Abstract Deadline: 7 September 2022
Email to: graduateconference2022@gmail.com
Language Policy: Turkish/English
Conference Mode: Hybrid
“Ecocriticism and Sustainability Graduate Student Conference”
“Staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all” (Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 4).
The Anthropocene, a new geological epoch proposed by Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000, highlights the detrimental human impact on the planet. The Covid-19 pandemic and climate change have become arguably two of the most concrete and destructive examples of human-centric life. The consequences of the pandemic and climate change have also underlined otherwise less evident dichotomies such as human/non-human and nature/culture. In recent years, the inequalities between these binaries, as well as the malign effects of human-oriented life have become an even more prominent focus for scholars in diverse fields such as cultural studies, philosophy, history, literature, and sociology.
Ecocriticism, which emerged with William Rueckert’s pioneering essay “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” (1978), has become an increasingly valuable lens to analyze the current situation. Therefore, the annual graduate conference of the program in Turkish Literature at Bilkent University chooses ecocriticism as this year’s focus. It will take place on 14-15 October 2022 and will welcome 20-minute interdisciplinary research papers dealing with ecocriticism in relation to (but not limited with) the following:
-Class, Social Inequalities
-Environmental History
-Memory Studies
-Gender Studies, Feminism(s)
-Literary Theory
-Genre Studies
-Film Studies
-Video Games
-Graphic Novels
-Environmental Disasters, Pandemic & Scarcity Studies
-Post-Humanism
-Animal Studies
-Turkish Literature (s), Ottoman Literature(s)
-World Literatures(s)
-Migration, Postcoloniality
-Travel Writings
-Translation
Please send your abstracts (250-300 words) and a short bio (100 words). Also, please provide
information regarding your pronouns as well as participation preference–i.e. online or in-person.
*Please note that the select papers from the conference proceedings will be published in a special
issue of a peer-reviewed journal.