Program

Conference Presentations and Discussion Boards will be online from July 8 to July 22.

Water Solidarities

Chair: Matthew Zantingh

Jessica Barr, “Confluence”

Joanne Leow, “"be like water"/"fill the sea": Ecological and Political Crises in Hong Kong”

Janine MacLeod, "Making a Counterhegemonic Language"

Remapping Place

Chair: Cheryl Lousley

Lorelei Hanson, “Countermapping the Bighorn Watershed: Shifting divisive politics to a poetics of flourishing”

Matthew Zantingh, “Finding Oil in Southwestern Saskatchewan”

Sarah Krotz, “Caragana: Colonial and Feral Natures in Edmonton's River Valley”

Jenny Kerber, “Salmon, Science, and Knowledge Across Borders in The Kings of the Yukon” 

Broken Earth & Shorelines: Speculative Anthropocene Voices

Chair: Jenna Hunnef

Camille van der Marel, “Exceptional Life: Eroding the Everyman Hero in Black and Indigenous Cli-Fi”

Olivia Weigeldt, “Caring for this Seismic Archive: Imagining Geologic Possibilities in the Colonial Anthropocene in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy”

Jen Doyle, "Waterways in The Road

Feminist Ecologies

Chair: Rachel Jekanowski

Mitch Goldsmith, “Elfriede Jelinek's Greed: Watery Bodies, Vibrant Matter, and Feminist Ecopolitics”

pr0phecy sun, “Feminist Bodies in a Posthuman Mountain Imaginary” 

Water Criticism: Ecowriting from the 1960s-80s

Chair: Richard Pickard

Donnie Secreast, “A Wholesome Lust for Destruction: Strategies of Satire in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

Wendy Roy, “"The Water in the Locks is Level": Water in a Burning World in P.K. Page's "Unless the Eye Catch Fire"”

Susan Tyburski, “Le Acequia Madre: Conserving a Water Community”

Writing for the People

Chair: Emily McGiffin

Alec Follett, ""A science for the people":  The Democratization of Science in Madhur Anand's and Adam Dickinson's poetry" 

Cheryl Lousley, “The Good-Natured Environmentalist: Trevor Herriot's Grass, Sky, Song and the Modest_Witness@Populist.Turn”

Richard Pickard, “Reading Nature: Climate Crises, Local Nonfiction, and the Writing Classroom” 

Grief and Care

Chair: Jenny Kerber

Joanna Lilley, “Hearing Voices”

Laurie Graham, “What is Here: How Poetry Might Address Ecological Grief” 

Kai McKenzie, "Watershed Moment"

Rethinking Ecopoetics

Chair: Kai McKenzie

Glenn Willmott, “What is an Emergency Ecopoetics?”

Adam Dickinson, “Thermography: A Poetics of Heat”

Joshua Schuster, “Notes on Heliopoetics”

Long Histories of Hope

Chair: Kaitlin Blanchard

Elspeth Tulloch, "Reading 'Hope': Hovering between Finalities and Futures in Hintze Hall"

Karen Quandt, "Baudelaire's Seine, Distributary of Hugo's Rhine"

Homings

Chair: Emily McGiffin

Sarah Ens, “Flyway: Tracking Ideas of Home”

David Williamson, “Through disassembled houses of perfect stones”

Conrad Scott, "Navigating Waterline Immersion"

Landforms/Bodyforms: Meditations and Movements

Chair: Richard Pickard

Morgan Young, "On Ground and Movement: Being in Place in Climate Crisis"

Ariel Gordon, "Reading Assiniboine Forest: A forest-bathing walk"

Dreams of Extraction

Organized by Paul Huebener

Chair: Paul Huebener

Conrad Scott, “'Knee deep in the black smoldering waters': Ecocritical Dystopianism and Bacigalupi’s Extractive Futures”

Leah van Dyk, “Dreams as Radical Reparations: Exploitation and Extraction in The Marrow Thieves

Paul Huebener, “The Politics of Sleep and Dreams in The Marrow Thieves

Sodden Apocalypse: Literal and Figurative Waters in 21st Century Writing in Canada

Organized by Jessica McDonald

Chair: Wendy Roy

Ian Moy, “Apocalyptic Travel: When Humanity Controls Nature in Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes

Jessica McDonald, “Bad Canadian: Citizenship, Water, and National Ruin in Douglas Coupland's Souvenir of Canada Series”

Mabiana Camargo, “The Gardeners' Waterless Flood: Survival and Resistance in Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood

Shakti Brazier-Tompkins, “Deep Dreaming: Water, Dreams, and the Apocalypse in Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves

Oil and Water: Placing Work Poetics and Petro-Narratives

Organized by Melanie Dennis Unrau

Chair: Melanie Dennis Unrau

Kelly Shepherd, “Working on the Water: Industrial Realism in West Coast Poetry”

Emma Gammans, "Applying Systems Thinking to Storytelling to Address Polarization During Energy Transition."

Melanie Unrau, "Duck, Duck, Goose: Waterfowl, Workers, and 'Founding Fathers' (in a Tailings Pond)" 

Mya Wheeler, “Deepening Intellectual Investment in the Energy Industry through the Power of Story”

Cripping the Commons

Organized by Kaitlin Blanchard and Richard Pickard

Chair: Kaitlin Blanchard

Polly Atkin, "Why is it Always a Poem is a Walk?: disability, access and ecopoetics"

Jes Battis and John Loeppky, "Accessing Environmentalism"