Here are two ads inviting applications to conference panels in 2019. (We were sent these without source references, but we think they are authentic. Could even a fictionist of genius achieve such perfect idiocy?)

The Association for Literature and the Environment (ASLE) 2019 conference seeks papers for a panel called “Disidentifications with the Human”, which draw upon (eco)feminist, queer, decolonial, new materialist, and critical-race approaches to animal studies and the environment. The panel will explore the limits of a human-centered worldview while also attending to the intersections of identity, society, dispossession, speciesism, ability, and/or racialized capitalism. Though this panel takes the format of a traditional 4-human panel, it is particularly interested in creative, hybrid, and nontraditional approaches to knowledge production, including but not limited to performance art, film, poetry, and other forms of artistic expression.

What? They couldn’t find a scholarly chimp, a thoughtful lizard, a creative rhino to contribute a paper?

The 2019 NWSA [National Women’s Studies Association] conference is looking for a moderator for a panel on “Anthropocene Feminism and the Non/Human in Contemporary Cultural and Literary Texts”. This panel explores how contemporary feminist literary and cultural texts narrate ecological crises and climate change with a particular focus on the non-human. In the context of what Richard Grusin termed Anthropocene Feminism, the presenters investigate how feminist and queer theory can produce knowledge of current climatological catastrophes beyond paradigms of hypermasculinity and human exceptionalism. How do women or indigenous people who are often on the forefront of struggles for environmental justice explore the shared vulnerabilities between non-human beings (plants, non-human animals, cyborgs) and humans as a site of resistance and resilience? How do they make sense of and challenge neoliberal ideologies as transnational phenomena imbricated with the Anthropocene and climate change in the context of what Angela McRobbie termed Postfeminism? How can feminist, critical race and queer theory employ non-human animals in productive ways to rethink the Anthropocene, given the fraught relationship between women, queer people, and people of color and animals in history and culture?

Non-human animal applicants would surely want to know the pay scale before preparing the paperwork.

Note: The Left’s “intersectionality” extends now to animals, plants, and cyborgs.