Nature Matters: Materiality and the More-than-Human in Cultural Studies of the Environment

Call for Papers and Panels

Toronto, Ontario

October 25-28, 2007

Hosted by the Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture
Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University

Nature cannot pre-exist its construction, its articulation in heterogeneous social encounters, where all of the actors are not human and all of the humans are not ‘us,’ however defined.

— Donna Haraway, “Otherworldly Conversations: Terran Topics; Local Terms. Science as Culture 3.14 (1992), 67.

Here’s how I’m reading the Face: it’s an address to the other with an acknowledgement of our human-centredness built in, a salutary and humbling reminder.

— Don McKay, Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry and Wilderness (Wolfville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2001), 99.

Having emerged from the 1990s “nature wars” that pitted so-called social constructivists against putative deep ecologists, scholars interested in questions of the relations between culture and nature (to use a convenient shorthand) have begun increasingly to engage in research that rejects both poles of that ultimately sterile debate: Nature may be a social construction, but it is pure hubris to think and act as if human beings are the only ones doing the constructing. For Haraway, the task of acknowledging and working with the implications of this observation about what she has called the “artifactuality” of nature is both scientific and political; for McKay, as demonstrated by his own lyric and metaphoric insistences, questions about nature, otherness and language are also poetic and ethical. For most scholars engaged in “environmental” work in the social sciences and humanities, the task is all of these things and more. How do we think and write about human, social processes and power relations in a way that also speaks to the activity and alterity of the more-than-human beings involved? How do we gesture, in our language and politics, to the ways in which nature is both interlayered with and outside of our cultural understandings of nature? What difference does it make in environmental cultural studies that we take more-than-human actors as our points of inquiry and conversation? In short: How do we make nature “matter” in cultural studies of the environment?

This conference will address these questions by providing a multidisciplinary forum for scholars interested in the broad field of “environmental cultural studies” to come together to discuss just how it is that nature matters in their work. To be held in downtown Toronto, hosted by the Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University from October 25-28, 2007, the conference will include six plenary sessions highlighting the recent work of prominent scholars in various corners of environmental cultural studies – including environmental history, cultural geography, ecological and feminist science studies, environmental politics and philosophy, ecological literary criticism, animal studies, and ecocultural studies – and concurrent sessions designed to foster both intra- and cross-disciplinary conversations in these and other fields. Selected papers from the conference will be published as a collection.

In organizing this conference on the theme of nature, materiality and culture, we recognize a large family of like questions that have arisen in different disciplinary contexts, such as:

– How do we in cultural studies research the influential complexities of other-than-human “actants”?

– What does it mean to consider nature as artifact? As landscape? As text? How do we read this ecological “archive” in environmental history, or interpret the relationship between land and literature in a way that hears the voices of the creatures/places beyond the words?

– How can attention to the sensuality of ecological experiences enrich the cultural incisiveness of postcolonial and genealogical environmental projects?

– What can a reconsideration of the physical add to cultural geography? How is life (human and more-than-human) constitutive of space?

– What role might the natural sciences play in cultural analysis – or, conversely, how can we understand natural sciences as particular cultures of nature?

– How do animals exist as subjects in matrices of power relations? How are their presences in human cultures part of a largely unwritten history of the humanities and social sciences?

– How can we develop a practice of language and/or poetics and/or ethics that respects the moments at which nature refuses its cultural construction, the moments of alterity that permeate human/more-than-human interactions?

– How can environmental justice concerns more fully inform, and be informed by, concerns about animal cultures or consciousnesses?

– How do diverse environmental cultures offer a challenge to Eurowestern bifurcations of nature and culture?

– How are feminist reconsiderations of corporeality crucial resources for the “incorporation” of nature in cultural studies?

– How do we conceive of environmental studies as part of the humanities and social sciences, and how might this conception both complement and conflict with natural sciences?

– How can conceptions of and interactions with the more-than-human inform and construct human conceptions of the “good”?

– How do ecological relations embody, reflect, and transform the social relations of their production and reproduction?

– How might green politics respond to a reconsidered materiality?

The conference will include opening and closing plenary sessions for all participants on each day of the conference in order to provide us with a developing common ground for conversation. Our plenary speakers are:

Stacy Alaimo, University of Texas, Arlington (feminist science studies) Bruce Braun, University of Minnesota (cultural geography)

Julie Cruikshank, University of British Columbia (indigenous studies)

Giovanna Di Chiro, Mt. Holyoke College (environmental justice)

Patrick Murphy, University of Central Florida (ecological literary criticism)

Mick Smith, Queen’s University (environmental philosophy and politics)

Cary Wolfe, Rice University (animal philosophies)

We thus invite proposals for panels and papers from scholars in any discipline whose work might inform, or be informed by, these or other views of nature “mattering” in environmental cultural studies. In addition to the specific questions listed above, areas of focus might include, but are not limited to:

– environmental literature and ecocriticism: text and nature

– body practices and embodiments: nature, flesh and culture

– environmental and natural history: land as archive

– environmental ethics and epistemologies

– ecopoetics and ecolinguistics

– the implications of physicality for cultural geographies

– animal/human animal communications and cultures

– environmental justice, postcolonial, feminist, and/or queer ecologies

– sensuousness and cultural materialism

– science studies: (cross-)cultures of environmental research and experiment

– ecopolitics and political ecology: struggling into a landscape?

– communicating (with) the Other: media and environment

– addressing the Other: Derrida, Levinas and beyond

We invite proposals for fully-formed panels (three papers each, 20 minutes per paper, with a chair but no discussant), and also enthusiastically invite maverick papers that have no particular family of origin. Panel abstracts should include a general overview of the panel plus abstracts for each paper (all 250 words or under); individual paper abstracts should be no more than 300 words. All contributors should include a one-page individual CV with their abstract. Graduate student papers are welcome.

Contributions from artists, musicians, creative writers and performers are also welcome; these contributions need not conform to the three-person panel format. Please contact the organizers for further information.

Abstracts should be submitted by February 10 to:

Cate Mortimer-Sandilands
Megan Salhus
Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture Doctoral Candidate
essandi@yorku.ca
msalhus@yorku.ca

Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University
4700 Keele Street
Toronto, ON M3J 1P3
CANADA

Presenters will be contacted in early March regarding acceptance of their papers. Final abstracts will be compiled for the program in late August and distributed in advance to conference participants. Depending on the outcome of funding applications, some travel-related costs may be supported for graduate students (these cannot be guaranteed). Please indicate in your initial application if you would like to be considered for a travel subsidy.

Photo: Nature art by Roy Staab on the Hudson River near Beacon, NY, 23 July 2004.