Daily Archives: February 13, 2015

Resilience: A Journal for the Environmental Humanities

Founding editors: 

  • Stephanie Foote (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
  • Stephanie LeMenager (University of Oregon)

About the journal: Resilience is a digital, peer-reviewed journal of the Environmental Humanities. It provides a forum for scholars from across humanities disciplines to speak to one another about their shared interest in environmental issues, and to plot out an evolving conversation about what the humanities contributes to living and thinking sustainably in a world of dwindling resources.

What resilience means: 

A mode of seeing, describing, and analyzing the cultural texts, events, and political and social desires shaping our current and possible relationships to the analytic category of environmentalism.  An invitation to think both against and with other disciplines, to improvise a common conversation, to stake out and describe an environmental sensibility that can account for transformations in key terms like “knowledge,” “nature,” “humanities,” and “culture.”

In the spring, we’ll be publishing short manifestos from leading environmental humanities scholars on what the word “resilience” means to them. Before they weigh in, we’d like to hear what it means to you.

Editorial mission: 

We will regularly feature contributions from across the humanities, in other words contributions from scholars of ancient and modern languages, literature, history,philosophy, religion, and the visual and performing arts, as well as from social science disciplines with Humanities components, such as educational philosophy, urban and regional planning, sociology, anthropology, and law.

We are interested in how to generate narratives of sustainability across humanities disciplines; in narratives produced through or around objects, geographic spaces, information cultures, political agendas, and social movements central to environmental practices and ideas; in how narratives about environmental practices and ideas circulate globally and locally, and in how investigating them can reveal points of shared commitment or impasses. Finally, we are open to all scholarly efforts to imagine ways forward for both environmentalism and the humanities as systems of value and action.

Read more at www.resiliencejournal.org

CFP “Land and the American Dream”: A Sustainability Symposium

THE PRECARIOUS ALLIANCE: “LAND AND THE AMERICAN DREAM”
OCTOBER 14-16, 2015
America has been celebrated as a beautiful land of bountiful natural resources since its founding. Its colonization and industrialization were fueled by the belief that the land could fulfill “The American Dream,” the hope of a better, richer, and happier life for all people. But is an American Dream that equates progress with prosperity, and democracy with development, a sustainable way forward into the twenty-first century?

The sustainability symposium on “Land and the American Dream” will provide a wide-awake, cross-disciplinary forum of scholars and scientists, business leaders and conservationists, policymakers and environmental advocates, land-use planners and farmers, and social justice activists, among others, interested in examining how competing visions and versions of The American Dream have contributed to an ongoing “precarious alliance” among competing economic, social, and environmental concerns. Moreover, the symposium will be dedicated to exploring the variety of solutions that can contribute to a new, sustainable American Dream.

ABOUT THE PRECARIOUS ALLIANCE
Conceived by Delaware Valley College President Dr. Joseph S. Brosnan as a forum for the exchange of cross-disciplinary perspectives, civil dialogue, innovative thinking, and practical solutions, The Precarious Alliance is a multidisciplinary sustainability symposium dedicated to exploring the array of complex challenges associated with adapting human networks to address environmental degradation, economic instability, and social inequalities in local communities and global settings.
Previous symposia have focused on Food (2010), Water (2012), and Energy (2014); previous keynote speakers have included Marion Nestle, Maude Barlow, and Bill McKibben.