CFP: Living Together: Environmentalisms and the Good Life

The Department of Philosophy & Religion at the University of North Texas invites submissions for our upcoming graduate student conference, “Living Together: Environmentalisms and the Good Life,” which will be held October 6 - October 8, 2023. 

Human intervention in Earth’s processes continues to scale up in the third decade of the 21st century, despite urgent calls for comprehensive change. Marginalized groups, meanwhile, feel impacts first and to the greatest extent. How can we promote opportunities for the good life among all, from the scale of the geopolitical or planetary to local relationships between rural settlements and urban centers, between neighborhoods, between neighbors, and between species? In this setting, what must 21st-century environmentalisms look like if we are committed to respecting a plurality of human and more-than-human traditions, identities, histories, and futures? This conference seeks to highlight interdisciplinary approaches to environmentalisms and the good life. 

The keynote address will be delivered by Dr. Brian Burkhart, Associate Professor of Philosophy and the Former Interim Director of the Native Nations Center (2021 - 2023) at the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Burkhart is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma but was born and raised in the Navajo Nation of Arizona. He is the author of Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land: A Trickster Methodology for Decolonizing Environmental Ethics and Indigenous Futures (Michigan State University Press 2019), which explores an articulation of the “nature of land as a material, conceptual, and ontological foundation for Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and valuing” and “breaks significant ground in articulating Indigenous ways of knowing and valuing to Western philosophy—not as an artifact that Western philosophy can incorporate into its canon, but rather as a force of anticolonial Indigenous liberation.”

Possible submission topics include:

• BIPOC voices

• Philosophy of race

• Decolonial theories 

• Feminisms

• Philosophy of animals and animal ethics

• The good life

• Memory and relation

• Imaginaries 

• New materialisms

• Philosophies of love and fear

• Posthumanism, transhumanism, and postanimalism

• Extraction and extractivism 

• Systematicity, non-systematicity, and eclecticism 

• Metaphysics

• Religious/spiritual perspectives

Please submit a 300-400 word abstract by August 1 for consideration, prepared for anonymous review. Accepted students will give a 20 minute presentation followed by a 10 minute response from a UNT Philosophy and Religion graduate student and a 15 minute Q&A. 

Submissions should be emailed to [email protected] with the following information in the email body:

• Name

• University affiliation 

• Current level of graduate studies 

Accepted students will be notified by August 15, and those who are accepted will have a final paper deadline of September 15. 

This is an in-person conference and there is no registration required. 

For questions, please reach out to [email protected].