Emotion, Space and Society invites proposals for papers relating to a
special issue on Ecology and Emotion. Proposals should be a maximum of
500 words in length and can address any aspect of the relation between
ecology, emotion and affect. For example:

• Emotion in environmental activism
• Affective ecologies
• Fearful environments
• Loving nature
• Environmental angst
• Ethics and emotional attachment to place
• Phenomenology of ecological hope.

/Emotion, Space and Society/ is a peer-reviewed quarterly journal
published by Elsevier and we welcome proposals from all
inter/disciplinary perspectives.

Proposals should be submitted to editor Mick Smith at
michael.smith@queensu.ca by Sept. 15th 2010, final papers by February
1st 2011.

“Oil Culture”

Guest Editors:

Ross Barrett, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Daniel Worden, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

“…the blazing oil leaped heavenward, and falling over on all sides from the fiery jet, formed a magnificent fountain of liquid fire…The scenes of terror and woe accompanying such a catastrophe can better be imagined than described.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1865)

As this report on an early oil well fire suggests, petroleum has long been recognized to be a dangerously volatile commodity whose illuminative and propulsive capacities are inseparable from its destructive potential. Oil’s catastrophic power has been reaffirmed by the succession of environmental disasters that have accompanied the global expansion of oil extraction, a series culminating in the devastation produced by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout. These ecological tragedies have been matched by the array of social antagonisms, global political conflicts, and boom-and-bust economic cycles that have developed around the oil industry since its beginnings. Despite its disastrous implications, however, oil came to be embraced over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a central and unassailable “fact” of everyday American experience, a core issue of national political platforms, and a reliable pillar of industrial and financial capitalism in the U.S. While much work has been done to track the material and political processes that made the dominance of oil capitalism possible, relatively little scholarship has addressed the rise of oil as a cultural problem. And yet as the Harper’s quote above suggests, petroleum has inspired a wide range of imaginative efforts to comprehend its terrifying power and the bewilderingly expansive social, political, and economic systems that it has engendered.

For this special issue, we seek essays that explore the wide field of “oil culture” that has emerged around the American petroleum industry in the 150 years since its inception in northwestern Pennsylvania. More specifically, we are looking for articles that examine how literature, art, film and photography, television programming, the print and digital news media, advertising and industry publicity, legal argument and theory, political rhetoric and imagery, academic and corporate research, and other forms of public culture have contended with the volatile material of oil and the systemic shifts that it has produced, and in so doing contributed to, or contested, the reorientation of modern American life around oil capitalism. We hope, ultimately, to assemble a roster of essays that elucidate the complex role that imaginative representations have played in the establishment of oil as the primary commodity underpinning modern economic expansion and a fundamental ontological construct shaping social, economic, and political life in the United States and beyond.

Papers might address a range of subjects and problems, including:

–literary, cinematic, and artistic visions of oil
–oil advertising and marketing
–trade and popular periodicals devoted to petroleum
–oil speculation and finance
–popular and academic histories of oil
–oil region museums and historical associations
–oil and the culture of automobility
–oil fairs and expositions
–the American Petroleum Institute and other trade associations
–oil and the academy: university and private research
–race, class, and gender in the oil fields
–oil, mobility, and subjectivity
–foreign policy, military action, and war
–oil disasters and environmentalism
–Hubbert’s Peak and theories of oil’s end
–oil and the left: critiques of oil capitalism
–oil and the Progressive press: reformism and muckraking
–the corporate structures of oil: trusts and monopolies
–gasoline crises and price hikes
–regulation and deregulation
–oil and political scandal
–Halliburton and corporate international relations

Proposal Process:

Authors are asked to electronically submit an abstract of 500-1000 words and an abbreviated cv (two pages) to Ross Barrett (rbarre@email.unc.edu) and Daniel Worden (dworden@uccs.edu) by September 1, 2010. Abstracts should articulate the central arguments, theoretical and/or historical implications, and methodological approach of the proposed essay, and situate the essay within relevant scholarly conversations. The abstract and cv should be sent as Word documents or PDFs.

After reviewing the proposals, the editors will notify the selected authors and submit chosen abstracts to the Journal of American Studies by September 8, 2010. Upon acceptance by the journal, authors will be asked to submit a full copy of their article to the issue editors by January 2011. The full version of the article should not exceed 6000 words, and should be accompanied by a short abstract (200-300 words). All articles will go through the peer-review process, and it is on the basis of these reviews that articles will be selected for publication in the special issue.

For further information on the Journal of American Studies, please see:

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=AMS

Ross Barrett Department of Art University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill rbarre@email.unc.edu Daniel Worden Department of English University of Colorado at Colorado Springs dworden@uccs.edu Email: rbarre@email.unc.edu, dworden@uccs.edu

• General trends in market-based environmental policies and instruments
• New forms of neoliberal conservation (including web 2.0, species banking, etc)
• Agro-food systems, the meat-industrial complex, and aquaculture
• Agro-fuels, energy and climate change
• The relation between conservation and land (including protected areas, etc.)
• Financialisation of the environment
• New social, environmental and peasant movements and left alternatives
• Accumulation by dispossession, property regimes, and the “new” enclosures
• Ecological imperialisms, including the recent ‘land grabs’ Urban and rural political ecologies and the links between them
• Theoretical advancements in nature-society relations
  

This conference aims to critically engage contemporary spatial, social, ideological, and political transformations in a transitional world. In a process-oriented world of movement, the global north and global south now simultaneously converge and diverge in a dialectic that shapes and transforms cities, suburbs , and rural areas. This conference addresses the nature and mapping of these forces and the dynamics that propel these changes. The conference also examines and defines the myriad of different spaces that make up our contemporary world, including urban, edgeurban, de-urban, micro-urban, greenfield, and off-the-grid.

In addition to plenary presentations, the Spaces and Flows Conference includes parallel presentations by practitioners, teachers, and researchers. We invite you to respond to the conference Call-for-Papers. Presenters may submit their written papers for publication in the peer reviewed ‘Spaces and Flows: An International Journal on Urban and Extraurban Studies’. If you are unable to attend the conference in person virtual registrations are also available which allow you to submit a paper for referring and possible publication. You also have the ability to upload your presentation to the Space and Flows YouTube channel.

The deadline for the next round in the call for papers (a title and short abstract) is 13 May 2010. Future deadlines will be announced on the conference website after this date. Proposals are reviewed within two weeks of submission. Full details of the conference, including an online proposal submission form, may be found at the conference website: http://www.spacesandflows.com/conference-2010/ .

We invite you to participate in the 2010 ESAC conference. It’s part of the 2010 Congress for the broad range of bodies that fall under the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

People from community groups, NGOs, practitioners, policy makers, (and of course the drivers of the conference: academics and students) are welcome to attend and actively participate. If you are interested in issues that involve climate change, food security, natural resources, millennium development goals, environmental health, environmental literacy and journalism tips that encompass all of the above, then this conference is for you.

View the Full Schedule.

In the spirit of passion for the planet and networking with your environment community, please join us at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec – May 31 to June 1, 2010

Cost of Attendance:
Member: $60
Non-Member: $90
Retired Member: $40
Retired Non-Member: $50
Student/Unwaged Member: $30
Student/Unwaged Non-Member: $40
Banquet: $35

Click here to complete your registration.

When registering for Congress 2010, one of the drop-down options will be to attend our banquet at the Spanish Club, scheduled for the evening of June 1st, that includes tapas and the choice of paella, lamb or a vegetarian option with a band and late night party with Canadian Association of Studies in International Development (CASID) for a cost of $35. This is an excellent opportunity for you to network and/or socialize with student and faculty colleagues.

Any questions please contact:
Dr. Shirley Thompson,
Natural Resources Institute, University of Manitoba,
70 Dysart Rd.,
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2
phone: (204) 474-7170 fax: 204-261-0038
e-mail: s_thompson@umanitoba.ca
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~thompso4/

ESAC ACEE call for proposals

ESAC ACEE 2010 Paper Proposal Form

ESAC-ACEE-2010-Panel-proposal-form

Accommodation Information

Informational Poster Contest

Travel Grant Application

International Mini-Conference Tallinn, Oct 22-23, 2010
Network of Science and Literature  Studies

http://www.teadusjakirjandus.utlib.ee/index2.html

Conference language: English Deadline: June 15, 2010

*Description* The conference will focus on plants and their  intricate alliance with the environment they inhabit, whether as  specimen of the life sciences, feeding crops, products of luxury  spoiling our palate, or delighting our senses by their aesthetic  beauty, to mention just a few of the variate procurements of plants on  earth. In sketching how plant-spaces shaped Nature and Culture from  the 17th century to nowadays, we want to discuss how our usage of  plants has influenced and still influences transformations of natural  and man-made habitats (whether rural landscapes or garden cities,  fields or laboratories, factories or kitchens). In open discussions and  short papers (ca. 15 min) we want to exchange ideas about the kingdom  of plants in all its diversity. Our main objective is to initiate a  collaboration of scholars, scientists and artists reflecting on and  experimenting with plant-spaces, either set-up by or related to a  natural object, a text, an image, or a technical device. To offer a  most flexible framework the conference is structured around 6 themes:

-  Plants in the museum and laboratory (natural history, botany,  molecular plant biology, fine arts)

- Plants in texts and images (nature  writing, art history, scientific articles and illustrations)

- Plants  and biodiversity (plant-geography, functional ecology, greenmovement)

- Plants and people (food, economic botany, gardening,  landscape architecture, urban planning)

- Medical plants (ethnobotany)

- Plants’ cloning and/or cloning plants (breeding, agriculture,  transgenic plant science)

Key Speakers

Professor Dr. Mart Kalm, Estonian Academy of Arts, Estonia

Professor Dr. Urmas Kõljalg,  University of Tartu and Natural History Museum, Estonia

Professor Dr.  Christof Mauch, Rachel Carson Centre, University of  Munich, Germany

Professor Dr. Verena Winiwarter, University of  Klagenfurt and University of Vienna, Austria

Call for Abstracts

We  welcome contributions from a variety of scholars and scientists, not  only specialists in environmental issues of plants, but also from such  diverse fields like human geography, anthropology, art history,  climatology, economy, landscape architecture and pharmacology. To engage in lively debates, we request for short papers that  elucidate and advance the issues and thematic concerns of the  transdisciplinary topic of plants in an environmental context. Although  there is no limitation to any geographical region we are  especially interested in papers dealing with the Baltic countries and  the Russian Empire.

To propose a paper, please send an abstract (not  more than 500 words) including title and full contact details to Sabine Brauckmann, sabine@ut.ee or Ulrike Plath, ulrike@utkk.ee. The deadline for  submitting an abstract is June 15, 2010. We will inform about the  accepted abstracts until July 1, 2010. Selected and reviewed papers  will be published in a special volume of the Estonian Journal of  Ecology in 2011. General information about the conference can be  found at: http://www.teadusjakirjandus.utlib.ee/events.html

We are pleased to invite proposals for a new book series, Critical Animal Studies, to be published by Rodopi Press, one of Europe’s premiere academic presses. The main goals of the series, which differentiates it from the pre-existing series in the field of animal studies, are that we are particularly looking to publish works that:

(a) focus on ethical issues pertinent to actual animals (as opposed to animals as only metaphors, tropes, or philosophical concepts); i.e. work with a certain normative value;

(b) adopt a broad critical orientation to animal studies, including (but not limited to) work that investigates and challenges the complex dynamics of structural, institutional, and discursive power formations that organize life conditions, relations, and experiences of animals, humans, and the environment alike; work that explores diverse forms and sites of human/animal resistance; work that contributes to current global debates by contextualizing critical animal issues within, for instance, processes of globalization, climate change, and biotechnology; work that intervenes in the animal economy of the production, science, service, experience, and culture industries; as well as work that critically analyzes ideologies, practices and effects of the current animal welfare movement;

(c) bridge boundaries between academic/activist knowledge, between theory/practice, as well as between existing disciplines. Based on this commitment to interdisciplinarity, all work published must be in language that is as clear and accessible to as wide an audience as possible;

(d) contribute to creative, bold, innovative, and boundary shifting knowledge development in critical animal studies.

If we can be of any further help or assistance in discussing projects please do not hesitate to contact either of us via email.

Sincerely yours,

Dr. Helena Pedersen
Senior Co-Editor

Malmö University
helena.pedersen@mah.se

Vasile Stănescu
Senior Co-Editor

Stanford University
vts@stanford.edu