CFP for EH/DH Session at Digital Humanities 2017 (McGill, Montreal, Canada)

In her DH 2014 keynote address, Bethany Nowviskie encouraged digital humanists to “attend to the environmental and human costs of DH.” These costs are sometimes accrued through acts of inaccessibility (e.g. building websites that are not practical for screen readers or mobile devices) and sometimes through acts of accessibility (e.g. exposing communities to unwanted surveillance through digital publications), whether deliberate or not. In the environmental humanities, like in the digital humanities, “access” is not always a desirable goal. The actions of thousands of First Nations and Native American people, who continue to protest corporate and state access to tribal lands for the purpose of building pipelines, attest that access is both a human and environmental issue. Access, especially human access, may well put endangered ecosystems at risk, expediting the “climate of extinction” in which, Nowviskie asserts, digital humanists work. This multiple paper session seeks contributions that consider the tensions and affordances produced by work that emerges in the intersections of environmental humanities and digital humanities.

Topics of papers may include, but are not limited to:

• Environmental impacts of digital technologies

• Digital approaches to water access issues

• Geospatial encounters with landscapes

• Digital environmental justice and community projects & scholarship

• Eco-feminist approaches to digital humanities

• Digital and environmental sustainability

• Ecomateriality of digital objects

• Human / Non-human / More-than-Human / Post-human interactions

• Digital humanities approaches to environmental datasets

• Impacts of ecological metaphors in digital humanities (e.g. text mining, cloud computing, sunsetting, server farms, etc.)

Please send paper title, abstract of 750-1500 words, and CV to Alicia Peaker (apeaker[at]brynmawr[dot]edu) by October 30th for consideration.