Aging Studies and Ecocriticism: Growing Old amid Climate Change
Due Date: 05-15-2021
In recent decades, the humanities have witnessed the development of two interdisciplinary fields that tackle challenges for present and future generations: by exploring cultural representations of crisis and change, aging studies and ecocriticism address the complex dynamics of individual and collective agency, oppression and dependency, care and conviviality, vulnerability and resistance as well as intergenerationality and responsibility. Their emancipatory research agendas challenge hegemonic discourses from the areas of science and medicine. Yet, even though both fields employ overlapping methodologies and theoretical frameworks (e.g., gender studies, postcolonial studies, or posthumanism) and scrutinize “boundary texts” in different literary genres (novels such as P. D. James’s The Children of Men and Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam Trilogy or Lucy Kirkwood’s play The Children) that have been analyzed from ecocritical perspectives as well as from the vantage point of critical aging studies, there has been little scholarly interaction between ecocritical literary studies and aging studies to date. With this collection, we aim at facilitating a conversation between aging studies and ecocriticism. We seek papers that will open new interdisciplinary research perspectives.
The full-length CFP is available at https://cirac.uni-graz.at/de/forschung/publikationen/calls-for-papers/. Please send a 250-word abstract and a 150-word biography before 15 May 2021 to cirac@uni-graz.at. Notifications will be sent out by 15 June 2021. Full chapters (6,000–8,000 words) will be due 1 December 2021.