The cumulative crises of anthropogenic climate change, Indigenous land and water defender campaigns, and calls to decolonize museums, universities and other cultural spaces have directed attention to the material structures of power that shape our interaction with place. If landscape studies have traditionally focused on questions of representation and cultural imaginaries, how does taking land seriously as a category prompt a rethinking of landscape? Landscapes have real, material impacts on our lives but landscape is also a canvas onto which a variety of emotional, ideological, and discursive involvement is mapped. Landscape is used by artists, writers, theorists, and politicians to tell us something—and, importantly, to make us believe something—about our lives and ourselves. As inhabitants, stewards, and architects of landscape, we have a responsibility to think critically about the role of landscape. Land and landscape are a point of entry to reckon with how colonial, nationalist, heteronormative, and white supremacist systems and structures impose themselves on land, waters, and communities. Given the very material politics of the present, what utility does landscape have as a framework? What does a history of landscape that centers land relations look like? What does landscape tell us about temporality, endurance, disappearance, emergency, and disaster?
We invite papers from interdisciplinary scholars working at the convergence of land, representation, and politics across media, geographies, and time periods. Through the framework of the Environmental Humanities, this conference seeks to re-think landscape studies and the definition of landscape through a cross-disciplinary dialogue across the humanities and social sciences.