Florida Gulf Coast University
Fort Myers, Florida
October 7-9, 2010
HandSCon@fgcu.edu

Florida Gulf Coast University’s Center for Environmental and Sustainability Education, and Departments of Language & Literature and Communication & Philosophy are currently accepting individual abstracts and panel proposals for FGCU’s 2nd International Humanities and Sustainability Conference, to be held in Fort Myers, Florida, October 7-9, 2010. Our goal is to encourage interdisciplinary conversations about the role of the humanities in fostering sustainability, however defined, and about the sustainability of the humanities as we move into the second decade of the 21st Century.

Please submit 300-500 word paper and panel proposals, with A/V requests, by email to HandSCon@fgcu.edu. The deadline for proposals is June 4, 2010 at midnight EST. Include all text of the proposal in the body of the email (attachments will not be opened), and be sure to include full contact information for all panel members. Seehttp://www.fgcu.edu/cas/HandScon/ for more information.

Possible questions for investigation might include, but are not limited to:

• What have “nature,” “culture,” and “environment” come to mean? How have these concepts been constructed, for better or worse, in the academy, but also in the global community at large, and how have these constructions structured our relationship to what we refer to as the natural world, whether in a limiting or a liberating way?
• What role do the humanities have, not only in fostering awareness of global environmental and social issues, but also in creating thoughtful and productive analyses of these issues by questioning the way environment and culture are represented in humanities and non-humanities disciplines alike, in addition to examining the role of media and information technology in establishing, complicating, altering, and/or breaking down those representations?
• What are the different ways we understand and relate to nature and society in the academy, both through humanities disciplines like religious and spirituality studies, cultural studies, new media studies, art, literature, and philosophy, and non-humanities disciplines like political, natural, and social sciences?
• What have been the goals, implementation, and outcomes of efforts toward integrating environmental and cultural sustainability education into humanities courses and curricula? How can information and media technology be used to enhance such efforts?
• Is “sustainability” sustainable?
• What pressures are being exerted on the humanities to transform themselves so as not to become obsolete in the ultra-practical and future-oriented information age, and how should the humanities respond to such pressures?

Eric Otto, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities
Florida Gulf Coast University
10501 FGCU Blvd. S.
Fort Myers, FL 33965

phone: (239) 590-7250
email: eotto@fgcu.edu