Roundtable at the 51st Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

Urban Environmental Pedagogy: Literature, Culture, Space, and Ecology (ASLE Session) sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE).

This roundtable, sponsored by ASLE, explores theoretical and curricular strategies for engaging students in investigations of urban ecological networks through literature, cultural artifacts, or site-based learning. How might we approach students’ positioning in urban ecological networks; perceptions of urban environmental temporality, spatiality, proximity, sociality, or justice; and affective engagement with cities? What interdisciplinary tools do we need to address the problems and possibilities urban ecologies present for “Shaping and Sharing Identities” (NeMLA’s 2020 theme) and inhabiting spaces justly and sustainably? How might we theorize literary form, genre, and aesthetics as tools for understanding urban ecological networks?

As geographers and environmental historians have established, urbanization entails not only industrial and residential concentration but also the extraction and production of resources outside of cities. This roundtable explores strategies for engaging students in investigations of urban ecological networks through literature, cultural artifacts, and/or site-based learning; participants might consider theoretical and curricular frameworks for approaching:

  • Students’ positioning in urban ecological networks and perceptions of urban environmental temporality, spatiality, proximity, sociality, and/or justice.
  • Material and social phenomena that reveal or obscure regional and global ecological impacts of urbanization, possibilities for urban sustainability, or environmentally just modes of inhabitation.
  • Literary form, genre, and aesthetics as tools for understanding urban ecological networks.
  • Assumptions about literary “settings” as discrete and dematerialized, rather than relational and material.
  • Affective engagement with cities or ways of “Shaping and Sharing Identities” (NeMLA’s 2020 theme).
  • The interdisciplinarity of urban ecologies and challenges of integrating materials from the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. 

Please submit a 300-500-word abstract outlining your intentions for (1) a resource you’ll share (e.g., reading list, syllabus, assignment, activity) and (2) a short pedagogical statement (e.g., analysis of this resource or other teaching practice, context, theoretical approach) on the NeMLA website by 9/30/19: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18141.