TBS Ecologies 24-25
April 3–5, 2025
& 4 preliminary workshop meetings
The focus of the Spring 2025 Bloomington Symposium is “Ecologies,” broadly construed. The study of ecologies invites us to bring together a diverse array of disciplines, fields, and perspectives: biological, environmental, climate, and earth sciences, art and design, geography, history, anthropology, religious studies, rhetoric, literature, music and performance, law and political science, as well as public health, policy studies, international affairs, media studies, and journalism.
A word once primarily associated with the biological sciences, “ecology” comes from the Greek, “oikos,” meaning family, home, or dwelling, and now is used in many fields to frame considerations of ecosystemic relationships–including interspecies entanglements, networks, mutualism, reciprocity, and antagonism. We invite proposals that consider an aspect of “ecologies” from a particular disciplinary perspective but are open to interdisciplinary conversation on their topic. Participants will be selected from as diverse a range of disciplines as possible. Proposals might be inspired by work on community and ecosystem ecology, environmental resilience, emplacement and environment, ideas of dwelling and home, aesthetic engagements with ecologies, the often precarious ecosystems in which we and other beings dwell, sustainable business and agriculture. We particularly invite proposals that consider how human cultural institutions (including ideas, values and beliefs) and cultural productions shape and are shaped by the more-than-human world: How do we understand or represent the changing ecosystems that we both inhabit and are? What might the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities be able to teach each other about sustainable ecologies in the anthropocene? In posing such questions, the symposium aims to expand theoretical frameworks beyond siloed disciplines and take a capacious understanding of what “ecology” means.
This workshop group is co-convened by:
Shannon Gayk, Associate Professor, English & Environmental Humanities
Jennifer Lau, Professor, Biology
We invite scholars, researchers, artists, and thinkers from diverse disciplines to join a year-long working group of sorts, culminating in an intensive 2.5-day symposium aimed at fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration on the concept of ecologies, broadly interpreted across disciplines.
Each proposal should identify an artifact–a place, a text, an organism, a material object, a performance, a network, a community, a data set–that will inspire and ground the participant’s focus for the workshops and April symposium. During our pre-symposium workshops, we will enter into discussion about our artifacts. Each participant’s “artifact” discussion will be expanded for the final symposium, to be followed by a broad conversation about the artifact presented and the question or problem it poses. The specific outline and format of the conversation and its possible outcomes will depend greatly on the participants.
The symposium aims to generate future research questions and develop a focused plan for documenting outcomes, whether in a white paper, collaboratively authored document, or other scholarly and artistic outputs.
