The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and The Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS) are excited to announce that they will hold their next conference jointly, from July 9-12, 2023 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon.

We seek papers, creative work, and other forms of scholarly engagement that approach literature, cultural artifacts, infrastructures, geographies, watersheds, borderwaters, atmospheres, and oceans as methods for reclaiming the commons and instilling and motivating a politics of care in our time. We seek understanding about the various ways in which we as scholars, activists, and artists can rise to the challenge of building community, extend our voices into new arenas, and leverage the insights of the humanities into the practices of our various cultures. We seek discussions that highlight the ways in which, during the recent covid-imposed period of isolation and its aftermath, communities have been or may be rebuilt and strengthened, especially between the human and more-than-human, the academy and local communities, the humanities and the sciences, metropolitan centers of power and the Global South, between and among regional institutions, and across languages and epistemologies. We seek papers that will explore the role of the public humanist, the public role of scientific and climate literacy, and the social, political, and scientific obligations of the scholar and artist as part of the larger project of reclaiming commons. Finally, we seek historically situated work that considers the long global history of commons.

ASLE welcomes proposals for the following presentation formats for our 2023 conference (described in more detail at https://www.asle.org/conference/biennial-conference/):

• pre-formed panels of scholarly papers or creative readings of between 4 and 8 presenters;
• individual scholarly papers or creative readings, to be placed into panels;
• scholarly/creative posters for participation in a poster session;
• collaborative work projects, in which presenters work together on a project prior to the conference and present on that work as a panel at the conference.

In addition, we welcome participation in special pre-conference workshops, many of which will focus on specific regional topics and collaborations.

Deadline for proposals is January 3, 2023