Call for Individual Project Abstracts

An Environmental Humanities Congress-in-Place

The Dunes, the Lakes, and the Calumet

Chesterton, Indiana

June 19-22, 2025

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– Conference Theme –

Wonder & Contradiction

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: February 1, 2025

 

The organizers of our inaugural Environmental Humanities Congress-in-Place are delighted to announce a call for research presentation proposals.    

 

We welcome proposals that connect to our Congress theme of wonder and contradiction. The Calumet region, which extends along the south shore of Lake Michigan from East Chicago to Michigan City, Indiana, is at once an ecological wonder and a place of significant contrasts. It is a dense confluence of land, water, biology, culture and history that has produced a concentrated space of world-famous biodiversity, stark geopolitical incongruities, epochal historical significance, and unfathomable cultural complexity – a space of great human and environmental suffering, incomparable beauty, myriad challenges, and uncertain future. Our event is an experiment:  We want to come together to engage firsthand with this wondrous place on earth as an inspiration for our own work in the environmental humanities.  

 

Many of you will want to share your ongoing research with the Congress, which we welcome, but we also hope this place will fire your imagination and foster new collaborations. To give maximum flexibility to the range and variety of contributions, we ask that you propose an extended project abstract for presentation and discussion.  

 

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: 

Conference space is limited, so proposals will be competitively judged. We welcome submissions in the following genres: 

• Individual Project.  Please submit an abstract of approximately 450-600 words without any author-identifying information, along with a bibliography. In your email, please include the paper’s title, the author’s name, institutional affiliation, mailing address, and email address. 

• Panel proposal. Please submit a brief description (300-500 words) of the panel topic, the names of the panel members, and, as a separate document, the abstracts for each presentation (300-500 words). Please include the panel’s title along with the panel members’ names, institutional affiliations, mailing addresses, and email addresses. 

• Book panel. Book panels on a Congress participant’s recent monograph or edited volume. Proposals should follow the instructions for regular panel proposals. 

• Book discussion. Discussions of an important text or author. Proposals must identify a moderator, the text selection, and a sketch of guiding questions or talking points for participants. 

• Art/performance category. We open this category for unique and non-traditional forms of academic engagement with the subject matter.

To get a better sense of the kind of Congress themes that might be particularly germane, see below the link to the Graduate Student list of possible research topics. 

 

SEND ALL PROPOSALS TO: John Arthos (jarthos@iu.edu).  

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PLEASE DON’T FORGET 

THE GRADUATE STUDENT PAPER SCHOLARSHIP!

 

To encourage and support graduate student research and participation in the Congress, we have established a competitive fund to subsidize student research and conference attendance. The deadline for this competition is sooner than the above CFP!

Grad Student Competition Submission Deadline: November 1, 2024

We warmly ask that you encourage graduate students you know to apply for this opportunity. Here are some resources we have set up on the website to aid in that work:

• possible research topics

• research resources

• application instructions (for grad paper competition)

Please direct questions about the Grad Competition to John Arthos (jarthos@iu.edu).

 

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General Information on the Congress

Our goal for this meeting is to be a genuine encounter with this very special place on earth. The historic meeting venues and local activities throughout the four days will accompany and vitalize our academic conversations, give us a chance to be in dialogue with local communities and organizations, and put us in the middle of this distinctive environmental space. We have set up a video wall on the event website to give you some sense of the ecological, cultural, historical, and political richness that runs through, underneath and around this tiny geographic area.

 

CONFERENCE VENUES:
Indiana Dunes Pavilion
Indiana Dunes National Park Learning Center 

The Good Fellow Camp Lodge

Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk Pavilion

Marquette Park Pavilion

 

PLENARY SPEAKERS

John N. Law (Comparative Studies, Ohio State University) author of The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago

Elizabeth Grennan Browning (History, University of Oklahoma), author of Nature’s Laboratory: Environmental Thought and Labor Radicalism in Chicago, 1886-1937

Harris Feinsod (English, Northwestern University) author of The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures

Ann Keating (History, North Central College), author of Invisible Networks: Exploring the History of Local Utilities and Public Works

Robert Melchior Figueroa (Philosophy, Oregon State University), author of Environmental Justice as Environmental Ethics: A New Introduction

 

COLLABORATING & SPONSORING ORGANIZATIONS

Save the Dunes

Indiana Dunes National Park

Indiana Dunes Learning Center

Eppley Institute for Parks & Public Lands

International Association for Environmental Philosophy

Indiana University 

First Nations Educational and Cultural Center

Society for Ricoeur Studies

North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics 

 

CONGRESS ORGANIZER:  Hermeneutics in Real Life is a scholarly circle promoting the study of hermeneutics by exploring its relevance to everyday practice, introducing its discipline to new audiences here and abroad, and experimenting in new modes of scholarly engagement in the digital realm. The Congress is our first foray into a broadly interdisciplinary regional event. 

 

CONGRESS REGISTRATION:  

Rates for Congress attendance are as follows:

Tenured and tenure-track Faculty:  $80.00

Students, Contingent, and Retired Faculty: $50.00

Latest Event information here.