Panel: “Environmental Literature and Class Politics”
Submission Deadline: January 18, 2021

The conference theme of “Ecologies, Survival, Change” affords a timely opportunity to explore the investment of women’s environmental writing in themes of socioeconomics or class politics.

This panel will explore the multiple ways women writers deeply engage both the natural world and issues of class and wealth disparity. Panelists’ papers might address such questions as:

1. What questions arise if we position literary works at the crossroads of nature writing and socioeconomics?

2. How do women writers interested in an environmental consciousness and income inequality articulate their concerns about the exploitation of both the earth and those socioeconomically disadvantaged?

3. How do concerns about vulnerability, deprivation, limited resources, exploitation, oppression, development, distributive justice, mitigation, and education equally apply to financial struggles and an environmental conscience?

4. How do women write about the environment through the lens of the Capitalocene, a framework theorized by scholars who consider climate chaos as a crime perpetrated by wealth and power against the poor and the natural world?

4. How do women writers narrate ecological inequity and differentiated access to ecological resources?

5. How do women writers explore the ways that ecology, territory, terrain, and landscape intersect with racial and class distinctions?

Please submit a proposal of 250-300 words, with a brief biographical paragraph or a CV. Email as a pdf attachment to Debby Rosenthal (drosenthal@jcu.edu) by Monday January 18, 2021.