Bio-/zoosemiotic proposals for ASLE-UK conference welcome

There is a call for papers for the 2011 postgraduate conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment UK (London Sept 9-10), entitled "Emergent critical environments: Where next for ecology and the humanities?". "Biosemiotics and zoosemiotics" is mentioned in the list of "possible paper topics". Deadline is March 31st - also for panel or roundtable proposals.

I quote:

Individual papers should be no longer than 20 minutes. Please send a 250 word abstract and a brief biography (maximum 150 words) to Sam Solnick, Deborah Lilley and Kate Parry – emergentenvironments [at] gmail.com by 31 March 2011. Proposals for panels (3 speakers) and roundtables are also welcome: please send a 200 word summary of the rationale for the panel or roundtable, in addition to individual abstracts. Please send further enquiries to the above email address.

Updated CFP: Zoosemiotics and Animal Representations

The organizing team of the international conference 'Zoosemiotics and Animal Representations', to be arranged in Tartu April 4-8, 2011 - cf. previous post - has issued an updated CFP. The deadline for abstract submission is September 15th. To submit a proposal, interested scholars should e-mail an abstract (300-600 words) and a bio-note (less than 100 words) to the address zoosemiotics@semiootika.ee. The abstract and bio-note should be sent together in one file (.doc or .rtf) attached to the e-mail.

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The news fall in two categories - plenary speakers and publication venues. We are glad to announce the plenary speakers of the conference: Colin Allen (Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University, USA), Jesper Hoffmeyer (Professor emeritus, Biological Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark), Graham Huggan (Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures at University of Leeds, UK) and David Rothenberg (Professor of Philosophy and Music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA).
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There are two publications planned for the articles based on conference presentations: a volume in Rodopi´s Nature, Culture and Literature series and a special issue on zoosemiotics in journal Semiotica.

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For up-to-date information, see the conference webpage.

Call for papers: Zoosemiotics and animal representations

CALL FOR PAPERS

Conference: Zoosemiotics and animal representations
Place: Tartu (Estonia)
Time: April 4-8, 2011
Deadline for abstracts: September 15, 2010

Conference webpage here

KEY TOPICS OF THE CONFERENCE:
- Theory and methodology of zoosemiotics
- History of zoosemiotics, the legacy of Thomas A. Sebeok
- Practical applications of zoosemiotics (e.g. zoosemiotics and conservation)
- Zoosemiotics’ relation to relevant fields such as cognitive ethology, biosemiotics, ecocriticism etc.
- Animal experience (semiotics and phenomenology)
- Semiotic perspectives on animals in literature, art, films etc. (e.g. seeing man in animals, and the animal in men).
- Semiotics of human–animal relationships: historical, social and communicative perspectives (e.g. the semiotics of zoos, of wildlife management, and of domesticated animals).

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Morten Tønnessen
Part of the organizing team

Call for papers: Special issue of Hortus Semioticus

See our call for papers below (plus here). Note that graduate students and young scholars are particularly encouraged to submit. As my fellow guest editor Riin Magnus writes in an email, we hope seniors in the field can help by spreading the cfp to potentially interested students and young professionals. We would like to express...

...that we would thereby also like to form and strengthen the network of graduate students working in the semiotics of nature or similar fields.

(MT)

CALL FOR PAPERS: SPECIAL ISSUE ON THE SEMIOTICS OF NATURE
Hortus Semioticus
Guest editors: Riin Magnus, Nelly Mäekivi and Morten Tønnessen

Hortus Semioticus is an online academic journal of semiotics - the study of signs and sign processes. In Tartu, Estonia, where the student journal is based, nature has long accompanied culture as a topic for semiotic inquiry (cf. the fields known as biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, and zoosemiotics). The driving force behind the journal is curiosity and the joy of inquiry. Around the summer of 2010 the journal will publish a special issue on the semiotics of nature (meaning living nature, rather than physical nature). We are inviting papers on the topics of meaning, value, communication, signification, representation, and cognition in and of nature (ranging from the cellular level to the global scene). We encourage originality within a scientific framework which emphazises the semiotic aspects of the life processes alluded to above. Not least, we strongly welcome submissions from other fields (besides, beyond or beneath semiotics). Graduate students and young scholars are particularly encouraged to submit. Contributions (5-20 pages) should be written in English or Estonian and sent to the guest editors by May 1st, 2010. Prior to that we're expecting an abstract (100-200 words) plus 3-5 keywords by April 1 2010. Please find further instructions here. Email addresses of the guest editors: riin.magnus@gmail.com (Riin Magnus), nellymaekivi@gmail.com (Nelly Mäekivi) and mortentoennessen@gmail.com (Morten Tønnessen)

More special issues

The online Tartu journal Hortus Semioticus will later this year publish a special issue on various forms of semiotics of nature (biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, zoosemiotics). Guest editors: Nelly Mäekivi, Riin Magnus and myself. The issue will feature an English language interview with Kalevi Kull.

About to appear right now is the Sign Systems Studies special issue on zoosemiotics (guest editors: Dario Martinelli and Otto Lehto).