Panel Proposals

The 2nd International Humanities and Sustainability Conference

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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

Call for Seminal Presentation Proposals: PROJECT EARTH-TO-ART

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CALL FOR PANEL PROPOSALS, THEORY PAPERS / PRESENTATIONS AND EXHIBITIONS / WORKSHOPS

THE KUMASI SYMPOSIUM: Tapping Local Resources for Sustainable Education Through Art

Department of General Arts & Art Education, College of Arts and Social Sciences

Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology KNUST, Kumasi, Ghana

July 31-August 14, 2009

A call is made for contributions addressing one or more of the symposium strands and topics: Art Education Practice, Studio Practice, Curatorial/Museum/Community Arts Practice, Art History/Criticism, Arts Administration/Management/Marketing Practice, and Open Session. The symposium entails plenary sessions and support activities such as demonstrations/workshops, exhibitions, and site-specific tours of local national resources. Expression of interest and proposals for Plenary Sessions and Exhibitions/Practical Workshops will be reviews until January 17, 2009. We expect about 200 participants from around the world. The working language of the conference will be English. Applications for individual paper presentation and participation will be reviewed until the space is filled. All abstracts and brief biographies should be submitted electronically to africoae@gmail.com

The symposium is organized as collaboration between African Community of Arts Educators AfriCOAE and KNUST’s Department of General Arts & Art Education. As a follow-up to AfriCOAE’s Project Earth to Art: Tapping Local Natural Resources for Sustainable Art Education Development at Accra. The two-week symposium July 31-August 14, 2009 will deal with the issue of sustainability in the 21st century to enable visual arts education developments in Ghana and perhaps similar settings. Owing to the challenges of transition from the postcolonial stance and to many others, best practices and resourceful programs often fail to roll out nationwide and to be sustained. The following questions will therefore guide the dialogues: Is sustainability of art teaching and learning developments in the postcolonial African environment possible? Can the postcolonial Ghanaian environment and non-Western others today provide adapt resources for sustainable artistic practice? If so, how can the resources best be tapped for education through art in Anglophone Ghana and other Modernist African settings?

Tapping Local Natural Resources for Sustainable Art

Education Development

PROJECT EARTH-TO-ART is an experimental eco-pedagogy project for application in art education in the Anglophone, Lusophone and Francophone African settings. The project addresses problems of shortages of adequately trained school art teachers, costs and reliance on imported art materials, and collaborations with stakeholders of the public and private schools in creating desirable human capital for teaching and learning in art. The idea is to bring together a cohort of art educators for a two-week workshop in Ghana in summer 2008.

The workshop will entail formal discussions and mini-lab tours of regional sites to explore for ecological materials and test their effectiveness in art making. Upon return to their place of teaching, the participants will work with their students to likewise explore, identity, collect, and design art materials from the local environment and test them by art making. In the following year, the cohort will reconvene to share the results of the art laboratory and engaged in papermaking workshop using local-ecological materials. A driving concept of the project is that art materials come from one’s own environment; we reason that in the traditional African setting, the art materials come from the local environment; tools come from the community, and conceptual basis from the human condition. The focus is Ghana, in hope that the results would disperse into other parts of Africa and elsewhere.

via PROJECT EARTH-TO-ART.