The submission period for Conference on Ecopoetics proposals is now closed. Due to time, space, and budgeting constraints—and the sheer number of submissions we received (more than 25 pre-formed panel proposals on top of more than 160 individual presentation proposals)—we were unable to accommodate many of the terrific proposals we received. Our sincere thanks to all who submitted.
Call for Papers: Conference on Ecopoetics
February 22-24, 2013
University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)
Contact and submissions e-mail: ecopoetics.conference@gmail.com
Deadline for panel and individual paper proposals: October 1, 2012
What is ecopoetics? What representational strategies and sociopolitical commitments might characterize this practice? How might we periodize ecopoetics and situate its modes of cultural production? This conference aims to bring scholars, poets, and creative artists into sustained dialogue on the historical and contemporary practices of ecopoetics.
We invite panel proposals or individual paper proposals that examine the various relationships—historical, material, aesthetic, activist—between poetry, poetics, and ecology. Possible topics include: ecological genres: pastoral, georgic, elegy, documentary; formal innovations in ecopoetics: sound- and performance-based practices, concrete and minimalist ecopoetics, intermedia ecopoetics; biopoetics, biopolitics, and posthumanism; pataphysics, biosemiotics, and information theory; discourses of pollution, garbage, toxicity, unsustainability, apocalypse; evolution and extinction; queer ecology; cross-cultural, indigenous, mestizo, subaltern ecopoetics; climate change and geosystems; creaturely life, life forms, nonhumans; life and non-life; site-specific poetics, bioregionalisms, transregionalisms, poetry and “sustainability”; Romantic and post-Romantic ecopoetics; Modernist and postmodern ecopoetics; the affective and ethical turns in ecopoetics; surrealist, digital, and conceptual ecopoetics; ethnopoetics; environmental justice and environmental racism; precarity and the multitude; disaster capitalism, petrocapitalism, “green” capitalism, political ecology; violence and abjection; urban and exurban ecologies; ecopoetics and object-oriented ontology; avant-gardening; poetry, activism, revolution.
Panel proposals should include a title, a rationale (250 words), and a list of presenters. For each presenter, list his/her paper title, institutional affiliation (if any), and a brief academic bio. You may construct a traditional panel with 3-4 presenters reading 20-minute papers, or a seminar with 6-8 presenters, each reading brief position papers of 5-8 minutes. Panels composed entirely of graduate students or of faculty from a single institution are unlikely to be accepted. You may propose a partially complete panel, and in this case, if accepted, additional presenters would be assigned to your panel.
Individual paper proposals should include a title, a 250-word abstract, 3-5 keywords, institutional affiliation (if any), and a brief academic bio. You may propose a traditional 20-minute paper or a brief position paper (5-8 minutes) for a seminar. If your paper is accepted, you will be assigned to a panel or seminar.
The conference will also feature poetry readings, art/film exhibits, and excursions to Bay Area forests and wilderness areas. Please direct submissions to ecopoetics.conference@gmail.com by October 1, 2012. Questions may also be directed to this e-mail address.
