Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark: ‘I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.

Mark Twain

CALL FOR PAPERS
Ecological Remedies: Visualizing the Environment in/as Health
(March 26–27, 2027)

How can we better recognize and attend to the entanglements of human and more-than-human injury? Despite numerous environmental histories and scientific data that evidence the imbricated harm done to human and non-human bodies through extractive capitalism, toxification, and disasters induced by a warming climate, “health” is still an anthropocentric term. Given the current dearth of language in the humanities to address ecological and human injury together, the visual arts hold a unique capacity to visualize the coextensive wounds to human and environmental bodies that might seem less visible or demonstrable. Many artists are proposing ever more creative visions for conceptualizing and creating future environments in health, and for imagining our environments as health. This symposium aims to convene a diverse array of artists and practitioners from art history, visual culture, and related interdisciplinary fields. We invite proposals that move beyond environmental remediation to a more holistic sense of justice-based ecological remedy, which presumes the salubrious co-constitution of human and more-than-human bodies and suggests ethical alternatives for caring, repairing, redressing, and/or living despite/with chronic injury. Such ecological remedies strive to acknowledge the difficulties of and possibilities for fostering long-term multispecies health for the planet. The symposium will take place over one and a half days, with sessions combining individual 20- minute presentations, panel discussions and spaces for collective exchange.
Please send a 300-word abstract of your proposed paper or presentation alongside your CV, to brianne.cohen@colorado.edu, kim.dickey@colorado.edu, and sonja.gandert@colorado.edu by October 16, 2026. Notifications of accepted papers will be sent out by November 16, 2026. Participants will be awarded modest funds to help cover travel and accommodation costs.