Journal News

>>>>>>>>March 20, 2024

Special Issue Launch: Volume 10 (2024): Ngā Tohu o te Huarere: Conversations Beyond Human Scales (Christine Howe, Alanna Myers, Robyn Maree Pickens, Sue Pyke)

Featuring the work of Ellen van Neerven, Fred Gesha, Sadie Hale, Louisa King and Therese Keogh, Luna Mrozik Gawler, Rachel Fetherston and Jessica Wilson, Carole Freeman and Deborah Wardle.

Swamphen emerges from the air, lands and seas that form the stories of the First Peoples of Australia and Aotearoa. We attend to these communities’ narratives as a first principle. We acknowledge the unceded territories on which we and our contributors have worked to produce this issue of Swamphen. We pay our respects to those territories’ Elders, past and present, with an eye to our namesake, the swamphen (kwilom, milu, ping ping, Porphyrio melanotus, pukeko), a bird active in this region’s ground, skies and waters.

>>>>>>>>February 8, 2024

Call for Submissions EXTENDED: Swamphen: Journal of Cultural Ecology

Submissions close 30 March 2024

Submissions are invited for ASLEC-ANZ’s conference themed edition of Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology. We invite submissions from anyone (whether or not you attended the 2023 conference) responding broadly and generally to the conference theme: “Recentring the Regions”. We invite creative practice submissions, poetry, photo essay as well as critical essays and research papers (up to 5000 words or equivalent). Submissions need not use keywords recentring and regions specifically, but to be considered will need to speak to some broad aspect of the theme.

Submissions

We invite members of ASLEC-ANZ and ASAL who attended the conference to contribute submissions related to the conference theme.
We welcome submissions from folks who did not attend the conference, providing the work clearly engages with any aspect of the conference theme. The conference website can be found here: https://www.regionsconference2023.org
We encourage short and focused works of 3,000 words (or equivalent), with a maximum of 5,000 words.
Approaches that foreground Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, Māori, Pasifika or decolonialist (tauiwi) knowledges and practices are strongly encouraged.
The journal is able to support the publication of diverse forms of scholarly and creative work and may publish some work on the ASLEC-ANZ website if this is appropriate.
With the exception of review essays, all submissions, regardless of form, will be double-blind peer reviewed.
Please submit full papers (with the exception of book reviews) via the online portal here: https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/Swamphen/about/submissions. For book reviews, please email alanna.myers@unimelb.edu.au first to submit an expression of interest to review.
If accepted, contributors will be asked to resubmit using Swamphen‘s stylesheet. Alternatively, you are welcome to submit using the Swamphen style in the first instance. The stylesheet can be found on the Submissions page: https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/Swamphen/about/submissions
For general enquiries please contact: info.aslec.anz@gmail.com
If you are interested but have specific questions about whether or not your work is relevant, please email Swamphen editorial collective member Jen Hamilton and she can relay your query to the collective.

Journal Submissions page /// https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/Swamphen/about/submissions

About the conference theme:

The 2023 ‘Recentring the Region’ conference took place at RMIT in July 2023. From ASLEC-ANZ’s perspective the aim was to examine ‘the region’ in environmentally-oriented critical and creative practice, alongside colleagues working in Australian literary studies. The synergies and cross over between the work of ASLEC-ANZ and ASAL was exciting to witness and think with. 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.

Over the course of the four days we asked: in terms of place, in what ways does art, literature and critique shape environmental thought and action? How might we rethink regions? For example, how is a watershed a region? How does the more-than-human world relate to ‘the region’? And how do habitats, forests, cities and towns co-become with regions? Through considering the mutability of regions, and the thinking they provoke, we investigated how they are continually being constituted by practices that encompass the literary and the artistic in all their forms.

About the journal:

Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology is a double-blind peer reviewed, Diamond Open Access journal. The journal was previously called the Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology and was renamed in 2020. The new name refers to the Australasian swamphen: kwilomi in Noongar language; milu in Kala Lagaw Yai language; ping ping in Dja Dja Wurrung language; porphyrio melanotus in binomial nomenclature; and pūkeko in te reo Māori. The editorial team welcomes diverse submissions: scholarly articles, book reviews, personal essays/memoir, photo essays, and creative works (poetry, short fiction, video/audio works, visual art, photography). This will be the 11th volume of the ASLEC-ANZ journal. The current Swamphen editorial collective are Chantelle Bayes, Clare Carlin, Adam Grener, Jennifer Hamilton, Christine Howe, Alanna Myers and Sue Pyke.

>>>>>>>>November 24, 2023

Call for Submissions:

“Recentring the Region” Swamphen Special Issue

The 2023 ‘Recentring the Region’ conference was a collaboration between the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture, Australia and New Zealand (ASLEC-ANZ) and the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL). Submissions are now invited for ASLEC-ANZ’s conference themed edition of Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology. We invite submissions from anyone (whether or not you attended the conference) responding to the conference theme.

Submissions close 15 February 2024.

Submissions page: https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/Swamphen/about/submissions

About the Conference Theme

About the Journal

Submissions

We invite members of ASLEC-ANZ and ASAL who attended the conference to contribute submissions related to the conference theme.
We welcome submissions from folks who did not attend the conference, providing the work clearly engages with any aspect of the conference theme. The conference website can be found here: https://www.regionsconference2023.org
We encourage short and focused works of 3,000 words (or equivalent), with a maximum of 5,000 words.
Approaches that foreground Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, Māori, Pasifika or decolonialist (tauiwi) knowledges and practices are strongly encouraged.
The journal is able to support the publication of diverse forms of scholarly and creative work and may publish some work on the ASLEC-ANZ website if this is appropriate.
With the exception of review essays, all submissions, regardless of form, will be double-blind peer reviewed.
Please submit full papers (with the exception of book reviews) via the online portal here: https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/Swamphen/about/submissions. For book reviews, please email alanna.myers@unimelb.edu.au first to submit an expression of interest to review.
If accepted, contributors will be asked to resubmit using Swamphen‘s stylesheet. Alternatively, you are welcome to submit using the Swamphen style in the first instance. The stylesheet can be found on the Submissions page: https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/Swamphen/about/submissions
Submissions close 15 February 2024.
For enquiries please contact: info.aslec.anz@gmail.com

>>>>>>>>>July 1, 2023

Swamphen #9 “Strange Letters” soft launch: 6 July 2023

You are invited to the Swamphen #8: Strange Letters soft launch! Hear from the editors and the contributors from this exciting edition at the 2023 ASAL/ASLEC-ANZ conference “Recentring the Region” at RMIT. The launch will be at lunchtime 1pm AEST (GMT+10) on Thursday at the Media Room. We will host a more extended launch soon.

>>>>>>>>>October 6, 2022

Swamphen #8 Launch: 14 October 2022

You are invited to the Swamphen #8: Particular Planetary Aesthetics Launch! Hear from the editors and the contributors from this exciting edition.

WHEN: 4-5pm Sydney, Australia (GMT+11), Friday 14 October

WHICH IS ALSO:

Australia/Boorloo/Perth AWST UTC +8:00 1300-1400
Australia/Garramilla/Darwin/Mparntwe/Alice ACST UTC/GMT +9:30 hours 1430-1530
Australia/Meeanjin/Brisbane AEST UTC +10 hours 1500-1600
Australia/Kaurna/Adelaide ACDT UTC +10:30 1530-1630
Australia/Naarm/Melbourne/Sydney/nipaluna/Hobart AEDT UTC +11 hours 1600-1700
New Zealand/Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland/Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington NZDT UTC +13 1800-1900

WHERE: Online –

Please register in advance for this meeting, After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Register here:

https://une-au.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIkd-CgrD4iE9ETCHoF4F3Rz46GSt66rMJW

>>>>>>>>>October 1, 2022

Issue 8 of Swamphen is now live: https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/Swamphen/issue/view/1140

Stay tuned for an official launch date.

>>>>>>>>>September 16, 2022

Swamphen currently has three issues in development for release in late 2022 and early 2023. Issue #8 themed Particular Planetary Aesthetics Guest Edited by Louise Boscacci and Perdita Phillips; Issue #9 Strange Letters, following our 2021 symposium of the same name; Issue #10 themed Beyond Human Scales following the 2021 conference.

>>>>>>>>>July 29, 2020

The Swamphen collective is listening to what is being said about the harms of academic privilege and we are reorienting our plans for our next issue in response. We believe dialogue is needed to create safe spaces and feel called to reassess the channels by which we publish and support the work of others. Swamphen’s ethic of interrogating our power, privilege and positionality is built on our understanding that we can’t see the full outline of structural racism when we’re on the side that benefits. We will continue to watch, listen and act.

>>>>>>>>>July 1, 2020

Swamphen Volume 8 will be a guest edited edition, slated for publication in 2022. Volume 8 will showcase the visual arts in an ecological context. The Swamphen Collective is now looking towards Volume 9, to be published in 2022, following the next ASLEC-ANZ conference. The focus of our 2022 issue will include thinking about dialogue that creates safe spaces and stands against harm.

We are dedicated to liberatory dialogue and are prepared for the discomfort that radical conversations bring. We are ready for our workings to be constructively challenged and interrogated for the purposes of destabilising the white privilege we represent.

As a collective dominated by white privilege, we are driven by a desire to #handoverthemic. At the same time, we understand that breaking down the blinkers of this privilege is our work.

We recognise that if a largely “white” project (no matter how contingent/unpaid that project may be) cannot attract significant, volitional engagement from communities who have been marginalised, we need to change our project to become more meaningful and inclusive.

We welcome our readers input anytime if and when they feel comfortable sharing.

As we move closer to the journal development period we will invite formal dialogue, but in the meantime we would be very grateful for the participation of others. This might take the form of informal suggestions, ideas for contributions or other modes of participation we haven’t foreseen.

Please email our collective, via smpyke@unimelb.edu.au, and we will respond as best we can.