Language & Literature

23.04.2013

New Essay Competition from WOLFoundation

The Web of Life Foundation is issuing the first call for essays for its 2013 essay competition.

WOLFoundation is dedicating to stimulating new thinking in the field of sustainability and socio-environmental issues. Within this context, the theme of this year’s essay competition is “An Aspirational Future“.

Essays should be up to 2,000 words of prose in any non-technical style (including fiction) and are meant for a general readership. From the Guidelines: “Any and all views on the specified theme are welcome and encouraged. We would like to see entries that address all perspectives creatively. Just avoid giving us tired ideas that have been hashed out many times before.”

The winning essay will receive a cash prize of $1,500 and $500 is awarded to the second placed entry.

Submissions should be addressed to submissions [at] wolfoundation [dot] org. Closing date for submissions is September 30th, 2013.

Guidelines for submissions can be found at http://www.wolfoundation.org/guidelines/

A book of collected essays from the 2011 competition was published in collaboration with Cultura21, as eBook (in November 2012) and as paperback (in March 2013).

By Sacha Kagan

18.04.2013

An Orange County Almanac – now available as paperback

An Orange County Almanac, and other essays, which was published in November 2012 as the 7th Volume in the Cultura21 eBooks series on Culture and Sustainability, in collaboration with WOLFoundation, is now also made available as paperback by the WOLFoundation. It is available for purchase ($7 + p&p. No sales tax.).

For enquiries please send an email to submissions [at] wolfoundation [dot] org

By Sacha Kagan

19.11.2012

An Orange County Almanac, and other essays

Cultura21, in association with WOLFoundation, has the pleasure to announce its

7th Volume in the Cultura21 eBooks series on Culture and Sustainability:

edited by J. Zammit-Lucia

We need new ways of thinking about issues that affect how we interact with our environment. The authors whose work is collected here make some powerful calls for change. Some make them emotionally and metaphorically; others make them rationally and logically; but all make them passionately.

”These essays are fresh, unconstrained and thought-provoking. They bring new, sometimes quirky perspectives to the environmental debate.” David Pilling. Asia Editor, Financial Times

“There’s no single “right” answer to the challenges that we face in the world today. The assembly of citizens gathered in this volume takes strength from its dynamic polyvocality: its attention to more perspectives – and therefore, its access to more possible approaches – than any conventional environmental text could offer.” Randy Malamud, Professor and Chair of English, Georgia State University

Dr Joe Zammit-Lucia is an artist, author and independent scholar and commentator. A self-proclaimed ‘intersectionist’, he works at the intersection of disciplines “which is where the action happens.” He is President of WOLFoundation.org, a Member of the Dean’s Advisory Board for the College of Arts and Sciences at Florida International University, has served as Special Advisor to the Director General at IUCN, is a Board Member for the African Rainforest Conservancy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Click here to download the free PDF version of the eBook.

Visit your Amazon Kindle eBooks online store, to purchase a Kindle version of this eBook…

By Sacha Kagan

11.11.2012

Multispecies Intra-Actions: A Round Table with Karen Barad

On the 17th November from 10:45AM to 12:30 PM (PST) at the SOMArts centre in San Francisco the public is invited to participate in a roundtable discussion with Karen Barad, currently Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a diverse panel of researchers ranging from ethnographers to artist.

Barad’s seminal 1996 essay, where she coined the term “intra-action,” will serve as a theoretical charter for the roundtable.

“Boundaries do not sit still, it is through specific intra-actions that a differential sense of being is enacted in the ongoing ebb and flow of agency…Agential intra-actions are specific causal material enactments that may or may not involve ‘humans.’ Indeed, it is through such practices that the differential boundaries between “humans” and ‘nonhumans,’ ‘culture’ and ‘nature,’ the ‘social’ and the ‘scientific’ are constituted”

Members of the roundtable will each give short “provocations” (3-5 minutes), bringing Barad into conversation with empirical matters and concepts from their own assorted texts on the table. Audience members are also invited to participate in the discussion and become provocateurs.

Following the roundtable, Karin Bolender of the Rural Alchemy Workshop will be performing “Gut Sounds Lullaby” at 2:00PM in the same space.

For more information: http://www.somarts.org/multispecies/

By Nikolai Huckle

10.10.2012

Art and Sustainability lecture in Mumbai by Sacha Kagan

Cultura21′s Sacha Kagan is presenting the research of his most recent book “Art and Sustainability: Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity” in Mumbai on the 12th of October at the Goethe Hall, Max Mueller Bhavan at 6:30pm.

He is currently in Mumbai with a study group from the Leuphana University Lüneburg.

By Nikolai Huckle

20.09.2012

launch of ADRIFT – a new project by Cape Farewell

Tom Chivers – Cape Farewell’s Climate Poet-in-Residence

Art and climate change organisation Cape Farewell is launching ADRIFT – an interrogation of climate as culture, devised by Cape Farewell’s poet in residence, Tom Chivers (in London, UK). They invite the public for a drink, performance and short film, as Tom Chivers maps the natural territories written into urban space. Free admission. Read more »

By Sacha Kagan

07.08.2012

Seeking Fresh ideas, Freshly presented

WOLFoundation – the Web of Life Foundation – is seeking submissions of essays to its annual competition that carries $2,000 in prizes

“WOLFoundation is a non-profit organization aimed at encouraging fresh thinking and clear, writing on subjects related to our environment. We are looking for ideas presented in a high quality, non-technical style. We welcome any opinion on environmental issues – be they for or against any particular debate or point of view.

We are looking for clear, compelling writing in the English language showing original thinking and new ideas. We welcome any form of writing – essays, fiction, short stories or any other form of prose written in accessible, enjoyable, style.”

Submission Requirements: Manuscripts must be written in English, double spaced, no longer than 2,000 words and contain no abstract, list of references or footnotes. Images are allowed as part of the manuscript. There are no fees or membership requirements for submission.

Deadline for submission is September 30th.

More details of the Foundation, detailed guidelines and last year’s winning essays can be found at www.wolfoundation.org

By Sacha Kagan

27.06.2012

ALECC 2012 Biennial Conference

The Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada / Association pour la littérature, l’environnement et la culture au Canada (ALECC) is a non-profit organization focused on the creation, appreciation, discussion, analysis, and dissemination of knowledge about the work of nature writers, environmental writers and journalists, eco-artists of all disciplines, ecocritics, and ecotheorists in Canada. Collectively they are interested in artistic, critical and cultural studies work on activism, animals, ecology, the environment, environmental justice, geography, land, landscape, mountain literature and culture, nature and nature writing, natural history writing, plants, region, regionalism, the rural, sense of place, transborder environmental issues, wilderness and wilder places, and much more.

2012 ALECC Conference

The 2012 ALECC Conference will be focused on “place” as an embodied, embedded, troubling, elusive, contested, personal, political, and ecological site in which space + memory = place, in an astonishingly complex range of ways. Read more »

By Luis Bravo

04.06.2012

Ernest Callenbach’s last words

Classic environmental novelist Ernest Callenbach, author of Ecotopia, passed away on April 16th 2012 at the age of 83. Shortly after his death, this document, which contains his “Epistle to the Ecotopians: Last Words to an America in Decline” was found:

Click here to read the full text.

By Luis Bravo

08.01.2012

New eBook available

The eBook „Negatives Menschenbild und Separationsdenken in der modernen Gesellschaft“ by Davide Brocchi is now available for download as PDF file.
The author deals with the source and the effect of the negative image of humanity and refers therefore to advocates of the negative image of humanity like Niccoló Macchiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. The thought of separation in modern society is dealt with in the eBook.
The author Davide Brocchi works in the field of cultural- and social-scientific research and as a lecturer at the „ecosign Akademie für Gestaltung“ in Cologne. He is the founder of Cultura21, and coordinates Cultura21′s Webmagazine (in German language).

His text is the fourth in the Cultura21 eBooks series on culture and sustainability. Further publications will follow.

Find the pdf document in the Cultura21 Webmagazin.

By Janna Gehrke

03.11.2011

Publication: Harvest in Times of Drought

From the book "Harvest in times of drought"

Harvest in Times of Drought – cultivating pedagogies of life for sustainable communities
Voices of the country

In the following lines, the book Harvest in Times of Drought is presented and offered for download (please find the download link at the bottom of the post). This publication is about creative education in Brasil that can generate social transformation and sustainability.

Brasil is one of the countries that is hit hard by the consequences of the industrialization in form of sharp inequalities, uprooting communicide and ecological upheaval. It has reached a threshold between a terrifying drought and a reflexive dawn. The task is to create on time a global project capable of cultivating a new paradigm of cooperation and sustainable community instead of competition. Read more »

By Janna Gehrke

29.10.2011

Ecodrama Playwrights Festival & Symposium on Performance & Ecology

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
May 31-June 3, 2012

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PROPOSALS

From the 31st of May until the 3rd of June 2012 the Ecodrama Playwrights Festival and Symposium on Performance and Ecology takes place in Pittsburgh. Artists, scholars and activists are invited to share their work, ideas and passions with the attenders of the Festival. Until the 1st of November creative and innovative proposals for workshops, round-tables, panels, working sessions, installations, or participatory community gatherings are awaited which explore, examine, challenge, articulate, or nourish the possibilities of theatrical and performative responses to the environmental crisis in particular, and our ecological relationships in general.

Ecology has an important role with regard to burgeoning creativity and interdisciplinary scholarship across the arts and humanities. Proposals that go beyond a recitation of ideas or positions, and instead bring presenters and participants together as they engage the driving question of how theatre might function as part of our reciprocal relationship with ecological communities are encouraged.

Possible topics for exploration include: land and body in performance; representations of bioregionalism; eco-literacy; representation of/and environmental justice; green theatre production; old cultural narratives/new stories; indigenous performance; community-based performance/ecological communities; sensing place/staging place; the ecologies of theatrical form and/or space; animal representation; and application of ecocriticism to plays, performance and culture.

For further informations and application details see http://pages.uoregon.edu/ecodrama/

By Janna Gehrke

16.09.2011

Confluence 2011 – Festival of Indigenous Storytellers

30th of September – 2nd of October, 2011
Fire Flies Ashram, Bangalore/India

The “Confluence” invites you to a 3-day event on storytelling, where storytellers from various tribal communities of India will be sharing some of their disappearing myths, legends and stories with a view to build a collective that supports the need for their preservation.

It consists of various activities, workshops, individuals and organisations to help enrich the understanding of tribal storytelling, vis-à-vis their cultural, spiritual and scientific linkages and importance, apart from the idea of keeping this ancient tradition alive.

“Acoustic Traditional is an independent non-profit organisation, led by young tribal people, working towards the promotion of oral storytelling and tribal folklore, especially of mountain and forest communities. It aims to encourage the preservation of the various myths, legends and stories that have been an integral part of a tribal group, vis-a-vis their cultural, environmental, spiritual and scientific heritage and also to creatively engage mainstream communities, through storytelling, in view of building a collective that supports the need for such preservation.”

for more information: http://www.acoustictraditional.org/festival.htm

By Benjamin Smith

08.05.2011

Call for Papers for the Graduate Conference “Landscapes and Mindscapes”

Submission deadline: 15th of June. Conference date: September 16th to 17th in Naples, Italy

Graduate students, recent Ph.D.s, and junior scholars from different fields focusing on any cultural and literary tradition are encouraged to apply. Papers should investigate critical methodologies (geocriticism, ecocriticism, geopoetics, etc.) and different approaches to the relationship between word and space.

By Ronja Röckemann

18.03.2011

Values of Environmental Writing

The Values of Environmental Writing Research Network raises levels of critical academic exchange and public debate about the possible relations between reading habits and preferences, levels of environmental literacy, and wider patterns of pro-environment behavioural and lifestyle change.

Network activities take place between September 2010 and June 2011, centring on three ‘Conversations on Environmental Change’ that use Creative Environmental Writing to investigate precisely:

what communities and individuals value
why they value it
how they value it
how values are defined, identified and transmitted

The Network Convenors are based in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, and the School of Critical Studies (English Literature), University of Glasgow.

By Sacha Kagan