The Cultural Studies Student Organizing Committee (SOC) of George Mason University invites paper proposals for our 5th annual Cultural Studies Graduate Student Conference.

“Since most of history’s giant trees have already been cut down, a new Ark will have to be constructed out of the materials that a desperate humanity finds at hand in insurgent communities, pirate technologies, bootlegged media, rebel science and forgotten utopias”(Mike Davis, “Who Will Build the Ark?”, New Left Review, January 2010).

The current and future impacts of ongoing, globalized environmental crises have animated scholars, activists, and professionals from a wide variety of disciplines and backgrounds and generated a burgeoning field of work that seeks to come to grips with the ecologies of the present as well as the possible ecologies of the future. This conference will provide a forum for emerging scholars and practitioners involved in cultural studies, environmental studies, the arts and humanities, public policy, political ecology and related fields to engage in conversations regarding contemporary and prospective environmental practices and politics.

We seek to engage in efforts to develop a deeper understanding of human interventions – in the forms of work, art, and politics – into the environment. We also wish to examine the ways in which concepts such as “nature” and “human practice” inform, articulate with and determine one another.  “Ecological Inequalities and Interventions: Contemporary Environmental Practices” will offer an appropriately interdisciplinary forum for work in this emerging area of inquiry.

We welcome proposals for traditional academic paper presentations, as well as alternative formats such as panel discussions, workshops, and film screenings. In addition we hope to publish select conference papers in an edited volume or curated journal issue.