CONFERENCE – Emergent Critical Environments: Where Next for Ecology and the Humanities?

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ASLE UK POSTGRADUATE CONFERENCE
9th and 10th September 2011

ASLE UK (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (UK) www.asle.org.uk) will hold or its Postgraduate Conference from 9 to 10 September 2011 at Queen Mary University’s Mile End campus (London, E1) on the theme of ‘Emergent critical environments: Where next for ecology and the humanities?’

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Kate Soper ‘Neither the “simple backward look” nor the “simple progressive thrust”: Eco-Criticism and the Politics of Prosperity’
Robert McKay ‘Reading the Politics of Species in Cold War Literary Culture: James Agee and Animals’
Tim Clark ‘Derangements of Scale’,
Timothy Morton ‘The Time of Hyperobjects: Hegel, Ecology, Aesthetics’

The conference will focus on the dynamic interrelation between ethics, aesthetics and socio-politics that is central to any critical or artistic configuration of local and global environments.  The overall aim is to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue between different approaches to the study of environments as both intellectual and physical spaces with animal, mineral, vegetable and academic inhabitants. We are especially interested in emergent critical approaches that are shaping the direction of the response to contemporary and historical ecological issues. This includes areas of thought not conventionally associated with what has come to be known as ecocriticism.

Further information including registration, the conference program, accommodations, and so forth can be found at http://emergentenvironments.wordpress.com/