CONFERENCE NEWS
The 2023 ASLE-UKI conference at Liverpool has now ended. We thank everyone who took part for their participation in what was a highly successful and productive meeting. These pages will now be archived, but will remain available.
CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
The programme is available on the following page:
Follow the links below for the detailed programme for each day, which will open in a new page. Information about the online day will be posted shortly.
Abstracts for all papers and panels are available by following the links below.
- Abstracts of individually submitted papers
- Abstracts of roundtables and preformed panels
- Abstracts of online day papers
Other Information
The ASLE-UKI conference is the major in-person event for ecocriticism in the UK. However, we are able to facilitate hybrid attendance and presentation.
Location
The conference will be held in the 502 Teaching Hub at the University of Liverpool (Square D6 on this campus map). If you are walking from the station/city centre then the easiest way is to head up Brownlow Hill and turn right when you get to University Square or up Mount Pleasent and turn left when you get to Abercomby Square.
Registration
Registrations are currently closed.
All delegates must be members of ASLE-UKI or an ASLE affiliate association. Membership information can be found at https://asle.org.uk/membership/.
**Please note that the conference dinner is now fully booked**
For further information, please contact us at asleuki2023@gmail.com.
Food and Drink
For those of you looking to eat out for dinner (especially after the poetry reading on Wednesday). There are multiple restaurants near campus. The ones we recommend within a five-minute walk are The Quarter, The Penn Factory and The Buyers Club. About ten minutes west from campus is Bold Street, which has the highest density of eateries in Liverpool. Particular favourites are Maray (another branch on the docks), Rudy’s (best pizza in central Liverpool and another branch on Castle Street), and Bakchich. For those staying by the Docks there are some great restaurants on Castle Street, including Queen’s.
The best campus coffee is 92 Degrees (2 branches nearby; one on Hope Street and one on Myrtle Street). There are also two serviceable Cafe Neros on campus. The nearest campus pub is The Cambridge but it’s quite small so we are recommending The Philharmonic and the bar at Buyers Club.
Accommodation
The University of Liverpool is a city-centre campus surrounded by a range of affordable accommodation. Most of these offer details on sites such as booking.com and hotels.com. Some big hotel chains (e.g. the very reasonable City Centre Travelodge and Holiday Inn near Lime Street station) do not show up on price comparison websites and need to be searched separately.
Liverpool is a very walkable city.
Below is a link to a map showing the approximate area where most of the appropriate hotels are. If you want to stay by the Mersey/on the docks it’s very nice but worth noting it’s about a 25 minute walk to the conference venue.
The conference is being held in the 502 Teaching Hub which is between Abercromby Square and University Square (Campus Map here)
Recommended area for hotels is here.
Excursions
You will receive information about excursions via email. If you have booked an excursion but have not had any information about it by the start of the conference, please listen for announcements in the plenary sessions or ask at the registration desk.
Twitter/X
Twitter/X hashtag: #ASLEUKI2023
Call for Papers
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland, Biennial Conference 2023
‘Transitions’
30 August – 1 September 2023, University of Liverpool
Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Brycchan Carey, Nandini Das, Caroline Edwards, Graeme MacDonald, Chris Pak, Craig Santos Perez
The 2023 conference for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland (ASLE-UKI) will be hosted by the Literature and Science Hub at the University of Liverpool. ASLE-UKI welcomes participation from scholars, readers, and creative practitioners interested in the relationships between literatures, environments and cultures – past, present, or future from anywhere in the world.
The theme of the 2023 conference is “Transitions“. At a moment of linked geopolitical and environmental emergencies, the sense of existing in a moment of transition is increasingly pervasive. But even if a transition is inevitable, its nature is not. Transition to where? How? For whom? What sorts of futures are possible or even imaginable against the negativity of apocalypticism or the ecocidal business-as-usual of capitalist realism? What can be learned from past articulations of cultures and ecosystems undergoing radical change – either voluntarily or through violence? What can traditional indigenous knowledges or transcultural stories of metamorphosis teach us about the possibility of reconfiguring self or environment?
As with previous ASLE-UKI conferences we are happy to receive papers on any aspect of literature, culture, and environment, but we particularly welcome responses to the following provocations:
A transition is a movement between places, a passage. This sense of transition has a particular resonance with Liverpool as the site of the conference: an imperial city built on the profits of enslavement, a major commodities port for the Industrial Revolution, and a key site in the ongoing history of crude oil and the petrochemical industry. We welcome papers that address histories and geographies of transit, travel and transmission – the still-unfolding consequences of the movement of peoples, commodities, and species: whether they be the drastic shifts in world-ecology instantiated by the transition to plantation monocultures and fossil capital; the movement of zoonotic diseases and toxins across bodies and borders as part of the slow violence of environmental injustice; or stories of intercultural encounter from the classical to the present.
Transitions are movements across time: across political moments, conceptual paradigms, energy regimes and geological ages. The University of Liverpool is home to the Olaf Stapledon Centre for Speculative Futures and the Science Fiction Foundation Archive, the second-largest SF collection in the world and a vast repository of imagined futures. With this in mind, we invite contributions on transitions-to-come: what sorts of social or, technological adaptations might emerge? How have past visions of the future shaped our sense of the possible? How will justice and ethics function in these managed (or cataclysmic) transitions?
Transitions are a change in state or being: We welcome papers – particularly about older periods and non-Eurowestern traditions – on what narratives of moral, infrastructural, bodily, climatological, or psychological change do for our understanding of ecology. How might they foster new ways of looking and feeling towards human and non-human others or at environments that are themselves in transition? What sorts of feelings and behaviours (e.g. solastalgia, petromelancholia, joyful militancy, doomer prepping, anticipatory grief) emerge as the affective correlatives to individuals and societies experiencing transition?
Critical and aesthetic transitions: What do different modes and genres (from the medieval dream vision to Hopepunk) offer in terms of imagining transition? What new formal innovations (e.g. ecopoetics, iDocs) arise in response to a world in transition. How is the field of ecocriticism itself transitioning due to its engagements with different critical traditions, institutional drivers, and ethical demands? What sorts of new critical formulations and scholarly practices (including, of course, “Transecology”) have and might emerge?