Canada Research Chair in Sustainability & Culture
CRC ACTIVITIES
RELATED RESEARCH
Nature Matters Conference 2007 
Nature cannot pre-exist its construction, its articulation in heterogeneous social encounters, where all of the actors are not human and all of the humans are not ‘us,’ however defined.
-- Donna Haraway, “Otherworldly Conversations: Terran Topics; Local Terms. Science as Culture 3.14 (1992), 67.
Here’s how I’m reading the Face: it’s an address to the other with an acknowledgement of our human-centredness built in, a salutary and humbling reminder.
-- Don McKay, Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry and Wilderness (Wolfville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2001), 99.
Having emerged from the 1990s “nature wars” that pitted so-called social constructivists against putative deep ecologists, scholars interested in questions of the relations between culture and nature (to use a convenient shorthand) have begun increasingly to engage in research that rejects both poles of that ultimately sterile debate: Nature may be a social construction, but it is pure hubris to think and act as if human beings are the only ones doing the constructing. For Haraway, the task of acknowledging and working with the implications of this observation about what she has called the “artifactuality” of nature is both scientific and political; for McKay, as demonstrated by his own lyric and metaphoric insistences, questions about nature, otherness and language are also poetic and ethical. For most scholars engaged in “environmental” work in the social sciences and humanities, the task is all of these things and more. How do we think and write about human, social processes and power relations in a way that also speaks to the activity and alterity of the more-than-human beings involved? How do we gesture, in our language and politics, to the ways in which nature is both interlayered with and outside of our cultural understandings of nature? What difference does it make in environmental cultural studies that we take more-than-human actors as our points of inquiry and conversation? In short: How do we make nature “matter” in cultural studies of the environment?
PROGRAM and REGISTRATION:
We are very excited to host “Nature Matters” as a forum in which to explore these and related questions. In response to our call for papers, we received over 175 proposals from scholars from 15 countries on topics ranging from human-animal relationships to visual cultures of nature, from ecological literary criticism to critical urban geographies, from phenomenology to deep ecology to technology studies to Critical Theory. We are delighted with both the interdisciplinarity and range of the presentations we are able to include, and also with the concerted focus that each included presentation takes to the central question of nature, matter, and materiality around which the conference is organized. Out of these submissions, we have developed an impressive list of thematically-organized, interdisciplinary panels; these panels will be offered concurrently with either three or four 20-minute papers per session. Panels and roundtables will be complemented by creative presentations throughout the conference.
Please see the link to the preliminary schedule for further information.
All participants in the conference must register for the conference and pay the appropriate conference fee. Presenters and other participants can preregister by mail. The deadline for registration for presenters is
Please see the registration link for further details.
We are particularly excited by our list of plenary speakers:
Stacy Alaimo, University of Texas,
Bruce Braun, University of Minnesota (cultural geography)
Julie Cruikshank, University of British Columbia (indigenous studies)
Giovanna Di Chiro, Mt. Holyoke College (environmental justice)
Patrick Murphy, University of Central Florida (ecological literary criticism)
Mick Smith, Queen’s University (environmental philosophy and politics)
Cary Wolfe, Rice University (animal philosophies)
CONFERENCE HOTEL:
We are pleased to hold Nature Matters at the Delta Chelsea Hotel in downtown Toronto (Yonge/Gerrard). The Delta is able to offer us outstanding meeting space, and also excellent accommodations for out-of-town guests. We strongly encourage participants to stay at the Delta Chelsea and take full advantage of the facility, including onsite childcare for hotel guests only. Participants need to book their own accommodations; please follow the hotel link at the top of this page or call the hotel directly to book your room. Please be sure to state that you are with the Nature Matters Conference to get the Nature Matters conference rates. Please book your accommodations prior to
For those of you who might prefer to share a room – or who might also like to arrange shared travel – please follow the link above to an online bulletin board that will allow you to pursue these arrangements privately.
Please see accommodations page for further details.
The link above will direct you to information about traveling to
** For those participants traveling to or through the
BANQUET:
Nature Matters will include a banquet on the Saturday night that will include performances by invited artists in addition to an excellent vegetarian/vegan Indian buffet. Participants must register for the banquet.
CALL FOR PAPERS: TOPIA
We are very pleased to announce that The Fall, 2008 issue of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies will include a selection of submitted papers from Nature Matters. We invite all participants to submit their finished papers for consideration in this exciting publication.
Please see the conference information link for further information on the banquet, paper submission, information for presenters and non-presenters, travel grants, food, check-in, and special needs.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please do not hesitate to contact us