Announce

14 au 16 mai 2020

Université McGill/Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) (L'anglais suit)

"Dire que les plantes sont immobiles procède d’un anthropocentrisme qui nous empêche de voir au-delà de notre échelle de temps habituelle. […] Les plantes ne cessent de se déplacer, accompagnant les mouvements des populations humaines. Comme le dit bien joliment Michel Valentin, les plantes voyagent par le biais de leur plus noble conquête, l’homme." Francis Hallé, Éloge des plantes 

Ce colloque international organisé conjointement par Stéphanie Posthumus, de l’Université McGill, et Rachel Bouvet, de l’Université du Québec à Montréal, vise à examiner les plantes à travers les récits en prenant appui sur des nouveaux paradigmes végétaux en science, philosophie, et écologie. La conception de la plante comme être vivant immobile (enraciné, sans mouvement) en opposition aux animaux qui, eux, sont mobiles (grimper, ramper, marcher, courir, sauter, voler, nager, etc.), se trouve de plus en plus remise en question. Les études montrent que les plantes bougent grâce au vent, à l’eau, aux animaux, aux êtres humains, et que les racines elles-mêmes jouent un rôle dans la progression du végétal sur le sol. Or, l’observation du végétal se double généralement d’une mise en récit : que l’on pense aux anecdotes rapportées à propos de telle ou telle plante, aux récits de voyage ou de découverte, dans tous les cas le discours joue un rôle fondamental. Si elles sont parfois à l’origine du récit, les plantes mobilisent également les humains de multiples façons: depuis l’aube de l’humanité, elles les font bouger pour des raisons alimentaires, vestimentaires, thérapeutiques, commerciales, spirituelles, politiques, imaginaires, etc. C’est cet entrelacement entre le récit, la plante et la mobilité que nous aimerions examiner, à partir de trois axes explorant tour à tour l’archéologie de la notion de mobilité, sa dimension géographique et sa dimension littéraire et culturelle.

Axe archéologique et anthropologique

Comment conçoit-on la mobilité de la plante depuis l’Antiquité? Quelles sont les périodes charnières au cours desquelles un changement majeur est apparu dans la manière de voir la plante ? Pour comprendre le changement d’échelle caractéristique de l’époque actuelle, où l’on s’interroge sur la capacité de la plante à se déplacer par elle-même, il importe de se pencher sur l’évolution des notions liées à la mobilité des plantes (l’idée de cheminement dans les récits de merveilles, le déplacement des populations végétales, etc.). Les textes littéraires constituent un terrain d’étude privilégié dans la mesure où les découvertes scientifiques liées au végétal font appel au récit, notamment au récit de voyage. On s’intéressera également aux savoirs qui s’opposent parfois au savoir scientifique, comme les savoirs indigènes, nomades, etc., dans lesquels le récit et la transmission orale jouent un rôle-clé.

Axe géographique et spatial

Modes de circulation Au-delà des éléments naturels comme l’eau et le vent, l’évolution des transports (pieds, bateaux, avions) a influencé la dispersion des plantes dans les différents continents. Quel rôle ont joué certaines espèces végétales dans les mouvements de migration humaine, de colonisation, ou encore dans les relations interculturelles ? Quelles zones géographiques, quels facteurs politiques et/ou culturels sont mis en exergue dans les récits ? Comment la plante traverse-t-elle les frontières régionales, nationales, transnationales?

Modes de représentation Quels sont les liens entre la carte, l’empreinte végétale, le dessin et le récit lorsqu’il est question de suivre le mouvement végétal? Comment la cartographie littéraire peut-elle représenter la mobilité végétale telle qu’imaginée et décrite dans le récit? Comment la représentation spatiale du mouvement végétal peut-elle intégrer des échelles géographiques différentes (locale, nationale, transnationale, globale)? Comment les humanités numériques et les humanités spatiales peuvent-elles aider à traduire le mouvement végétal à travers les récits?

Axe littéraire et culturel

Comment se manifeste la transformation du regard sur le végétal dans les textes contemporains, marqués par la montée d’une conscience écologique depuis les Sommets de la Terre (Rio en 1992)? Comment la littérature peut-elle aider à voir le végétal autrement ? Quelles observations littéraires et narratives peut-on tirer de la réécriture de l’histoire des plantes et de leur circulation à travers le monde lorsque l’accent est mis sur l’agentivité des plantes ? Comment le texte intègre-t-il le temps végétal ? Quelles sont les formes littéraires, les voix narratives et les genres qui sont propices au végétal, etc.?

À l’image de la plante, la langue du récit se nourrit d’un lieu ou d’un environnement. Notre colloque privilégiera les récits écrits en français, tout en accueillant des corpus écrits dans d’autres langues. Les participant.e.s pourront s’exprimer en français ou en anglais, mais devront comprendre les deux, afin que la communication puisse s’établir.

Approches possibles : épistémologique, philosophique, anthropologique, littéraire, sémiotique, historique, géographique, écocritique, géopoétique, etc.

Les propositions de communication (exposés d’environ 20 minutes) sont attendues sous la forme d’un résumé d’environ 400 mots. Chaque proposition doit être envoyée accompagnée d’un titre, de l’indication de l’axe de réflexion choisi, de références bibliographiques et d’une courte bio-bibliographie (200 mots).

Formats : fichier Word ou PDF

Langues : français, anglais

Échéance : le 15 septembre 2019

Notification : le 15 octobre 2019

Merci d’envoyer les propositions à l’adresse suivante : imaginairebotanique@gmail.com

Comité d’organisation :

Stéphanie Posthumus, Département de langues, lettres, cultures, McGill University

Rachel Bouvet, Département d’études littéraires, Université du Québec à Montréal

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

International Conference - Plant Mobility and Narrative

McGill University / University of Quebec in Montreal

May 14-16, 2020  

To say that plants are immobile is the sign of an anthropocentrism that keeps us from seeing beyond human time scales […] Plants never stop moving, in the company of human populations. As Michel Valentin so beautifully put it, plants travel thanks to their most noble conquest, humans.

Francis Hallé, In Praise of Plants

Jointly organized by Stephanie Posthumus at McGill University and Rachel Bouvet at the University of Quebec in Montreal, this international conference will examine plant narratives in light of new, emerging paradigms in the botanical and environmental sciences, plant philosophies and vegetal studies. The idea of the plant as an immobile organism (rooted, fixed in place) in opposition to animals as moving creatures (climbing, crawling, slithering, flying, swimming, etc.) no longer holds. Studies show that plants move with the wind, in water, on animals and humans, and that even roots play a role in vegetal movement at ground level. Moreover, observations about plant movement are often conveyed through narrative form; for example, anecdotes about a specific plant encounter, travel narratives about discovering or following a plant species, imaginary tales of other plant worlds – these narratives all rely heavily on recounting, telling, and storying. Plants are often at the root or origin of these discursive practices, but they also mobilize humans in many different ways. Since the beginning of human history, plants have made humans move for reasons of food, clothing, medicine, commerce, spirituality, politics, myth, etc. We propose three perspectives for examining the intertwining of narratives and plant mobility: archaeologies/anthropologies of the notion of plant mobility, geographies/spaces of plant mobility, and literatures/cultures of plant mobility.

Archaeologies and anthropologies

How has plant mobility been understood over the ages? What are the key historical moments at which the view of plants changed? In order to understand the recent shift towards understanding the individual organism’s vegetal movement, it is necessary to have a sense of the evolution of different terms related to plant mobility (the idea of plant growth in récits de merveilles, the dispersal of plant populations, etc.) Literary texts will serve as the main area of study for these archaeologies that will foray into the ways in which scientific discoveries about plants make use of narrative. This perspective on plant mobility may also examine alternative forms of plant knowledge, such as traditional ecological knowledge, that have emerged to counter the hegemonic scientific worldview by cultivating practices of narrative and oral story-telling.

Geographies and spaces  

Modes of dispersal

In addition to using natural elements like water and wind, plants have benefited from the invention of different modes of transportation (boats, cars, airplanes) to disperse across larger regions, countries, and continents. What role have specific plant species played in human migration, colonization, and intercultural relations more generally? What geographical zones, political and cultural factors are highlighted in narratives about plant mobility? How have plants traversed regional, national, and transnational borders?

Modes of representation

What are the significant links between maps, prints, drawings, and narratives when it comes to following plant movement? How can literary cartography help represent plant movement as it is imagined and described in narrative? How do spatial representations of plant movement contend with multiple geographical scales (local/global) and views (transversal/bird’s eye)? How can the digital humanities and spatial humanities contribute to the visualization of plant mobility in narratives?

Literatures and cultures

How are new ways of viewing plants as mobile agents expressed in contemporary literary texts written? To what extent has this view been marked by a growing environmental awareness that can be dated back to the first Earth Summit held in Rio in 1992? How do literary texts push the reader to see plants differently? What literary and narrative observations can be made about the rewriting of plant histories and their movement around the world in light of the notion of plant agency? How does the literary text integrate plant temporalities? What literary forms, narrative voices and literary genres are most often used for narrating plant mobility?

As is true for plants, a text’s language is nourished by place and environment. This international conference will take as its main object of study texts written in French while also welcoming other nonliteratures. Conference participants are welcome to give their paper in French or in English, but they will need to understand both languages to facilitate communication and the exchange of ideas.

Possible approaches: epistemological, philosophical, anthropological, literary, semiotic, historical, geographical, ecocritical, geopoetic, etc.

Please submit a 400-word abstract (presentations will be 20 minutes in length), as well as a title, a note indicating into which of the three perspectives your presentation fits, a list of bibliographical references, and a 200-word bio-bibliography.

Format: Word or PDF files only

Languages: English or French

Deadline for proposal submission: September 15, 2019 Notification of acceptance: October 15, 2019

You may send your abstracts and additional information to the following address:  imaginairebotanique@gmail.com

Organizational committee:

Stephanie Posthumus, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, McGill University

Rachel Bouvet, Département d’études littéraires, Université du Québec à Montréal

February 28-29 2020

The Department of French & Italian at the University of Arizona is delighted to invite MA and PhD students to submit one of the following:

an abstract for an oral presentation (20 minutes + 10 minutes for questions/comments)

a  poster for work in progress  

The oral presentation and poster may be a research paper written for a graduate class or it may be part of a thesis or dissertation in one or more of the following areas:

Theoretical and applied linguistics

First, second language acquisition

Teaching French as a second/foreign language

Digital technologies (and pedagogy)

French and Francophone literature, culture and civilization 

French and/or Francophone cinema

Women’s studies, queer studies and sexuality

We are also inviting students in visual arts to submit their original work related to French and/or Francophone culture in photography, painting, drawing or short films. The selected submissions will be exhibited during the conference and on our website. 

We are pleased to present two plenary speakers:

Dr. Sébastien Dubreil, Teaching Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Second Language Acquisition, and Technology-Enhanced Learning at Carnegie Mellon University

Dr. Moradewun Adejunmobi,Professor of African American and African Studies at University of California, Davis

Participants will be able to attend a workshop on Digital Humanities led by Dr. Bryan Carter, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Director of the Center for Digital Humanitiesat the University of Arizona. 

 Considering digital humanities as a part of your professional portfolio

As seen by the rise in digital humanities conferences presentations workshops and publications, the digital humanities should be considered as an important addition to the professional portfolio of any new or rising academic. This workshop will offer ideas on how to get started in the digital humanities and a few examples of existing projects.

Submit your abstract by November 15, 2019 here: https://2ndazconference.sciencesconf.org/index/unauthorized

Women contributed extensively to the production of knowledge in the eighteenth century, without however always receiving credit for their intellectual and scientific practices. Largely excluded from the ranks of universities and academies, women fashioned alternative practices and found other venues in the margins of the institutions of knowledge. Their participation in intellectual life took multiple forms: by participating in correspondence networks, by influencing and facilitating the election of new academy members, by participating in competitions anonymously, or simply by publishing their work. Others were patrons, hosted salons, wrote memoirs, attended public lessons and sessions, etc. This panel seeks to re-evaluate women's relationships to multiple forms of knowledge production in eighteenth- century Europe.

Please send a 200-word abstract to Julie Candler Hayes (jhayes@hfa.umass.edu) and Sarah Benharrech (sbenharr@umd.edu) by September 15th 2019.

https://www.asecs.org/asecs-2020

17th Borders and Crossings Travel Writing conference

University of Sydney, Australia 20-23 July 2020

Conference theme: ‘Travelling differently’

Conference background

The first of the ‘Borders and Crossings’ conferences, a series devoted to the international, interdisciplinary study of travel writing, was organised by Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs, and held at Magee College, Derry in 1998. Travel literature was at that time far from mainstream as an area of academic research, but the intervening two decades have witnessed a major shift in attitudes towards the genre, with the emergence of dedicated journals, scholarly associations and other academic apparatus associated with the building of a new field. ‘Borders and Crossings’ has played a catalytic role in these processes as it has provided a forum for scholars across a range of disciplines and from a wide variety of national contexts to meet regularly, to explore an increasingly rich corpus of travel writing, and to debate its centrality to the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

In 2020, the Borders and Crossings conference will come to Australia for the second time (the first was at the University of Melbourne in 2008), and will have as its core theme the idea of differences and diversity in means and experiences of travel.

Call for papers: ‘Travelling differently’

The 2020 conference will take part in a unique context: that of a postcolonial yet white-western dominated member of the ‘Anglosphere’, situated in a South-East Asian and Pacific Island geographical, economic and political context. Contemporary Australia, and its founding settlement of Sydney, epitomise borders and crossings. It is founded on different types of travel: forced and chosen, tourism and exile, appropriation and return, movement of ideas and cultures, movement of species and their shifting environments. We thus invite conference participants to reflect on the theme of ‘travelling differently’. Subthemes can include but are not limited to 

-          Redefining regions: How have borders changed or are they changing? What makes them more or less porous? What factors impact on who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’?

-          North-north and south-south interactions: Much of our world has been shaped by north-south interactions, but north-north interactions continue to dominate the global cultural conversation at the same time as south-south interactions are emerging as new vehicles for political and cultural exchange.

-          Ideas travelling: how do contemporary shifts in political, economic and cultural power impact on the ways in which ideas travel?

-          Travelling minorities: in countries like Australia, Indigenous people have travelled lands and continents for millennia, but modern societies create new challenges: those of displacement and ‘exile within’. Other racialised minorities, and indeed women and LGBTI populations, also face different challenges in travelling, whether material (personal safety, less access to the means to travel), psychological, cultural or symbolic. 

-          Animals travelling: a country like Australia is well-placed to know how the transport of animals around the globe has impacted on ecosystems, cultures and economies in our Anthropocene age. How do animals feature in travel writing? What symbolic roles do they play?

-          Forced travelling: asylum seekers, Indigenous peoples, and all others displaced due to a range of natural and human-made catastrophes experience travel differently from those who have a choice in the matter. How is their experience documented and imagined?

-          Travelling objects: Humans are collectors—whether purchasers or plunderers—and transporters of things. What do ‘travelling objects’ come to symbolise in the ways we talk and write about travel? 

-          Repatriation: Travellers—whether human or inanimate, whether exiled or ‘born displaced’, whether in times of war or times of peace—also experience return, in life and after death. What is the place of repatriation in our cultural narratives?

-          Travelling words: Languages also travel the globe, often becoming means of literary expression as second or third languages of the writers. Words also travel through translation, or travel from orality to page as written forms are developed for traditional languages. How does the language of expression impact on the ways in which we write and read about travel?

-          Travelling images: Our artistic traditions, from visual arts through to performance and cinema, have developed rich hybridities through the travel of styles and models from one culture to another. 

-          Virtual travel & proxy travel: in our internet-facilitated age, virtual travel is a reality for many, not only vicarious tourism but also the virtual transnational workplace.

-          Imagined universes: stories of travel lie at the core of science-fiction and fantasy writing. Indeed, one cannot imagine other universes without travelling to them.

-          Philanthropic travelling: our age has seen an explosion of philanthropic travel, and documentation thereof, whether through a growing body of testimony by volunteers working for NGOs or through the ubiquitous imagery of philanthrocapitalists travelling the Third World.  When one is ‘travelling for others’, how does the narrative of travel change?

Diseases travelling:  From the plague to cholera to AIDS to H1N1 (the virus that caused the pandemics of Spanish flu in 2018-2019 and swine flu in 2009) to Ebola, the world has experienced its share of pandemics. Travelling diseases become imbricated with the history of peoples, cultures, nations, and have often played central roles in travel writing, whether testimonial or fictional. 

Teaching travel writing: why, and how, does one ‘teach’ travel writing? What roles does travel writing play in our curricula, whether in literature, foreign languages, area studies, international studies or history?

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 1 March 2020.

For all enquiries contact Conference Convenor Bronwyn Winter: bronwyn.winter@sydney.edu.au

AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES (ASECS) 2020 panel.

Abstracts to Jessica L. Fripp, Assistant Professor of Art History, TCU (j.fripp@tcu.edu) before sept 16.

“Too political, too big, no good”: picturing politics in the long eighteenth century

“Too political, too big, no good” were the words Kim Sajet, director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, reportedly used to turn down Julian Raven’s gift of his propagandistic/fan-art portrait of Donald Trump, Unafraid and Unashamed. Inspired by this amusing, if somewhat absurd, event, this panel seeks papers that address political art in the long eighteenth century (1660-1830) that was celebrated at the time but is now maligned, or vice versa. Topics might include: official commissions celebrating events that have fallen out of favor due to changing understandings of histories of power (for example, colonial or imperialistic endeavors); works that have been positively or negatively affected by the vagaries of taste for a style or an artist; works taken up independently by artists that were well-received or rejected; or works that demonstrate the conflict between the needs of a political regime and the public. What did it mean for a work of art to be “too political,” “too big,” or “no good” in the eighteenth century? What impact do these value judgments have on our understanding of political art, then and now?