Deadline: August 1, 2020
We invite you to submit a proposal to our AATSEEL stream, “Sustainability and Slavic Studies: Classroom, Research, Profession.” We envision a combination of panels and roundtables and welcome proposals addressing issues related to the environment and sustainability in research, teaching, and/or the profession in general. Please feel free to get in touch off-list with any questions you may have (jvergar1@swarthmore.edu).
f you wish to participate, please send your proposal to the Head of the Stream division, Dr. Meghan Murphy-Lee, following the Proposal Guidelines for individual papers.
“It is worse, much worse, than you think.” So writes David Wallace-Wells in his account of climate change, The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. In a little over 300 pages, he chronicles the broad, devastating effects of global warming and the cascading series of calamities that will follow, demonstrating along the way how no one lives “outside” of nature. So where does the field of Slavic Studies fit into the picture?
This stream will address a range of topics in our research, teaching, and professional practice related to environmental sustainability. We wish to cover these three shared facets of our field as a means to highlight their interrelated character, as well as to underscore how we might address the growing climate crisis in a number of venues. Potential topics for contributions include: environmental sustainability in the classroom and on the syllabus across disciplines (e.g., how to incorporate it into language study or how to design courses on or featuring environmental issues in literature, art, history, and beyond); options for assessing our own work, institutions, and organizations in terms of climate impact; research in environmental humanities, across verbal and visual media formats; histories/historiographies of the natural environment (Imperial, Soviet, post-Soviet); and related trends in the field as envisioned by the stream participants.
As Wallace-Wells suggests, “climate’s kaleidoscope” can lead us to be “mesmerized by the threat directly in front of us without ever perceiving it clearly.” Our stream seeks to enable such clarity, and to foster both reflection and action as we consider our place in this rapidly changing world. What impacts, both positive and negative, do we have upon climate as scholars, teachers, and AATSEEL members?