Call For Papers

“Visualizing the Urban Jungle and the Urban Oasis: City Space and the
American Environmental Imaginary,” panel for the American Studies
Association Annual Meeting, Washington D.C., November 5-8, 2009

Deadline: January 1, 2009

This panel seeks to explore tensions and parallels between American
conceptions of urban space and wilderness, both within and outside of
the United States. On the one hand, urban space may be conceptualized
as an alternative to nature, a man-made environment designed and
practiced to civilize or domesticate the wilderness. Yet at the same
time, the new kinds of physical, social, and cultural relations
brought about by the industrial and post-industrial urban environment
often figure in the cultural imaginary as natural, primal, wild, or
other-than-human. How have urban American residents, agencies,
artists, and reformers conceived of their social and built worlds in
terms we might currently call environmental? What kind of visual
practices are in play in the navigation and/or depiction of outdoor
urban environments such as streets, public squares, parks, gardens,
waterways, and zoos? How have artists, urban planners, architects,
civil engineers, and members of the general public defined and re-
imagined "unnatural" spaces in the city through particular visual and
spatial aesthetics? In what ways do differences of class, race,
gender, and sexuality shape and express these constructions? To what
extent can we speak of the urban jungle and/or oasis as a co-
production between human and nonhuman organisms and what purposes do
these co-productions serve in the politics of cities and
environmentalism more broadly?

Paper topics for this panel may include (but are not limited to):
· Surveillance and social control as a mode of urban
“sustainability”
· Rooftop gardens, urban farming, and the greening of urban space
· Urban architecture as a metaphor for the natural world, and
vice versa
· Social Darwinism, class difference, and species difference
· The City Beautiful movement
· Natural rehabilitation of urban spaces in public art and urban
design (e.g. NYC’s High Line project, urban “earth art”)
· Urban ruins
· Suburbia and New Urbanism
· Lawns and other domesticated landscapes
· Urban interspecies encounters and the spaces that frame them
(e.g. zoos, dog parks)
· Natural history museums and botanical gardens
· Trans-species disease (e.g. avian flu, mad cow) and the global
city

Please submit a 500 word abstract and CV to both Catherine Zuromskis
and Lisa Uddin at zuromskisunm.edu and lisa_uddinbrown.edu by
January 1, 2009.

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Catherine Zuromskis
Assistant Professor
Art and Art History
MSC04 2560
1 University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001