PAMLA 2024 Panel CFP: Teaching Against the Anthropocene (PAMLA)
Palm Springs, California
Event: PAMLA
Please consider submitting a proposal to our panel "Teaching Against the Anthropocene," to take place at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Convention in Palm Springs California (Nov. 7-10, 2024), and please share the cfp with colleagues who might also be interested!
Proposals accepted until April 30th at the following link: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19097
"Teaching Against the Anthropocene" will explore how we translate environmental media into our teaching practices and how we can encourage our students to reflect critically about environmental concepts like the Anthropocene.
In the decades following Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer’s essay “The Anthropocene,” the term has come to evoke the dangers posed by anthropogenic climate change, environmental degradation, amplified natural disasters, and mass extinctions. But as the ubiquity of the Anthropocene hypothesis grows, scholars have increasingly questioned its value, and particularly, its capacity to obfuscate the systemic forms of social and environmental injustice that underpin the globalized economics of exploitation and extraction.
Who, exactly, is responsible for the environmental crisis? Who is empowered and who is disempowered to make choices about our environmental futures? How might the urgency of finding global solutions to the climate crisis accelerate the erosion of local sovereignty? Who constitutes the universal “we” conjured by the Anthropocene? How can we prepare our students to approach environmental questions from antiracist, decolonial, feminist, indigenous and/or queer perspectives?
This panel welcomes presentations on texts, documents, philosophies, activities, assignments, syllabi, and other media that panelists have effectively used in the classroom to teach about and against the Anthropocene. The goal of this session is not only to share successful pedagogical approaches but also to spark a dialogue on how the humanities can act in an age of planetary crisis.
Contact Information
Robert Decker (University of Southern California)
deckerr@usc.edu
Chloé Vettier (Scripps College)
cvettier@scrippscollege.edu
https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19097
Robert Decker