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 Call for Papers Humanities on the Brink: Energy, Environment, Emergency A Nearly Carbon-Neutral (NCN) online symposium sponsored by the  Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and hosted by the University of California, Santa Barbara July 10-31, 2020 Is it time to panic yet? The accelerating drumbeat of awful, depressing, terrifying, no-good,  exasperating, numbing, rage- and despair-inducing news from around the  globe has many of us repeating the same simple question: What can I do?  How can one person make a difference, for instance, in the effort to  transition to renewable energy systems? Or what influence does a single  person have over governments as they deal (or choose not to deal) with  sea level rise, climate migration, monster hurricanes and wildfires, and  other catastrophes associated with the out-of-control overheating of  our planet?  What about mass shootings, resurgent white supremacy, the  rise of “illiberal democracy,” the weaponization of social media, or any  number of the other ills that threaten to metastasize into full-blown  planetary emergencies? Scholars in most mainstream humanities circles, understandably  preoccupied with the grim “endgame” of declining enrollments and budget  cuts playing out in academic departments at universities all over the  map, have had relatively little to say about the climate and extinction  crises.  On the other hand, scholars in fields such as ecocriticism and  the energy and environmental humanities have been grappling for years  with questions about the rapidly worsening state of the biosphere and  related social problems.  The trouble with many academic conversations  about these things is that, however interesting they may be to their  participants, they are, indeed, academic conversations: discussions  carried out among specialists in language that ordinary people find  off-putting or simply unintelligible; discussions that too rarely  translate to meaningful action; discussions that perpetuate academic  “business as usual,” advancing the careers of individual humanists but  mostly failing to spark collective change and the growth of the sorts of  inter- and extra-disciplinary alliances that hold the greatest promise  of actually transforming the petrocultural impasse we currently  inhabit.  And, of course, much of the dialogue still happens at  conferences with enormous carbon footprints.  No matter how convivial  and edifying the gatherings are, this fact lends a bitter taste of  flygskam (Swedish: “flight shame”) to the proceedings. As we continue to examine the meaning of the humanities in a time of  emergency, scholars must find ways to bridge academic critique and  research with the work that non-academic communities are doing in  response to the existential threats of what many have come to call the  Anthropocene. Extending this impulse to create bridges rather than  silos, this ASLE Off-Year Nearly Carbon Neutral (NCN) symposium asks  participants to take up questions of urgency and emergency in the  context of the overlapping social and ecological crises that mark the  present—to think within and against what we might call the “Emergency  Humanities.” We seek panels and presentations that not only study texts  through these lenses, but that also reflect on the limits and  possibilities of doing humanities scholarship and changing our rapidly  warming world. We invite you to submit panels, presentations, and  programming ideas to “Humanities on the Brink” and participate this  coming July...Flygskam-free!Panel and presentation themes may include the following:   *   Climate pessimism, optimism, and/or denialism   *   Energy humanities on the brink of an age of emergencies   *   The “failure” of the humanities   *   Salvaging the wreckage of the liberal arts   *   Urgency as a mode of foreclosure   *   Urgency as a site of possibility   *   Energy transition and the question of urgency   *   The humanities and/as resistance to authoritarian (ab)uses of emergency discourse   *   Alternative or queer temporalities and the question of urgency   *   Energy, infrastructure, and narrative   *   Settler colonialism and the uneven experiences of “emergency”   *   Creating ecological/cultural “arks” to preserve endangered beings, relationships, languages, communities, and heritages   *   Community-building efforts inside and outside the humanities   *   The humanities and radical forms of dissent: culture jamming,  civil disobedience, mass mobilization, monkey-wrenching, and more   *   Lessons for the humanities from disaster sociology, emergency management, and other relevant fields   *   Rewilding and biocultural restoration and/as the humanities   *   “Emergency” and the global South   *   Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic imaginaries; utopian and dystopian visions   *   Past “emergency humanities” failures and successes (e.g., Nazi  book-burning vs. the distribution of tens of millions of Armed Services  Editions in World War II)   *   Current approaches to keeping the humanities alive in war zones,  under conditions of economic austerity, in prison, and elsewhere outside  the proverbial Ivory Tower   *   Emergent genres that imagine utopian infrastructural futures (e.g., solarpunk)   *   The limits and possibilities of the “new” humanities   *   Research-creation and the necessity of challenging conventional academic knowledge production   *   Metacritical reflections on other forms of NCN research and interactions NCN Format Speakers record their own talks. Talks normally consist of       1. a video of them speaking, which could be filmed with a webcam or smartphone;       2. a screen recording of a presentation, such as a PowerPoint, with the talk as a voiceover;       3. a hybrid of the two, with speaker and presentation alternately or simultaneously onscreen. Talks are uploaded to the conference website where they can be viewed at  any time during the conference timeframe. Talks are organized into  panels (i.e., individual web pages) that generally have three speakers  each and a shared Q &#38; A session. Participants and panelists contribute to online Q &#38; A sessions,  which are similar to online forums, by posting and responding to written  questions and comments. Submissions We welcome two categories of submissions from participants. Those  interested in pre-formed panels, workshops, and roundtables should  submit a panel overview of 300-500 words, including two keywords and  100-word biographies of each participant, along with contact  information. For pre-formed panels, 200-word abstracts will be required  for each presentation on top of these requirements. Individual  presentations will require a 300-word abstract, 100-word biography, two  keywords, and contact information. We encourage creative uses of the medium of the virtual conference  setting, and ask that applicants model their proposal on the form that  most closely fits their format, providing a short description of the  format in their abstract.  For examples of past NCN symposia, see ASLE’s  “A Clockwork Green: Ecomedia in the Anthropocene”&#60;http://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/?page_id=17731&#62; and other successful online conferences&#60;http://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/&#62;  recently hosted by the University of California, Santa Barbara.  For a  helpful, detailed guide to NCN conferences, see this white paper&#60;http://hiltner.english.ucsb.edu/index.php/ncnc-guide/&#62; by Ken Hiltner, Director of UCSB’s Environmental Humanities Initiative. Questions or suggestions?  Please contact Bart Welling at bhwellin@unf.edu&#60;mailto:bhwellin@unf.edu&#62;.  Please submit all proposals as .doc(x) or .pdf attachments to Bart Welling, Jacob Goessling (jacob.goessling@gmail.com&#60;mailto:jacob.goessling@gmail.com&#62;), and Jordan B. Kinder (jkinder@ualberta.ca&#60;mailto:jkinder@ualberta.ca&#62;). Symposium Events Keynote speakers will be announced as they commit to the symposium.  We  will be hosting an online watch party featuring the documentary  INVASION, which deals with the anti-colonial work of the Unist’ot’en  Camp of the Wet’suwet’en Nation.  We invite your ideas regarding other  events and ways to put the NCN format to the best possible use. Timeline April 1: Proposals due May 1: Acceptance decisions made May 15: Registration opens ($25, or pay what you can) June 15: All videos uploaded July 10: Conference begins 