CFP: Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland, Biennial Conference 2025

Call for Papers, Other Conferences

Erosion – Creimeadh

9th August (Online Day); 12th-14th August 2025, University of Galway.

Confirmed keynote speakers: Nessa Cronin, John Brannigan, Malcolm Sen

The 2025 conference for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland (ASLE-UKI) will be hosted by the University of Galway, Ireland. 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 2025 conference is Erosion – Creimeadh. (Creimeadh is the Irish word for erosion: pronounced ‘crem-oo’). Erosion is a slow, gradual type of degradation. It is hard to perceive, with its effects often only becoming visible over time through generational knowledge, art, or technology. Yet, erosion also contains the risk of suddenness, as once it reaches a certain point, disasters such as floods, mudslides, or avalanches can strike. Erosion is a salient example of Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” (2011), or Timothy Morton’s concept of the “hyperobject” (2013), which express the difficulty of dealing with nonhuman scales when there are calls for action. How can literature and culture be a way to perceive, theorise, or address erosion? 

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 conference theme. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Scale: erosion invites us to reflect on that which exceeds the usual operational scales of political action, at institutional, infrastructural, interpersonal, and organisational levels. Can we use ecocriticism to face open scales, regardless of how and where we live? How can we re-think time and space at larger scales, in secular or nonsecular ways, enabled and demanded by what we now face as our political and ecological long-term horizons? And how do we still acknowledge and address the risks of sudden local catastrophes?
  • Temporality: erosion elicits a sense of slow and ancient time. In postcolonial contexts such as Ireland, there is often a longstanding sense that landscapes, language, culture, or economic sovereignty are being eroded. Yet, concepts of slow and ancient time can relegate postcolonial contexts to the past and obscure their imbrication in present networks of economy and power. How do we situate ourselves within temporalities of erosion?
  • Resistance: can resistance to ecological, social, neo-colonial, or economic oppressions be forces of counter-erosion, chipping away at destructive processes? How does one respond to erosion when it has been caused unjustly through exploitation, extraction, pollution, colonialism, politics, or economics? What are the sources of ideological inspiration for subcultures that are developing in the face of ecological or indeed imminent landscape collapse?
  • Language and materiality: how does one write from the perspective of the eroded, whether it be an ecosystem, a species, a language, a culture, or an economy? who are the ‘natural’ actors in erosion processes? What materialities are at play when objects collide with each other during erosion? How might erosion contradict ideas of the aesthetic itself as the ‘natural’ dwelling place of the speculative, the prophetic, the sublime, and other modes of limitlessness?

As the conference is being held in the west of Ireland, we also particularly invite papers that consider the conference theme and/or the broader topics of literature, culture, and environment in the UK and Ireland, and which consider the interrelationships in these islands between histories, languages (including English, Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, and others), literatures, and/or ecologies.

Proposal formats may include:

  • Individual scholarly or creative-critical papers/performances of 20 minutes.
  • Pre-formed panels of three or four papers/dialogues/performances.
  • Roundtable discussion panels with three to five participants.

Please submit proposals via the links on the conference website: https://asle.org.uk/events/galway-2025/. Include contact details, a short bio, and an abstract of up to 300 words by 19th December 2024.

We can facilitate hybrid participation where possible. All delegates must be members of ASLE-UKI or an ASLE affiliate association. Membership information can be found at: https://asle.org.uk/membership/. For more information, please contact us at: asleuki2025@gmail.com.

Conference committee: Ashley Cahillane; Laoighseach Ní Choistealbha; Tina-Karen Pusse; Patrick Lonergan; Maureen DeLeo; Eavan O Dochartaigh.

#ASLEUKI2025

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