The newly elected administration inaugurated the year 2017 by raising questions in the nation and the world about the oncoming policies of the US government regarding the construction or removal of barriers, the care or exploitation of the environment, and many other dilemmas involving radically alternative scenarios for our future relations to the world and to our habitats. What is at stake is the option of facing contemporary cultural and political challenges on the ground of a shared or an exclusive governance.
In terms of historical and literary reflection, this involves a rethinking of the positioning of even the newest transnational perspectives, such as Border, Hemispherical, and Oceanic Studies, which are called to acknowledge the mobility and multiplicity of the where and what of their investigation. The 24th AISNA Biennial Conference proposes to discuss possible ways of reconceptualizing the mutual and shifting positions of center(s) and margin(s), subject(s) and object(s) in terms of relation, and particularly of an inclusive structure of relations that are based on an ecological ethics. Workshop proposals are invited from the diverse areas of inquiry of AISNA addressing methodological hypotheses, such as the need to assume a complex framework of simultaneous scales of analysis; translation as the main means and medium to expand our theoretical conversation; an ecocentric and ecological paradigm as the ground for our decision-making procedures; and networking as the privileged tool for a hopeful and successful management of the urgent issues posed by an unstoppable process of globalization and an apparently similarly unavoidable process of exhaustion of the planet’s resources.
Topics may include but are not confined to:
• North-American Studies & World Literature
• Rethinking Cosmopolitanism in a Global Perspective
• Exilic Writing
• Migration and the Environment
• US Literature and Global Circulation (Markets and Publishers)
Translation and World Literature; Multilingualism; New Textualities
• Ecolanguage, Ecopoetry, Ecopoetics • Animal Studies
• Environmental Dystopias
• Landscape Transformations and Shifting Geographies
• Environmental Justice
• Environmental Politics; Presidencies and Environmental Policies
• Foreign Relations and Climate Change
• US Environmental Activism
• Inhabiting the ‘Wilderness’ – Past and Present
• Natives’ Territories and Newcomers’ Settlements
• Ecofeminism
The deadline for workshop proposals is April 15, 2017. Submitted proposals will be reviewed by the conference organizer and the AISNA board. A selection of max. 20 workshops will be issued by April 30, notified to the submitters by email, and published on the Conference website.
Submissions should be written in English and include:
• a workshop title • a clearly stated description of the proposed topic in no more than 300 words
• contact details of the workshop’s coordinator or coordinators (max. 2), including professional affiliation.
Each workshop will host no more than four papers, including the coordinator’s or coordinators’. In case they intend to present papers in their own workshops, aspiring coordinators should indicate their prospective titles in their proposals. We remind aspiring coordinators that their task will comprise a brief introduction of the speakers, a strict monitoring of the observance of the allotted 20-minute time for each presentation, and a supervision of the following question and answer session, aimed to stimulate a fruitful discussion in the last but essential part of each workshop. For this purpose, in their proposal they should also suggest the name of a discussant.
All workshop proposals should be sent by e-mail to the conference organizer, Paola Loreto (paola.loreto@unimi.it), as well as to the secretary of AISNA, Simone Francescato (segretario-aisna@unive.it).
Link to the conference page: sites.unimi.it/AISNA
Link to the registration page: sites.unimi.it/AISNA/register
>> NEW <<: Here is the Conference program.
Bando per borse di studio per la partecipazione alla AISNA Biennial Conference di Milano
