Call for Proposals for a collection

Environmental Rhetoric: Ecologies of Place

Peter N. Goggin, editor

Essay proposals are invited for a collection of original papers titled Environmental Rhetoric: Ecologies of Place. This collection invites scholars of rhetoric (in English studies and elsewhere) to address locales as rhetorical places/spaces for examining complexities and discursive constructions of change, resilience, and sustainability in the natural world. Of particular interest are essays that focus on issues of ecology and the human/nature relationship as situated, place-based concepts. This collection will forefront environment and place as powerful agents in their own rights that inform the crucial contexts for rhetorics of environmental (and social) justice, and sustainability. Environmental Rhetoric: Ecologies of Place will contribute to an emerging and growing field of scholarship in environmental rhetoric for research and teaching in the humanities.


This collection invites previously unpublished essays that challenge and build on earlier work on environmental rhetoric, that are responsive to ever-changing conditions and contexts for environmental and ecological concerns, and contribute to evolving practices, pedagogies, and theories on the environment. Topics might include, but are certainly not limited to: rhetorics and discourses of sustainability and sustainable development in specific locations; rhetorical geographies of the natural world, non-human and trans-human rhetorics of place, ecocriticism and ecocomposition; ecological literacy; rhetorics and discourses of material culture and the environment; technology/media and the natural world; teaching writing and ecology, methodologies for researching and interpreting environmental rhetoric and place, and networks, nodes, and connectivity of environmental systems and place-based rhetorics. The focus of the proposed essay may look broadly at a topic from a conceptual/theoretical perspective, or narrowly and pragmatically at a specific case.

Please send your 250-500-word proposal, contact information, and a CV as electronic attachments in MSWord format to Peter Goggin (goggin1@asu.edu<mailto:goggin1@asu.edu>) by June 30, 2011.

Whatever a sustainable society may be, it must be built on the most realistic view of the human condition possible. Whatever the perspectives of its founders, it must be resilient enough to tolerate the stresses of human recalcitrance.
--David Orr

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
--Aldo Leopold

And remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
--Confucius