About the conference
The SLSAeu Conference 2018 is centered on the theme of green, providing a resolutely cross-disciplinary platform to explore one of the most pervasive and broadest tropes of our times. Alongside this central theme, the organizers also welcome provocatively un green and prismatic proposals from experts in all academic disciplines and professional fields.
How to define and understand greenness is an urgent political, societal, philosophical and economic question not only in academia – yet there is much confusion about its meanings. Green is often positively connoted. It has become pervasive across a broad range of disciplines, but far from having universal meaning, it marks a dramatic knowledge gap prone to systematic misunderstandings: Engineers brand ‘green technologies’ as ecologically benign, but climate researchers point to the ‘greening of the earth’ itself as the alarming effect of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. ‘Green growth’ aims to reconcile economic and ecologically sustainable development, while in philosophy ‘prismatic ecology’ rebukes the use of green to represent binary ideas of the other-than-human world as an idealized nature. More concept than color, green is often being reduced to a mere metaphor stripped of its material, epistemological and historical referents.
Streams and Formats
This conference invites participants to investigate the notions of green, greenness and greening across a broad range of disciplines, comprising translation problems deriving from the migration of these tropes across different knowledge cultures, including but not limited to:
- environmental and medical humanities, public health & urbanism
- chemistry, physics, biology, biotechnology & biophilosophy
- so-called ‘green economy’ and discourse of ‘green politics’
- sociology and the politics of the anthropocene
- green as (natural/toxic) pigment, material and metaphor in art and media
- colour theory, perception and cognition
- ecomusicology & sound studies including audio papers
- ecopoetry, literature and horror
- eco and green fashion, design or warfare
Organization
SLSAeu 2018 is organized in collaboration with the University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences/Medical Museion, with support from other UCPH departments, and Aarhus University. The main conference site will be UCPH’s South campus, other events and keynotes will happen at the Medical Museion, and at the National Gallery of Denmark.
The conference is supported by Novo Nordisk Fonden and the Carlsberg Foundation.
The Call for Participation can be downloaded as a pdf file - extended deadline: 18 January 2018.
For those not familiar with the European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts: slsa-eu.org
Registration and conference fee
Participants in the conference will have to cover travel to and from Copenhagen as well as accommodation on their own expense. The conference fee will be consistent with former SLSA conference (ca. 250 €) and calculated according to the funding situation. The SLSAeu is fully self-supportive and counts on a majority of paying delegates to allow for delegates who have no institutional support and a very low income to benefit from lower rates or fee-waiving. The fee covers administrative costs, conference materials and booklet, all coffee and lunch breaks, snacks and drinks at the opening, as well as the attendance of special evening events at our partner organizations.