Environmental Studies Association of Canada – l'Association canadienne d'études environnementales

3rd Biannual Conference of

ASLEC-ANZ

The Association for the Study of Literature, Environment, Culture–

Australia and New Zealand

University of Tasmania

Launceston

20, 21, 22 October 2010

Sounding the Earth: Music, Language, Acoustic Ecology

‘All of the sound we hear is only a fraction of all the vibrating going on in our universe’ (ecologist and composer David Dunn, Nature Sound). ‘Since each thing is made differently, each form of life hears a slightly different multiverse’.

ASLEC-ANZ invites papers, performances, photo/phonographics—on music, language, sound, the earth—that reflect the multiversity of human and non-human worlds; that investigate music’s power as intrinsic language to ‘transcend social and cultural barriers’; that examine the process of remixing, recycling, renewing in sound and the environment.

The proposed theme, Sound and the Environment. actively engages with the aural (human and non-human), and thus seeks to bring into encounter human and non-human aural expressions and aesthetics; conservatory and architecture; drama and legislation; arts and industry sustainability.

Among the topics that presenters will take up are: soundscapes and environmental awareness; music modeled on nature; music performed collaboratively with nature; the power of song (human and non-human) to change the way humans think and act; Indigenous ’singing up’ as a mode of resilience and joy. We envisage an extension of the theme that includes the politics of sound and air.

Topic suggestions include but are not limited to:

* nature writing / nature singing / inherited language

* noise as pollutant

* silence as extinction

* noise as environmental aesthetic

* popular / classical / sacred music and ecology

* Music as environmental ‘bandaid’

* ‘silence’ in environmental art, film, literature and philosophy

* auditory perception; extra-human acoustic ecologies

* capturing sound / Unsound practices

The conference is to be held at the School of Architecture at Inveresk. This is the site of the Academy for the Arts, and the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, and is situated on the North Esk, in Launceston. Accommodation in town is within Zimmer frame walking distance from the venue.

Submission deadline is 15 July 2010. Abstracts should be no more than 250 words, and should state IT requirements. Selected papers will be published in the inaugural ASLEC-ANZ refereed journal. Registration information, venue and accommodation details will be posted to the ASLEC-ANZ website at the end of May. In the meantime abstracts and questions should be directed to

Dr CA Cranston

President ASLEC-ANZ http://www.asle-anz.asn.au/

CA.Cranston@utas.edu.au

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CFP: “The Ecological Community”

Inaugural ALECC Conference

Cape Breton University, Nova Scotia

August 19-21, 2010

The Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada, in conjunction with Cape Breton University, invites submissions for its inaugural conference to be held in August 2010, on the theme of “The Ecological Community.” Proposals may take the form of individual papers, pre-formed panels, workshops, literary readings, or roundtables. We welcome interdisciplinary approaches, graduate student work, scholarly research outside the academic humanities, and proposals from writers, artists, and activists working beyond the university system.

ALECC is a growing organization of writers, academics of all stripes, and individuals passionate about the environmental arts and humanities (see http://www.alecc.ca). Our three-day conference will also include field trips to sites of ecological and cultural interest in the area around Cape Breton University, such as the Sydney Tar Ponds reclamation site, Cape Breton Highlands National Park, the Glace Bay Miner’s Museum, and the Cabot Trail, along with opportunities for birding and botanizing.

Our theme invites participants to investigate the current state of communities and to meditate on things as they might be – how might humans live sustainably in an ecological community?

While we are open to proposals that touch on any aspect of the conference theme, we particularly solicit proposals for papers and literary readings related to the following topics:

• The relationship between biodiversity and cultural diversity
• Human and more-than-human communities: mammals, fish, birds, plants . . .
• Rural and urban senses of community: farms/ranches, reservations, villages, towns, cities
• Sense of place / the senses in place
• Bodies, genders, desires and community
• The fate of community in sites of economic restructuring and environmental conflict
• Environmental reclamation and sense of place
• Relationships among scientific and artistic communities
• The wild, the feral, and the tame
• Languages, dialects, accents, and rhetorics of community
• Community-based activism
• Local knowledge in a global world
• Digital solipsism vs. digital communities
• Community healing in the face of disease, toxicity and disaster

Proposals for individual papers or literary readings should be 500 words in length; pre-formed panel proposals should be 300 words in length (with individual 500-word proposals for each paper); and proposals for roundtables or workshops should be 750 words in length, including a tentative list of speakers where possible.  Send your proposal to: Dr. Richard Pickard, Dept. of English, University of Victoria, PO Box 3070 STN CSC, Victoria BC V8W 3W1; but preferably to rpickard@uvic.ca in PDF format.

All proposals must be received by February 20, 2010.

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