The ENVIRONMENT, SPACE, AND PLACE Working Group of the Cultural Studies Association invites both general and themed submissions for the 16^thAnnual Meeting of the Cultural Studies Association (U.S.), to be held at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, May 31-June 2, 2018.

While the ESP Working Group has historically drawn from a deep-rooted engagement with geography, we welcome work from across all fields and interdisciplines concerned with the workings of nature and power, including but not limited to anthropology, geography, history, international relations, science and technology studies, environmental studies, and development studies. We invite theoretically, methodologically, and empirically diverse work from scholars, artists, and activists investigating the spatial and cultural dynamics of environment, nature, space, and place, broadly conceived.        

Process of Submission

Please submit a 300-500-word abstract no later than Friday, February 16, 2018 through the Cultural Studies Association’s Easy Chair system. Please indicate in your submission whether you are responding to the general or theme call HERE.

Submission of proposals is limited to current CSA members, but new members are welcome. See the benefits of membership & become a member HERE.

Travel Grants

Travel grants are available for partial reimbursement to graduate and advanced undergraduate students who planning to present. 

CALLS FOR PAPERS:

Environment, Space, and Place Working Group: General Call

In keeping with this year’s theme, “Interventions,” we invite participants to reflect upon the engagement of their work with the current political moment. What does cultural studies offer either theoretically or methodologically towards understanding the present socio-ecological conjuncture and its politics? We invite individual or collaborative papers or creative presentations from academics, artists, and activists working at the intersections of environmental and cultural studies, broadly conceived. Interventions may address, but are certainly not limited to, the below topics.

• Border ecologies, crossings, and interventions
• (Un)natural disasters, climate change, and political (non)intervention
• Life, nonlife, and the politics of care
• Eco-social relations in the Anthropocene
• Environmental management strategies and their politics
• Interspecies justice and intersectional activism
• Activist geographies and the environmentalism of the disenfranchised
• Biopolitics, race, and animality
• Labor in precarious ecologies
• Resource extraction and circulation in the global marketplace
• Authoritarian geographies and the spatial politics of resistance

Environment, Space, and Place Working Group Themed Panel:

Spatial Histories, Residential Ecologies

We invite papers and creative presentations for a panel on “Spatial Histories, Residential Ecologies” that analyze the tensions among development, displacement, and belonging in human-dominated residential spaces. As a panel at the intersections of cultural and environmental studies, we are especially interested in papers that explore connections among one or more of the following topics: interspecies interactions, sub/urban ecologies, gentrification, tenant activism, environmental justice, migration, feral ecologies, the enclosure of wild spaces, indigenous sovereignty, the racialization of space, the temporal and spatial rhythms of the privatized couple (what Jack Halberstam has called "family time"), pet studies, ecophoboia, tourism, green planning (and critiques thereof), urban homesteading, and speculative futurism.

Please contact Environment, Space, and Place Working Group Co-Chairs Sophie Moore slsapp [at] ucdavis.edu, Daniel Lanza Rivers drivers  [at]  fullerton.edu, or Lindsay Garcia ldgarcia  [at]  email.wm.edu.