Mobile Bodies: Globalization, Travel, and the Environment
Description
Our contemporary geological moment is shaped by the circulation of commodities, people, plants and even disease that can be traced back to 1492. In this historical context, this panel invites interrogations and reflections on migration, unequal mobilities and their relationship to the environment. How has traveling given rise to different perceptions of environments and people inhabiting those environments? With some migrants being deemed desirable and some being deemed “vermin beings” (Mavhunga, 2011), we are interested in narratives that respond to the unequal patterns of mobility and exchange set in motion with the events of 1492.
This panel is concerned with texts and narratives that probe the links between mobility, environment and agency. With the shift in perceptions that travel brings, we ask about the role that travel plays in placing lifeforms along a continuum of humanness, stretching from human to the subhuman and to the nonhuman. Taking travel and mobility as potential avenues to think of altered bodily perceptions and experiences, this panel is interested in analysing how the figure of the traveler/tourist/settler can become a conduit for strange and uncanny bodily experiences. Examples include settler journals from the tropics and works of speculative fiction (new weird, body horror), narratives of real and imagined travel. Papers that study the figure of the traveler in specific historical contexts, including but not restricted to colonialism and neocolonialism are welcome.
Is mobility in itself something that can provoke bodily estrangement, and if so how are they linked? In investigating the links between mobility and estrangement, we are equally interested in how ‘being mobile’ can lead to a decentering of anthropocentric worldviews.
We welcome papers that consider the following topics:
- Travel narratives
- Environmental narratives and environmental humanities
- Globalization, mobility, and migration
- Tourism and the ethics of leisure travel
- Medical humanities, medical, wellness or health tourism pre and post the age of mass tourism
- Bodies: transformation, change, in motion, illness, disease
- Nonhuman and its relationship to environment, travel
- Nonanthropocentric worldviews
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Krystale Tremblay-Moll is a Dominican/Canadian writer and literary scholar based in Montreal, Quebec. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto. Her research examines contemporary Caribbean and Latin American cultural production with a focus on tourism, globalization, mobility, and gender/sexuality. Her work has been supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de recherche du Québec.
Speaker Bio
Associate Professor of Literature at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil. She holds a PhD in English, U. of Alberta, and developed research as visiting scholar at Trent University, both in Canada. Her main research interests include contemporary literature, inter-American studies, travel and life writing. Her work has appeared in Interlitteraria, Canadian Literature, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Interfaces Brasil/Canada, Aletria, Ilha do Desterro.
Speaker Bio
Vanessa Badagliacca, PhD, is an art historian and teacher. Her academic research – interacting with her curatorial practice – explores the entanglements between plant life, environmental issues and artistic practices, with an approach informed by science, ecocriticism, new materialisms, focusing mainly on the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America in a transnational perspective. She contributes with her writings in academic journals, art magazines, exhibition catalogues, independent publications.
Speaker Bio
Weiling Deng is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Digital Humanities at Champlain College. Weiling received her Ph.D. in Social Sciences and Comparative Education from UCLA. Her research and teaching interests include Global Asias, urban humanities, panoramic and immersive media, ethnography, and race/gender/technology. Weiling is currently working on her first book project, Illuminating the Shadows of the Undead: Panoramic Fabulation of Transpacific Chinese Scenes.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Priscilla Jolly is a PhD candidate at Concordia University, Montreal. Her research interests include environmental humanities, postcolonial studies and landscape studies.
Speaker Bio
Yuan Liu is a PhD student at the University of Glasgow. He obtained an MSc in Translation Studies (with Distinction) from the University of Glasgow and an MLitt in English Language and Literature from Nankai University. Positioned at the intersection of comparative literature, translation studies and trauma studies, his PhD explores how the Nanjing Massacre (1937-1938) is remembered in a body of comtemporary transnational cultural texts across poetry, cinema, and theatre.
Speaker Bio
Kotaro Nakagaki is a Professor of American Literature at Senshu University, Japan. From 2024-2026, he has served as the president of Japan Mark Twain Society. Now he is working on research theme about “American hobo/tramp Narratives.” He is the author of Mark Twain and His National Identity under the Age of Establishing Nation/State (Otowashobo-Tsurumishoten, 2012 [in Japanese]) and articles on popular culture, including “Chaplin and the 1910s in America: Making Images of Tramp.”