Regarding the Earth: Ecological Vision in Word and Image

4th ASLEC-ANZ Biennial Conference in association with RMIT and Monash Universities

August 31 to September 2, 2012

Following on from our last conference, ‘Sounding the Earth: Music, Language, and Acoustic Ecology’ (Launceston, 2010), the 2012 ASLEC-ANZ conference, co-hosted by RMIT and Monash Universities, continued our ecological exploration of the senses with a focus on vision. Papers presented considered the ecological implications of different ways of perceiving, imagining, valuing and representing Earth, whether understood as planet, place or collective, comprising a multiplicity of more-than-human entities, agencies and processes. The Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture (Australia-New Zealand) is a multi-disciplinary organisation, and welcomed contributions from a wide range of research fields, including ecophilosophy, environmental history, cultural geography, religion and ecology, science studies and art history, as well as ecocritical literary and cultural studies.

The conference opened with a public forum at RMIT on ‘Re-Imagining the Global: Culture and Climate Change’ on Friday evening, 31st August, at which Ursula Heise and Tim Morton spoke.

Areas for consideration included:

  • Art, environment and ecological aesthetics
  • Ecopoetics, biosemiotics and ontopoetics
  • Environmental ethics and transpecies justice
  • Prophetic witness and apocalyptic imagining
  • New materialisms and speculative realism
  • Mapping, modelling and inventorying
  • Reading the past, envisioning the future
  • Wayfaring, walking, and witnessing
  • Indigenous knowledges, the colonial gaze, and postcolonial perspectives
  • Ecohumanities and green pedagogies
  • The earth looking back: nonhuman agency and lively worlds
  • Observing human-animal entanglements

Keynote Speakers
Professor Ursula Heise (UC Stanford)
Professor Timothy Morton (UC Davis)

Program
Download the program