ASLE UKI 2015 Conference 'Green Knowledge' ABSTRACTS AND
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ASLE UKI 2015 Conference ‘Green Knowledge’ ABSTRACTS AND SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES Plenary Speakers LouIse WestlIng is Professor Emerita of English and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. She was a founding member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and its President in 1998. Books include Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor (1985), Eudora Welty (1989), The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction (1996), and The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language (2014). She has also edited two autobiographies and The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment (2014). At present she is co-editing with John Parham A Cambridge Global History of Literature and the Environment (forthcoming 2016). Ursula K. Heise teaches in the Department of English and at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and served as President of ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) in 2011. Her books include Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), and Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture, Suhrkamp, 2010). She is editor of the bookseries, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave-Macmillan and co-editor of the series Literature and Contemporary Thought with Routledge. She is currently finishing a book called Where the Wild Things Used to Be: Narrative, Database, and Endangered Species. Roger HarrabIn is the BBC's Environment Analyst. Roger started his career at the Coventry Evening Telegraph, and as a freelance journalist on Fleet Street before moving to the BBC over 2 decades ago. He has since reported on programmes such as Panorama, Newsnight, Assignment, The Ten O’Clock News, BBC World and The World at One. Many of today’s environment/equity themes became issues of public concern following Roger’s reports on Radio 4’s “Today” programme. They include climate change, biodiversity, carbon footprints, population, over-fishing, green taxation, road pricing, global inter- connectedness, 3rd World debt, and many more. His interests cover policy on the environment, transport, energy, development, public health and economics, particularly where these areas overlap. Roger has undertaken many acclaimed interviews on environmental issues with many key figures including Ban Ki Moon, President Barroso, Tony Blair, John Kerry and Al Gore. He is a graduate of St Catharine’s College Cambridge, and has spent academic sabbaticals at Green College Oxford and Wolfson College Cambridge, where he is an Associate Press Fellow. He co-directs the Cambridge Environment and Media Programme, which brings together senior journalists and outside experts to discuss media coverage of long-term sustainable development issues. PresentatIons and ReadIngs Ann FIsher-Wirth’s fourth book of poems, Dream Cabinet, was published by Wings Press in 2012. Her other books of poems are Carta Marina, Blue Window, and Five Terraces. With Laura-Gray Street, she coedited the groundbreaking Ecopoetry Anthology, published by Trinity University Press in 2013. Her poems appear widely and have received numerous awards, including a Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, the Rita Dove Poetry Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award, two Mississippi Arts Commission fellowships, and thirteen Pushcart nominations including a Special Mention. Ann has held a senior Fulbright in Fribourg, Switzerland, and the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Uppsala, Sweden. She has served as President of ASLE and has recently been named a Fellow 2015-2018 of the Black Earth Institute, an organization dedicated to the arts, to social and environmental justice, and to matters of the spirit. Her current project is a collaborative poetry/photography manuscript called Mississippi with the acclaimed photographer Maude Schuyler Clay. She teaches at the University of Mississippi, where she also directs the minor in Environmental Studies. And she teaches yoga at Southern Star Yoga Studio in Oxford, MS. Marlene Creates joins us to screen her film From the Ground Tier to a Sparrow Batch: a Newfoundland Treasury of Terms for Ice and Snow, Blast Hole Pond River, Winter 2012-2013. Her theoretical and studio research interests include photography, ecology, poetry, and place. Since 2002 her principal artistic venture has been to closely observe and work with one particular place — the six acres of boreal forest that she inhabits in Portugal Cove, Newfoundland, Canada. Her artwork, spanning more than three decades, has been an exploration of the relationship between human experience, memory, language and the land, and the impact they have on each other. Since the 1970s her work has been presented in over 300 solo and group exhibitions across Canada and in Ireland, Scotland, England, France, Denmark, the USA, and China. She has also been the curator of several nationally touring exhibitions, worked in artist-run centres, and taught visual arts at the University of Ottawa, Algonquin College, and the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. Her video-poems have been included in national exhibitions and screened at The Voice: VISIBLE VERSE Videopoetry Festival in Vancouver, the St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival, and the ViDEOTExT Festival in Bramberg, Austria. In 2001 she was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Among the awards she has received are the Artist of the Year award from the Newfoundland & Labrador Arts Council (1996), The Long Haul Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts from VANL-CARFAC (2009), the CARFAC National Visual Arts Advocate Award (2009), and a Government of Newfoundland & Labrador Arts and Letters Award for poetry (2010). Recent awards include the 2013 BMW Exhibition Prize at the Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival in Toronto, and the Grand Jury Award at the 2014 Yosemite International Film Festival. www.marlenecreates.ca Panel Abstracts and Speaker BIographIes Panel SessIon A: Wednesday 2nd September 1.15pm – 2.45pm A1: Towards an ecologIcal understandIng of collaboratIVe practices with and between art and poetry, place and landscape I If you are that place: poetry, painting and land Harriet Tarlo (Sheffield Hallam University) and Judith Tucker (University of Leeds) Poet, Harriet Tarlo, and artist, Judith Tucker, have walked and worked together since 2011 on “Tributaries” (W. Yorks) and “Excavations and Estuaries” (the Humber). They continue to talk and make work about these now much-visited places including drawings, paintings and poems conveyed to the public through exhibitions, readings, papers and artists’ books, all of which inter-relate in an open flux. Defying obvious boundaries and binary ways of thinking about art and poetry, this paper will reflect on the ecocritical and ecopoetic possibilities of all these collaborative, cross-disciplinary practices from the original walks and conversations to the production and exhibition of the work. They consider how collaborative practice explores place through writing as painting and painting as writing, considering the processes and materials involved in painting, drawing and writing as well as viewing and reading. In particular, they explore the line, lines being a crucial constituent of mapping, drawing, painting and poetry and key to how we reflect on and in place. Drawing on the new materialist notions of thing-power and of strategic anthropomorphism in relation to avant- garde practices from the mid twentieth century, they consider how and whether inter- disciplinary collaborative practice might be a means to explore more open, environmentally aware engagements with landscape and place, a greater understanding of the “naturalcultural” nexus (Haraway). Vibrant Spaces: A ThIn Place DIalogue Ciara Healy and Mary Modeen This joint collaborative presentation with accompanying images emerged out of a correspondence between Ciara Healy (University of Reading) and Mary Modeen (University of Dundee). Both as artist/curators and academics, they attend to ecological/environmental ways of knowing: in scientific, cultural, metaphysical, and religious modes. Thin Place was the title of an interdisciplinary curatorial project at Oriel Myrddin, Carmarthen, developed by Ciara in early 2015, which aimed to find connections among making, actions, materials and study. The nature of the curatorial project went beyond the single exhibition in Wales, incorporating a symposium, catalogue and education programme that dissolved boundaries between separate fields of knowledge and, in so doing, attempted to create a metaphysical thin place within the gallery. A written and visual dialogue between the presenters preceded what began as this place-based curatorial project, based on emergent ideas in eco-criticism, eco-feminism, post- and new materialism. Coinciding with this research, Mary led a recent Vibrant Matters conference (Dundee, Jan. 2015), furthering this vital materialist interdisciplinary discourse through the participation of two research networks. In ancient times it was believed that the delineation between worlds was more permeable in certain anomalous areas in a landscape; thin places were sometimes signified by burial mounds or standing stones. In building