Second Call for Papers: Mediating Climate Change
University of Leeds
Tuesday 4th – Thursday 6th July 2017
Confirmed speakers: Professor Wändi Bruine de Bruin (Leeds); Professor Nigel Clark (Lancaster); Professor Alexandra Harris (Liverpool); Professor Mike Hulme (King’s College London); Dr Adeline Johns-Putra (Surrey); Professor Toby Miller (Loughborough); Professor Gillen D’Arcy Wood (Illinois)
Our experience of climate change is always mediated. Its effects are encountered through changing weather patterns, including the storms, floods, and droughts that afflict communities across the world. They are also encountered through different forms of representation: a novel imagining a desiccated future Earth; a television documentary about coral bleaching; a graph of rising global temperatures. Researchers increasingly understand climate change as a cultural and political issue, and are concerned with the ways in which it is mediated in different contexts, and to different audiences.
This major environmental humanities conference will cross disciplines and periods to analyse the ways in which human beings have tried to make sense of climate change. What difficulties are there in representing climate change? How has it been debated in the past? What new ways of exploring and mediating climate change are emerging as we face an uncertain future?
We welcome proposals of around 250 words for twenty-minute papers suitable for an interdisciplinary audience. Topics might include, but are not limited to:
• Representations of climate change in literature, film, the media, and the arts
• Climate change and cultural theory (e.g. posthumanism, new materialism)
• Historical constructions of climate change
• Climate change and the Anthropocene
• The mediation of climate science
• Scales of mediation/climate modelling
• Climate change as a culturally mediated and contingent concept
• The construction of climate change within academic discourse
• Climate change and consumerism (e.g. greenwash)
• The psychology of climate change (e.g. disavowal, denial, scepticism, affirmation, optimism)
• Climate change in political discourse
• Climate change and the ethics of representation
• Mediation and climate change activism
We also welcome proposals for complete panels and for presentations/panels using non-standard formats. The deadline for proposals is 15 January 2017. Please use the conference email address for all correspondence and proposals: mediatingclimatechange@leeds.ac.uk
Conference organisers: David Higgins and Tess Somervell.
Conference advisory team: Jeremy Davies, Dehlia Hannah, Graham Huggan, Sebastien Nobert, Chris Paterson, Lucy Rowland, Stefan Skrimshire, Kerri Woods.
This conference is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through a Leadership Fellowship awarded to Dr Higgins.
For further details, visit http://romanticcatastrophe.leeds.ac.uk/conference/
