2024 Graduate Student Conference
"Critical Ecologies and Speculative Futures: Conceiving the Envrionment"
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Jennifer French | Williams College
February 29 - March 1, 2024
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures | University of Miami
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The MLL Annual Gradaute Conference is open and free to all members of the University of Miami and the general public.
https://forms.gle/djK7yqEN6akjhJFa6
Program
Call for Papers
GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE 2024
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 29 – FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 2024
DEPARTMENT OF MODERN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES
UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI
Critical Ecologies and Speculative Futures: Conceiving the Environment
Critical theory has questioned the conceptual limits of ideas like the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and supremacy of human animals over nature. Ongoing global crises, such as climate change, divergent levels of modernization, and the search for bold and expedient solutions to accelerating environmental crises urge new frameworks to analyze an interdependent world.
We take inspiration from scholars such as Aílton Krenak, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Einar Haugen, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari whose works draw upon the grammar of ecology to investigate the mutual constitution of environment and culture. Critical ecologies assert that theories and practices that elevate culture over nature were never sufficient and thus demand innovative analyses of dynamic cultural ecosystems.
We welcome diverse and creative approaches to this theme. To this end, critical ecologies not only pose the environment as a focus for humanistic scholarship but also expand conceptual frameworks to (re)imagine space, resource distribution, technologies, urban development, temporalities, materiality, body, queerness, Indigeneity, ethnicity, race, class, and intersectionality.
The Annual Graduate Student Conference of the Michelle Bowman Underwood Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami calls for papers from a variety of interdisciplinary approaches. We emphasize our invitation to graduate students but extend it to academics, artists, and activists from diverse disciplines around the world. We encourage projects that include or critique—but are not limited to—the following topics:
LITERARY STUDIES
Literary ecocriticism
Literature and intersectionality
Speculative fabulation
Afrofuturism
Transhumanism and artificial intelligence
Science fiction
Decolonization
Border studies
SOCIOLINGUISTICS
Language contact induced change
Issues in Indigenous and minority languages
Linguistic anthropology
Bilingualism
Ecolinguistics
Ecology of language
Ethnolinguistics
CULTURAL STUDIES
Environmental humanities
Ecofeminism
Post-feminism
Posthumanism
Urban studies
Migration and diaspora
Hybridity
New materialisms
Cultural anthropology and psychology
Abstracts of no more than 500 words are welcome in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Please add a short 250-word author biography to the abstract. Proposals may be submitted via this link by Monday, November 27, 2023. The approved papers will be announced after Monday, December 4, 2023.
The plenary speaker will be announced by January 30, 2024.
This conference will take place entirely in person on the University of Miami campus in Coral Gables, Florida, on Thursday, February 29, and Friday, March 1, 2024.
For inquiries related to the participation of this conference, please contact doctoral student Neta Kanny (she/ella/ela/elle) at nkanny@miami.edu.
Official Call for Papers Letter
This event is sponsored by the Michele Bowman Underwood Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, the Joseph Carter Memorial Fund, the Graduate Student Association of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, the Department of English, the Department of History, and the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program
