Association of Literature, Environment and Culture Conference in Canada (ALECC) by Alice Burns
I was recently awarded funding from the NWCDTP to attend and deliver a paper at the Association of Literature and Environmental Studies Conference in Canada at Wilfrid Laurier University. The funding allowed me to travel to Canada and stay for the duration of the event so that I could settle myself and fully prepare for the full conference without stress and organise my presentation in sufficient time. The paper itself addressed the conference theme of migration and was titled ‘One place suits one person, another place suits another person. For my part I prefer to live in the country’: Beatrix Potter and the Migration to the Lake District’.
The activity itself involved delivering a paper to approximately 60 delegates in a conference which addressed questions of land ownership and custodianship, as well as the task of comprehending and responding to the complexity of migration in the past, present, and future. The paper drew on the vast archives of Beatrix Potter, currently held by the National Trust, the V&A and the Frederick Warne Archive (held by Penguin), to bring these invaluable resources to a wider audience than previously explored. Because the conference was primarily ecocritical / migratory in scope, it allowed me to expand upon my ideas in relation to the wider field of ecocriticism, particularly from indigenous perspectives.
The conference provided a valuable opportunity to listen to other researchers’ work on ecocritical thinking, examining ideas pertaining to land custodianship, as well as more metaphorical realms of thinking, such as the notion of ‘mother-trees’, as well as investigating work on resource-sharing as an eco-social enterprise. All of this work feeds into my thesis work more broadly to better consider the human relation to the non-human world, and how this is depicted through the literature we read and write.
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