? The Evolving Field of Ecocinema Studies”
Andrew Hageman (Luther College), “Ecocinema, Ideology, and Dreams of a Clockwork Green”
Adrian Ivakhiv (University of Vermont), “From Environmental Films to Eco(philosophical) Cinema”
Friday, March 23, 2012 12:15PM-02:00PM
 K11: Ecocinema 2: Eco-effects and Affects: From Audience Cognition to Resource Consumption
Room: Franklin
Chair: Andrew Hageman (Luther College)
Respondent: Toby Miller (University of California, Riverside)
Alexa Weik von Mossner (University of Fribourg), “Objects of Emotion: Cognitive Approaches in Cine-ecocriticism”
Helen Hughes (University of Surrey), “The Toxic Materiality of the Eco-Doc”
Paula Willoquet-Maricondi (Marist College), “Media Technology, Ecocriticism, and the Sustainability Movement”
Saturday, March 24, 2012 03:00PM-04:45PM
 P14: Cinema, Oil, Disaster: Ecological and Post-industrial Issues in Contemporary Media
Room: Lexington
Chair: Claudia Springer (Framingham State University)
Mona Damluji (University of California, Berkeley), “Big Oil on the Big Screen: The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s Persian Story”
Nadia Bozak (University of Toronto), “Topographies of Destruction: Oil Security and the Representation of Eco-War in Peter Mettler’s Petropolis”
Jen Caruso (Minneapolis College of Art and Design), “Eco-disaster, Post-industrial Aesthetics, and The Road”
Claudia Springer (Framingham State University), “Eco-disaster and Creative Re-use: From Road Warrior to Garbage Warrior”
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These two panels also appear obviously ecocritical:
Saturday, March 24, 2012 09:00AM-10:45AM
M12: Trash, Contamination, and Dirt on Screen
Room: Gloucester
Chair: Kara Andersen (Brooklyn College)
John Powers (University of Wisconsin, Madison), “Contamination and Intentional Allegory: The Strange Case of Todd Haynes’ Safe”
Kara Andersen (Brooklyn College), “The Demiurge of the Discarded: Mr. Stain on Junk Alley”
Chelsey Crawford (Oklahoma State University), “Coveting Imperfection in the Digital Age”
David Lerner (University of Southern California), “Smells Like Lowbrow: Odorama in John Waters’ Polyester”
Saturday, March 24, 2012 03:00PM-04:45PM
 P19: Representing the Post-industrial City: Film, Television, and the Geography of Unproductive Urban Centers
Room: Thoreau
Chair: Stanley Corkin (University of Cincinnati)
Stanley Corkin (University of Cincinatti), “Free Markets, Free Drugs, and Post-industrial Baltimore in The Wire”
Nathan Holmes (University of Chicago), “Synthesizing the Post-industrial City: Location and Form in Detroit 9000 (1973)”
Paul Newland (Aberystwyth University), “Deregulated Isthmus of Enterprise: The Isle of Dogs on Film and Television since 1979”
Mark Shiel (King’s College London), “Post-industrialism and the Cinematic Landscape of Los Angeles”
And, here’s Claire Molloy’s environmentally focused paper in:
Saturday, March 24, 2012 01:00PM-02:45PM
O18: “Indie†Politics: Political Filmmaking and Contemporary US Independent Cinema
Claire Molloy (University of Brighton), “Environmental Politics in the Age of ‘Indie’ Eco-entertainment.”
Considering ecocinema’s broad purview, I’m keen to add to the list as others see papers that are not as explicitly marked but nonetheless take an ecocritical perspective. Please send in your additions, so I can add them to the list.
We invite submissions for an edited anthology exploring the disciplinary intersections of technological mediation, design, and the posthuman.
Deadline: Abstracts of 500 words should be submitted by March 30,2012. Notifications will be made by early May with final drafts of
submissions due by September 30, 2012. Please include a short biographical statement with abstracts.
Editors:
Dr. Amy Propen, Rhetoric and Composition, York College of Pennsylvania
(apropen@ycp.edu; http://amypropen.com/)
Dr. Colbey Reid, Literary Studies, York College of Pennsylvania
(creid@ycp.edu)
Dr. Dennis Weiss, Philosophy, York College of Pennsylvania
(dweiss@ycp.edu, http://faculty.ycp.edu/~dweiss/)
In the early days of the Internet, there was much talk about moving from the offline world to the online world. Fanboys to cybertheorists proclaimed the demassification of culture. Life, we were told, would become increasingly virtual and the world of things wouldn’t matter much. In their 1994 preamble to “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,†cyberlibertarians Esther Dyson, George Gilder, and George Keyworth nicely articulated this early Internet dream: “The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth—in the form of physical resources—has been losing value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.â€
The past decade, however, has witnessed a renewed focus on materiality. From Bruno Latour’s constitution of a parliament of things to Jane Bennett’s efforts in Vibrant Matter to challenge the view of matter as passive and inert, Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s recent exploration of the social lives and agency of texts (2010), and Bill Brown’s award-winning 2001 Critical Inquiry issue on “thing theory,†a variety of discourses and disciplines have renewed their efforts to engage questions about the epistemic and rhetorical power of physical artifacts. Literary theorists, digital humanists, rhetoricians, philosophers of technology, and product designers are paying more attention to the crafted environment, the manner in which artifacts mediate human relations, and the constitution of a world in which the boundary between humans and things has seemingly imploded. Simultaneously, new questions arise about the extent to which we ought to view humans and nonhuman artifacts as bearing equal capacity for agency and life, and the ways in which technological mediation challenges the central tenets of humanism and anthropocentrism.
Contemporary theories of human-object relations presage the arrival of the posthuman, which is no longer a futuristic or science-fictional concept but rather one descriptive of the present, and indeed, the past. As Charles Bazerman has observed, “technology… has always been part of human needs, desires, values, and evaluation, articulated in language and at the very heart of rhetoric†(383). Bill Brown’s A Sense of Things likewise points out that humans have long been living under what one Atlantic Monthly article positioned, already in 1906, as a tyranny of things. Discussions of the posthuman already have a long history in fields like literary theory, rhetoric, and philosophy, and as advances in design and technology result in increasingly engaging artifacts that mediate more and more aspects of everyday life, it becomes necessary to engage in a systematic, interdisciplinary, critical examination of the intersection of the domains of design, technological mediation, and the posthuman.
Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, itself a project of mediation within the complex intersections occasioned by the history of technology, aims to bring diverse disciplines together to foster a dialogue on some of the significant technological issues pertinent to
philosophy, rhetoric, aesthetics, and science.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Humanism and anthropocentrism in a world of relational artifacts
The place of the human being in technologically mediated environments
Moving from a demassified culture to a culture of things and artifacts
The resurgence of materiality and things in a posthuman world
The posthuman at the nexus of design culture and technologies of mediation
The value of things in a posthuman device culture (Albert Borgmann and philosophy of technology)
The symmetry thesis and the status of the human being
Multimodal technologies, rhetorics, and questions of agency
Rhetorics of the posthuman and questions of agency
Rhetorically-focused case studies or ethnographies involving
technologically mediated environments, spaces, and bodies
The text as agent; texts and agency
Visual, material, and spatial rhetorics, design, and mediation
The posthuman quality of material cultures, past and present
Textual design as a space of human-object interface
Digital archives and the problems, uses of technologically mediated history
Design culture: interior design, fashion design, artisanal craftsmanship and/as human- artifact boundary dissolution
Form (style, genre, etc) as technology; parallels between the turn to form and the turn to things
Proto-posthumanisms (Victorian, Edwardian “cyborgsâ€)
Please submit abstracts of 500 words and a short biographical statement to Amy Propen (apropen@ycp.edu) or Colbey Reid
(creid@ycp.edu) or Dennis Weiss (dweiss@ycp.edu) by March 30, 2012. Essays appearing in the anthology will average 3,000-6,000 words. MLA style should be used where citation is required. Notification of acceptance will be given by early May. Completed chapters will be due by September 30, 2012.
Spring 2012, ** $1,000 Prize ** Sponsored by: Sierra Club and Center for Environmental Filmmaking
The contest is open to anyone who prepares a short, funny video for YouTube, which communicates a clear message about clean energy and/or green jobs.
Submissions must:
- Be humorous!
- Address the issue of clean energy and/or green jobs
- Reach a broad audience beyond just environmentalists.
- Be an original production.
- Be less than three minutes.
- Posted to Eco-Comedy Video Competition 2012 YouTube Channel at:Â http://www.youtube.com/ecocomedy2012 .
- Submitted by 11:59pm on March 2, 2012.
There will be six judges representing the Center for Environmental Filmmaking, Sierra Club, the US Environmental Protection Agency, Mill Reef Productions, and EcoSense. The decision of the judges is final. Awards are based on overall merit of the entries. Judges reserve the right not to grant an award. The organizations listed above reserve the right to post submissions on their websites.
Submissions that are not received by March 2, 2012 will not be judged. The winner will be announced at American University on Tuesday, March 20 at the DC Environmental Film Festival.
For more information regarding submission guidelines and contest rules, visit: http://www.american.edu/soc/cef/eco-comedy-film-competition.cfm
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30-31 October 2012, New Orleans
Pre-Conference (Live & Virtual) to the AMS/SEM/SMT 2012 Joint Annual Meeting
http://www.ams-esg.org/events/upcoming-events/ecomusicologies-2012
The AMS Ecocriticism Study Group and the SEM Ecomusicology Special Interest Group invite submissions on research from any academic field related to any issues of and around ecomusicology (ecocritical / ecological / environmental studies of music and/or sound), which is broadly construed as the dynamic relationships between culture, music/sound, and nature/environment, in all the complexities of those terms. (For more on ecomusicology, consult the information and resources at www.ams-esg.org.)
Papers accepted for the conference will be considered for publication in a volume of essays currently being prepared under the working title “Ecomusicology: A Field Guide,” edited by Aaron S. Allen (University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA) and Kevin Dawe (University of Leeds, UK). This volume will present the diversity of ecomusicological work in the field by including various disciplinary approaches from, e.g., history, literature, ethnography, anthropology, and ecology.
The conference will be held in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, on the uptown campus of Tulane University on 30-31 October, which is immediately prior to the Joint Annual Meeting of AMS, SEM, and SMT in downtown New Orleans. (The historic St. Charles Streetcar connects the two locations.) Between Ecomusicologies 2012 and AMS/SEM/SMT, on Wednesday 31 October, there will be options to attend the SEM pre-conference on “Crisis and Creativity,” and/or to participate in local outings that explore New Orleans’s rich cultural histories and natural settings.
The conference organizers plan to include electronic communications to allow for virtual involvement. If you would like to participate in the conference either as a presenter or attendee but cannot be in — or for environmental reasons prefer not to travel to — New Orleans, you will have the option to deliver your work and/or see and hear the presentations of others via the Internet.
Scholars from any academic field are invited to submit proposals for presentation in a variety of formats, including:
* panels (3 to 6 participants, 30-90 minutes),
* papers (10, 20, or 30 minutes),
* posters (electronic or paper formats), and
* alternative formats (performances, films, etc.).
Submissions will be accepted until 16 April 2012, acceptances will be sent by 28 May 2012, a preliminary program will be posted by 30 July 2012, and discounted pre-registration will end 17 September 2012 (dates are tentative and subject to change after subsequent coordination with AMS/SEM/SMT).
An author may submit multiple proposals (within reason), e.g. proposing the same research to be presented as a paper or a poster, or proposing entirely separate topics. All submissions must conform to the following guidelines:
1) Deadline: The submission of a two-page PDF (as described below) must be sent via email to BOTH sem.ecomusicology.sig [at] gmail.com AND ams.esg [at] gmail.com by 11:59:59pm GMT on 16 April 2012.
2) Submission: The submission email must include a 2-page PDF as an attachment (no other format will be accepted): on the first page, include title, author name(s), affiliation(s) and contact information (for one corresponding author if there are multiple authors), and brief biographical information (for each author); on the second page, include title & format, abstract, and rationale as described below. Do not include any author identifying information on page 2 because the abstracts will be reviewed blindly.
3) Title & Format: For ALL submissions, on page 2 include a title (50 words maximum) and indication of format (e.g. panel; paper of 10-, 20- or 30-minutes; poster; or type of alternative format).
4) Abstract: Follow the guidelines below that are appropriate to the chosen format.
* For panels of 3-6 participants (30-90 minutes): 250-word (maximum) abstract justifying the formation of the panel as a whole, plus 250-word (maximum) abstracts that summarize the argument/aims, methods, findings, etc. for each of the contributions.
* For papers of 10 or 20 minutes and posters: 250-word (maximum) abstract, summarizing argument/aims, methods, findings, etc.
* For papers of 30 minutes: 250-(minimum) to 500-word (maximum) abstract, summarizing argument/aims, methods, findings, etc.
* For alternative formats: 250-word (maximum) abstract, summarizing argument/aims, methods, findings, etc., and indicating the alternative format (performance, film, etc.).
5) Rationale: For ALL submissions: 250-word (maximum) rationale for participation in the conference; this section provides, first, an opportunity for further explanations and, second, some necessary administrative information. First, this section provides more space to elaborate on any unusual disciplinary background or on any other features that may not be immediately obvious in the abstract, or to explain and justify the alternative format. Not all submissions may necessitate such elaboration. Second, all submissions must include here a) an indication of whether or not publication in the edited volume is desired, b) if virtual participation may be desired or necessary, and c) 2-5 keywords that best describe the orientation and content of the submission.
While submissions to Ecomusicologies 2012 may be the same as submissions to the AMS/SEM/SMT Meeting, they should not be presented at both; thus, if a submission is accepted for both Ecomusicologies 2012 and AMS/SEM/SMT, then the author is encouraged to withdraw from the former and present only at the later (in such an event, the submission may still be considered for publication in the “Field Guide”).
Address any questions to: sem.ecomusicology.sig [at] gmail.com and/or ams.esg [at] gmail.com. Conference program and further updates will be posted at www.ecomusicologies.org.
Program Committee:
Aaron S. Allen (University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA)
William Bares (University of North Carolina at Asheville, USA)
Kevin Dawe (University of Leeds, UK)
Annette Kreutziger-Herr (University of Music and Dance Cologne, Germany)
Michael MacDonald (University of Alberta, Canada)
Jennifer C. Post (New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University, Wellington)
Robin Ryan (Independent Scholar, Western Australia)
Juha Torvinen (University of Turku, Finland)
Denise Von Glahn (Florida State University, USA)
(Reposted from SCMS Film Festival Research listserv)
Below is a link to the call for papers for East Winds: East Asian Cinema and
Cultural Crossovers. This is both a film festival and symposium, with talks
from key scholars in the field and Q&A with directors.
We have already had a good response to the original call, but have decided
to extend it until the 2nd February to allow people time to submit a
proposal in case the original CFP post got lost in the Christmas/New Year
period.
<http://cueafs.com/?page_id=2620> http://cueafs.com/?page_id=2620
Spencer Murphy and Colette Balmain