Advertisements
Author: Owain Jones
I work at Bath Spa University as a Professor of Environmental Humanities, and I am Director of the University's Environmental Humanities Research Centre
Bath Spa University Environmental Humanities Research Centre, Free Public Lecture: Eschatological Imagination in an Age of Extinctions; Stefan Skrimshire (University of Leeds); Wednesday 12th December, 18:00 – 20:00
CFP and info about; Forming the Future, An interdisciplinary conference at Plymouth University, 2-3 Sept 2019
Lecture and poetry reading: From Aesop to Kafka: Talking Animals in Children’s Literature and Writing for Adults; Bath University; 4 December 2018
Call for papers Inside Festival Cultures: Fields, Bodies, Ecologies. A Conference organised by the University of Birmingham; 16th and 17th May 2019
RGS-IBG 2018 Confernce Session on ‘Landscape, Becoming and Time’ illustrated in a series of drawings by Chris Glynn
On Friday 31st August, Dan Keech and Owain Jones (Professor of Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University), convened two paper sessions at the annual international conference of the Royal Geographical Society at Cardiff University, entitled ‘Landscape, Becoming and Time. Past, present and future uses of the dwelling concept in Human Geography and beyond’.
The nine presentations included historical reports of the experiences of families taking up tenancies with the UK Land Settlements Association, critical reflections on Tim Robinson’s work ‘The Stones of Aran’, and human-technology relations within field recordings in Indonesia. One presentation included singing as part of an exploration of faith tourism in Welsh sacred places.
Throughout these sessions, Chris Glynn, of Cardiff School of Art and Design at Cardiff Met University, created illustrations of the presentations, which can be viewed in his blog. It also provides further details about the remaining speakers in the sessions, and their work.
The three-day conference attracted a record number of over 1700 delegates to Cardiff University.
Call for papers: Towards Extinction, To Ward Off Extinction An International Conference organised by CECILLE (Centre d’Etudes en Civilisations, Langues et Lettres Étrangères) 7-9 November 2019 Université de Lille SHS, France
We are sharing this CFP via Sarah Jonckheere <sarah.jonckheere(at)univ-lille.fr>
Call for papers: Towards Extinction, To Ward Off Extinction
An International Conference organised by CECILLE (Centre d’Etudes en Civilisations, Langues et Lettres Étrangères)
7-9 November 2019 Université de Lille SHS, France
Convened by: Thomas Dutoit (CECILLE), Sarah Jonckheere (CECILLE/IdA), and Laura Lainväe (EMMA)
Keynote speakers:
Sarah Wood, co-editor and advisory board of OLR and Angelaki, UK
Jesse Oak Taylor, University of Washington, USA
Towards Extinction, To Ward Off Extinction
More than 99 percent of all species that have inhabited the Earth are estimated to be extinct (Beverly Peterson Stearns and Stephen C. Stearns). Hence, extinction cannot be reduced to futuristic scenarios only: it is at same time present (species are going extinct right now), present in absence (with the traces left behind by past extinctions), and awaiting in the future (extinction of multiple species and their habitats because of the human-caused climate change). Those past, present, and future extinctions construct a complex web of life and death, of coexistence and coextinction.
Extinction is thus an event that is complex, multiple, and haunting, if only because of the ambivalent responses it draws forth. On the one hand, doomsayers express a self-annihilating desire for extinction and consider that humanity is fast-set on a fateful, timely death-course. On the other hand, eco-minded people still hope to find that railroad switch which would allow for a last-minute alteration of mankind’s trajectory. This desire for the quenching out of the human race, along with the concomitant attempts at averting the end, might be symptomatic of the very uncanniness and plurality of extinction itself.
More generally, this attraction/repulsion reaction towards extinction might in fact point to the way one can approach it: to make the unavoidable avoidable, one ought to think about it; in other words, it is necessary to extend one’s thoughts towards extinction in order to ward off extinction. Thought radiates at the core of extinction.
One might argue that it is lack of thinking, and more importantly lack of thinking otherness (i.e. non-human species), coupled with a sinister capitalistic greed, that brought about the Anthropocene: indeed, as early as the Industrial Era, man’s inherently constitutive role in the fashioning of the then-discovered geological record became evident. Extinction was thereby written into our modern concept of time. Even as the concept of anthropogenic agency emerged, mankind’s invention of modern science, and especially evolution, had a gory impact upon animals, violently translating them into species and media through brutal processes of killing, excoriating, eviscerating, etc. (Jesse Oak Taylor).[1]
As humans, we need to be aware of our power to rewrite the earth with pollution, overfarming, deforestation etc.; but we should not forget that we are not only the infamous influencers of the earth, but also the readers of the earth: reading the geological strata, reading fossils, reading animal traces, and reading the consequences of climate change.
One might even aver that the next great extinction is a literary event: it can always only, and by definition, be imagined because if it were to happen actually, there would be no humans left to do the imagining.
This conference will attempt to open up new avenues to alter our ways of thinking about the earth and thinking about otherness in a more eco-responsible way: instead of wounding, the emphasis will be put on caring, on caring for the other, and with the other. Underlying this conference is the urgent need to undermine and decentre all anthropocentric views of human exceptionalism in order to reassess such notions as empathy and responsibility: how can one (take) care and be responsible for the earth? How can we implement an environmental ethics in order to stave off extinction? How does extinction force us to be responsible, not only for present-day non-human species but also to take responsibility and respond for dead species? How can literature make us more responsible readers and writers of the earth?
We welcome 20-minute papers that could include but are not limited to the following topics:
- thinking extinction, extinction as possibility of impossibility, or impossibility of possibility
- ambivalence of extinction
- records and traces of extinction
- sensationality of extinction
- extinction and cinema
- climate change and extinction
- extinction and repetition
- literature, responsibility, and extinction
- extinction and responsibility
Proposals of about 300 words together with a short biographical note (50 words) in Word or PDF format should be sent to towards.extinction.lille2019@gmail.com by February 1st, 2019. Files should be named and submitted in the following manner:
Submission.FirstNameLastName.docx (or .doc or .pdf)
Example: “Submission.JaneDoe.docx”
[1] As Jesse Oak Taylor explains, “[i]n order for species to take shape, animals first had to become specimens. The “type” had to be abstracted from the individual life as that life was converted physically and violently into a sign (“Tennyson’s Elegy for the Anthropocene: Genre, Form, and Species Being.” Victorian Studies 58.2 [2016]: 224-233).
