Writing Welsh Environments: Changing Climates
Friday 12 - Sunday 14 May 2023
Hybrid Conference – in person at Gregynog Hall, Newtown, Powys, and simultaneously online
Keynotes: Professor Matthew Jarvis &
Dr Michelle Deininger
The Thirty-Third Annual Conference
of the Association for Welsh Writing in English
Online weekend pass £10
Confirmed Keynote Speakers
- Dr Michelle Deininger (Cardiff) ‘Protecting the Land, Safeguarding the Future: Ecofeminist Approaches to Women’s Writing in Wales’
- Professor Matthew Jarvis (Aberystwyth), 'Earthsplaining: Welsh Literary Environments after Donahaye'
- Creative Keynote: Jannat Ahmed,Welsh poet and editor of Lucent Dreaming, in conversation with Andy Webb
- Book launches:
- Birdsplaining, Jasmine Donahaye (New Welsh Review)
- The Edge of Cymru, Julie Brominicks (Seren Books)
- Animals, Animality and Controversy in Modern Welsh Literature and Culture, Linden Peach (UWP)
- Gorwelion: Shared Horizons (ed. Robert Minhinnick) and Library of Wales edition of Nigel Heseltine's A Day's Pleasure and Other Tales, ed. Daniel Hughes (Parthian)
Programme
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Call for Papers
In 2015, the National Assembly for Wales made a historic decision to change the course of Wales onto a more sustainable path by passing the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. This Act responded to the agenda set out in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Eight years on, the scale of the challenge and the pace of change required for us to have a chance of meeting these ambitious goals has become even more clear. We are living in a period of rapid, anthropogenic climate change and plummeting biodiversity. Climate change is no longer an event that we talk about in the future tense.
The thirty-third AWWE conference 'Writing Welsh Environments: Changing Climates' is an opportunity for literary and cultural scholars to come together to reflect on, identify and address the challenges of the altered environments in which we find ourselves. How have literature and culture responded to and informed our relationship with the environment in Wales (both in past and contemporary periods), and how – in the face of the present crisis – can they help us to address challenges associated with climate change? What are the resources in the literary and cultural record that might help us better understand, and find paths through, the present crisis? How can literature and culture in Wales help us to build more sustainable relationships with the non-human world? How can they help scientists communicate the urgency of the situation without becoming reduced to a medium for the message? What can literature and culture teach us about mitigation, but also about adaptation to the inevitable changes that we will undergo? How can we best change our own practice in order to meet our responsibilities?
We welcome proposals that offer discussion of any aspect of literature and culture in relation to Welsh environments in the past and present, focusing exclusively on Welsh matters, or offering international comparisons. We also welcome proposals which offer creative responses to these questions.
The thirty-third AWWE conference 'Writing Welsh Environments: Changing Climates' is an opportunity for literary and cultural scholars to come together to reflect on, identify and address the challenges of the altered environments in which we find ourselves. How have literature and culture responded to and informed our relationship with the environment in Wales (both in past and contemporary periods), and how – in the face of the present crisis – can they help us to address challenges associated with climate change? What are the resources in the literary and cultural record that might help us better understand, and find paths through, the present crisis? How can literature and culture in Wales help us to build more sustainable relationships with the non-human world? How can they help scientists communicate the urgency of the situation without becoming reduced to a medium for the message? What can literature and culture teach us about mitigation, but also about adaptation to the inevitable changes that we will undergo? How can we best change our own practice in order to meet our responsibilities?
We welcome proposals that offer discussion of any aspect of literature and culture in relation to Welsh environments in the past and present, focusing exclusively on Welsh matters, or offering international comparisons. We also welcome proposals which offer creative responses to these questions.
Possible topics might include:
- the environment and form/genre, (e.g. ecoGothic, ecopoetics, speculative fiction, experimental poetry, dystopian fiction, apocalypse, georgics, neo-pastoral, creative non-fiction)
- changes to local environments (e.g. through extractivism, industrialisation, infrastructure, post-industrialisation, energy production)
- changes in farming practice and land use (e.g. appropriation for reservoir construction, afforestation and firing ranges, mechanisation, intensification, rewilding, carbon colonialism)
- relationships between changing environments and the Welsh language
- relationships between changing environments and gender / race / disability (e.g. climate justice, decolonisation and decarbonisation)
- affect and environmental crisis (e.g. grief and solastalgia (Albrecht), anger, pre-traumatic stress (Kaplan), depression/melancholy)
- developing kinship with non-human species
- problems of representing the scale of climate change (e.g. the ‘hyperobject’ (Morton), deep time)
- literature, agency and activism
- place (e.g. loss of place, commodity-haunted place, Genius loci)
- the environment and nation/nationalism
- the Anthropocene, Capitalocene (Moore), the Chthlucene (Haraway)
- cultures of activism
- Wales and the Blue Humanities, Wales and coasts/islands
- climate crisis and communication
- interdisciplinary approaches (e.g. with cultural geography, geology, environmental and ocean science)
- the carbon footprint of the arts, humanities and media
Critical and creative proposals are invited, as follows:
Proposals may be from individuals (limited to 20 minutes), from pre-formed panels of three papers (90 minutes total) or for a round table discussion (90 minutes).
Proposals may be from individuals (limited to 20 minutes), from pre-formed panels of three papers (90 minutes total) or for a round table discussion (90 minutes).
Deadline
6 February 2023
Attendance is in person or via zoom (please indicate when submitting your proposal).
Attendance is in person or via zoom (please indicate when submitting your proposal).
Conference Team
Queries may be addressed to the organisers:
- Kirsti Bohata k.bohata@swansea.ac.uk
- Tomos Owen OwenT6@cardiff.ac.uk
- Andy Webb a.webb@bangor.ac.uk
- Sarah Morse treasurer@awwe.org
Latest news and discussions
For all AWWE discussions, please use the hashtage #awwechat on Twitter.
Contact
To contact the AWWE Committee with any queries or suggestions, please email committee@awwe.org
