Conference CFP: Environmental Emergencies Across Media
Environmental Emergencies Across Media
Linnæus University, Campus Kalmar, Sweden
16-18 March 2023 (from Thursday 11 am to Saturday 2 pm)
Transdisciplinary conference hosted by Linnæus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies, Linnæus University, Sweden, and Kalmar Art Museum
Deadline for abstracts: October 1, 2022
We live in a state of planetary environmental emergency. Scientific research as well as global news reports and local or Indigenous testimonies from all over the world witness an increase in alarming signs of current and future destruction. We are met with reports about so-called ‘natural’ weather disasters including megadroughts, extreme floods, and wildfires, as well as ever-growing waste mountains and landfills, gigantic plastic islands in acidified oceans, and species extinctions at an unprecedented pace. These unsustainable conditions produce eco- and climate-refugee streams around the world which in turn may evolve into political instabilities. These threats concern all aspects of human and non-human life, and the radical future changes they prompt range from ethics and existential choices including individual consumer choices to political institutions, collective investment strategies, ideological policy decisions, and business strategies.
Similar to two earlier conferences, “Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices”, Växjö January 2019, and “The Anthropocene Condition Across Media and the Arts”, Cluj/Romania August 2019, this conference recognizes that the arts — including work by artists, activists, writers, performers, and artistic researchers — has a crucial role to play in the current environmental emergency. Our argument is that in the same way that citizens and decision makers need to calibrate their acts in a complex epistemological situation, artistic endeavours, likewise, are faced with huge representational and epistemological challenges. Therefore, we invite not only academics but also artistic contributions, artistic research presentations, and contributors who identify as activist researchers in order to open up a full debate on these challenges.
The aim of this conference, thus, is to move beyond the conventional targets of a humanities ecocritical conference — regularly focusing upon the problems of representing the environmental crisis – by adding activist and speculative fields of articulation and collaboration in transdisciplinary terrains. The conference, consequently, inaugurates a collaboration between Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies, at Linnæus University and Kalmar Art Museum.
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