Contributions are invited for an international conference on "Environmental Change - Cultural Change". The event is organised on behalf of ASLE-UK and EASLCE, the British and European affiliates of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and supported by the University of Bath's Institute for Sustainable Energy and Environment (I-SEE), the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Department of European Studies and Modern Languages.

Attention will focus on two aspects of the relationship between environmental change and cultural change:

            - the cultural, social and historical framing of environmental communication, and in particular of discourses of climate change and loss of biodiversity;

            - the challenge to contemporary environmental literature and film, and their potential contribution to ecological education and consciousness.

Public understandings of and attitudes towards global warming and other environment-related issues including GM foods, nuclear power and wilderness preservation vary in sometimes surprising ways from one country to the next. They also change over time. Apocalypticism, the environmentalist master narrative of the 1960s and 1970s, has given way, as Frederick Buell has written, to acceptance of environmental crisis as a way of life. We have learned to live with a multitude of daily ecological risk scenarios, preventing, mitigating or simply accommodating ourselves to them. The assumption that sustainability demands cultural change has been challenged by powerful resistance to radical lifestyle change: in practice, environmental problems have tended instead to be subjected to progressive reframings. Key questions for the conference will be how historical experience, physical circumstances and imaginative construction combine in the cultural framing of individual issues, how norms and expectations change, what cultural understandings of 'nature' and the human subject have stood or still stand in the way of constructive engagement with environmental change, what alternatives the reservoir of contemporary and historical images and narratives of nature and culture has to offer, and what rhetorics and art forms might be adopted as strategies in facing environmental change today. The conference will seek to gain new insights into the potential role of environmental literature, film and other media in generating environmental knowledge (Peter Swirski).

Provisional acceptance has been received from the following invited speakers:

• Prof Sidney Dobrin (University of Florida, Dept of English; a specialist in ecocomposition)
• Dr Georgina Endfield (University of Nottingham, Dept of Geography; a leading researcher in the historical conceptualisation of climate change, social responses and adaptation)
• Dr Robert Macfarlane (University of Cambridge, Dept of English; critic and nature writer, author of Mountains of the Mind)
• Dr Timo Maran (University of Tartu, Institute of Semiotics; a leading writer on biosemiotics and Estonian nature writing)
• Prof Robert Watson (UCLA, Dept of English; author of The Green and the Real in Early Modern Literature)

Proposals for papers (EITHER standard papers 3000 words/20 minutes OR contributions to paper jam sessions 1200 words/12 minutes) and panels (3 papers OR 5 jam session papers) are now invited.  

Please submit proposals for papers (title plus 250 words) to Professor Axel Goodbody e-mail: A.H.Goodbody@bath.ac.uk and Dr Greg Garrard e-mail: g.garrard@bathspa.ac.uk by 1 February 2010, indicating your IT requirements.

For further information: http://www.thermaldegree.com/designs/easlce/conference