More-than-human humanities research group!

Category: Call for Papers Page 1 of 4

Deadline 28 Feb. Call for papers: ‘Recentring the Region’ 

July 4-7, RMIT University and Deakin University, Melbourne

A partnership between ASAL (Association for the Study of Australian Literature) and ASLEC-ANZ (Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture (Australia and New Zealand)), the 2023 ‘Recentring the Region’ conference turns attention to ‘the region’ in Australian literary studies and environmentally-oriented critical and creative practice.

Regions pre-date colonisation in Australia, bringing them into tension with the nation and its structures. They encompass geographies, hydrologies, ecologies, networks and alliances. They are structural and affective, relational and fluid. They can bring entities together and move them apart. Regions are a way of thinking, narrating, and making, and they are continually being constituted by practices that encompass the literary and the artistic in all their forms.

‘Recentring the Region’ will be face to face (based at RMIT University in Melbourne’s CBD) with some fully online sessions to accommodate interstate and overseas participants.

We invite broad and inclusive approaches to ‘the region’ in Australian literary and other creative practices and scholarship from Australia, Aotearoa and beyond, and call for 20 minute paper/presentation proposals (diverse formats also welcome) that trouble the nation state as the primary regional frame. These might consider, but are not limited to:

·         First Nations literature, creative practice and regions

·         Regional literary history and cultures

·         Critical regionalism and bioregionalism 

·         Environmental, oceanic and atmospheric regions

·         Trans-Tasman and Pacific writing and literary culture

·         Place-making and literary practice

·         Biographies from the regions

·         Genres as literary regions

·         Ecocritical regions

·         More-than-human regions

·         Artforms as artistic regions

·         Critical discourses, theories and disciplines as scholarly regions

·         Periods as temporal regions

Please send 200 word abstract/proposal and 50 word bio by 28 February 2023 to RegionsConference2023@gmail.com

Please indicate on your submission whether you are submitting as a member of ASAL, ASLEC-ANZ or both and if you are planning to present online or face to face (hybrid is unavailable). For more information about ASAL and ASLEC-ANZ see

CEMUS Spring Seminars and Conference (CFP deadline Mar. 1)

Our friends at CEMUS, The Centre for Environment and Development Studies, have some exciting events this year.

Starting on Feb. 9, they have a great seminar line-up for Spring. You are welcome to visit in person in Uppsala or online!

They are also hosting the ClimateExistence conference Aug 16-18 with the Sigtuna Foundation (in Sigtuna). Check out the details on their website and do not forget to submit your application by the March 1 deadline!

CFP: Sea Farming and Feminist Blue Humanities

Deadline: 31 January 2023

Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics

We call for contributions that disclose past, current, and future transformations regarding how societies might nourish life through, by and with the seas, suggesting modes of thinking and consuming in ways that allay our high-energy and high-consumption societies. Nourishment in theory unmakes modern distinctions between individual consumer choice and planetary belonging, self and other, body and environment – generative to what has been termed for instance low trophic theory-practices (Radomska and Åsberg 2021; Åsberg and Radomska 2021). Thus, we invite submissions that explore the political and ethical terrain in contemporary nourishing practices surrounding sustainable food system transitions located along the coasts and in the oceans.


Attention towards farming at sea needs be aware of the cross-border, trans-material, multi-species, posthuman entanglements in which it is embedded. For instance, we need to understand how posthuman and more-than-human ethics (Probyn 2016, 20) might be implemented in ocean farming. We need to understand how privatization and increases in oceanic productivity (Motichek et al. 2008) may impact environmental justice at different scales. We need also to think with the original meaning of “farm” as “something payable” and consider how to repay and replenish the oceans for what humans and society take from them. Hence, this special issue aims to address the themes of ocean farming and situate them within the context of coastal nourishment and care (e.g., feminist, multispecies, etc.) to address ethical and political implications that come with specific challenges, such as innovating ocean farm technologies for the harvesting of new materials, cultivating terrestrial plants and marine vegetables at sea, altering food webs, establishing policies and regulations on ocean farming, and reshaping aquatic relationships between humans and other beings.


This special issue invites critical ocean studies, indigenous, anti-colonial, queer, gender and intersectional approaches to marine and coastal sea farming. It honours inventive and societally relevant traditions in feminist STS, environmental ethics, blue – and multispecies humanities and the long histories of indigenous peoples’ connections to coastal areas. We hope to especially showcase the uses of arts and humanities to policy and society but also the creativity emerging out of postdisciplinary meetings between (eco- and bio-) art, the environmental humanities, the natural sciences and diverse societies of the world.

The Science Fiction Research Association Conference 2022 “Futures from the Margin” Oslo June 27-July 1

Check out the Co-Futures research group at Oslo University, and the 2022 SFRA Conference.

What do futures look like from the margins? The 2022 SFRA Conference is dedicated to visions of human futures that center and foreground the issues of those from the margins, including Indigenous groups, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, and any people whose stakes in the global order of envisioning futures are generally constrained due to the mechanics of our contemporary world. For many people around the world imagining radically different futures has a life or death quality, as their presents are beset by societal discrimination, poverty, inequality and precarity, as well as the acute effects of climate change and the global environmental crisis.. How can futures from the margins speak to power in presents?

Open Call: Soils as Sites of Emergency and Transformation, NESS Conference, Gothenburg, Sweden. Abstract deadline 15 Dec!

Dear soil friends, please consider joining us for “thinking with soils” workshop in Gothenburg, Sweden, 7-9 June 2022, as part of the Nordic Environmental Social Science Conference (NESS). Please note he short deadline for abstracts: 15 December 2021. Draft papers: 20 May 2022. The NESS format allows us to spend concentrated time in a small group of 12-15, meeting in half-day sessions over three consecutive days. Covid-19 permitting, we will hold this workshop in person. If you would like to participate but struggle with the short deadline for abstracts please get in touch!

Workshop chairs:

  • Anna Krzywoszynska, The University of Sheffield (a.krzywoszynska@sheffield.ac.uk)
  • Daniel Münster, Oslo University (daniel.munster@medisin.uio.no)
  • Janna Holmstedt, National Historical Museums, Sweden (janna.holmstedt@shm.se)

Please send abstracts of 150-200 words using this link: https://forms.gle/jsqkrDXEnGSQRtVT9

Background and urgency

The Covid-19 pandemic is seen by some as the latest warning against the intensity of intervention of human worlds into non-human processes and spaces. This latest emergency unfolds, however, against the background of the long and accelerating process of human-induced, global planetary and ecosystem change variously debated as the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, or the Plantationcene.

The most lasting, the most fundamental, and the least address aspect of this ‘slow emergency’ and ongoing transformation relates to soils. When (rarely) discussed in the public sphere, soils are framed as an object of concern, and their degrading state is seen as a cause for alarm (as exemplified e.g. by the creation of the EU Mission for Soil Health and Food). In the Nordic context, soil emergencies are particularly noticeable as global heating-related changes in soil functions and states are having sudden and profound effects on lives, livelihoods, and land-use and inhabitation futures.

Such emergency framings which underpin policy and expert concern around soil change can, however, lack historical and ontological reflexivity around the desired human-soil relations. Beyond this emergency framing, soils are also a site of and a source of transformation. Both historically and today, soils are active participants in the making of human societies and of ecologies. Whereas loss of soils has been linked with societal collapse, reciprocal relations of care can transform societies and ecosystems. Moreover, in contemporary thinking in political and social theory (e.g. Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth, Donna Haraway’s thinking on composting), arts (e.g. the Humus economicus project), and in debates about sustainable farming (e.g. regenerative agriculture), relations with soils are a source of inspiration for new models of human-environmental interaction and for conceptualising more-than-human health. This new wave of ‘thinking with soils’ works across disciplinary boundaries to reconceptualise people, environments, and their interactions by acknowledging and interrogating human entanglement with soils.

Invitation: ‘a thinking with soils workshop’

We invite you to spend time together thinking through and getting to grips with our soil past, presents and futures in the context of the Nordic Environmental Social Science Conference (NESS) 7-9th June 2022. Covid-19 permitting, we will hold this workshop in person.

The NESS format allows us to spend concentrated time in a small group of 12-15, meeting in half-day sessions over three consecutive days. While the final format of our workshop depends on who responds to this call, we broadly envisage spending time in a structured manner discussing and workshopping one another’s ideas, and jointly discovering new directions of thought and forms of engagement. We envisage concluding the workshop by collaboratively building ‘a toolbox’ of ideas and practices for making the case for soils as societal actors.

As a workshop contributor, you are asked to share with others in the workshop group a paper (complete or in draft), a photo-essay, a movie (with accompanying essay), or a website (with accompanying essay) which you would like others to engage with. In the workshop, we will ask you to present this contribution very briefly, and to participate in a shared discussion on themes relating to the contribution. We will also ask you to read or view at least two other contributions and engage with them deeply in the workshop.

We ask you to share with us an abstract by 15th December 2021, and a full contribution (which can be a draft or working paper) by 20th May 2022. If you would like to participate but struggle with the short deadline for abstracts please get in touch!

Please send abstracts of 150-200 words using this link: https://forms.gle/jsqkrDXEnGSQRtVT9

We broadly invite contributors to engage with the emergent thought on human-soil relations through the framing of emergency and transformation. This may include reflecting on the following questions, and related issues:

  • What are new, meaningful and interesting ways for thinking through current and past socio-ecological emergencies in relation to human-soil linkages?
  • How do soils or particular relations with soils contribute to the creation of emergencies, and how do they participate in transformations?
  • How can we transform current thinking about socio-ecological transformations by thinking with soils? What conceptual, affective, and ethical modes arise from soil engagements?
  • What forms of methodological and experimental practice can help us transform our thinking, or those of specific groups? What are emergent methodologies for a social science and humanities engagement with soils?
  • How are relations with soils and land drawn on and transformed in response to ecological and social emergencies, including economic and health impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic?

We invite empirical and theoretical papers related to the theme, as well as artistic commentaries and interventions.

Further information from NESS conference organisers:

The NESS workshops follow a standing session format (similar to ECPR), which allows for substantive discussions on research in progress.  The conference invites scholars from multiple disciplinary backgrounds in environmental social science.  The overall objective of the workshop is to facilitate and encourage participation, equality and collaboration between younger and more established scholars.  Each paper is expected to relate to the theme of the workshop, and the participant submits and presents a paper (or work in progress) for the discussion.  Workshop participants will be asked to comment on at least one other paper in the respective workshop and participate in the general discussion of the other papers presented.  Participants should only choose and attend one workshop for the duration of the conference.  The ambition with this format is that the workshops allow for in-depth and coherent discussions of the respective themes and provide opportunity for potential joint publications or other continuing collaborations between the participants

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