About – ALECC

Who Is ALECC?

Founded in 2006, ALECC is a Canadian association for the study of environment and culture that brings together artistic, activist, and academic communities. We are an interdisciplinary organization whose members are involved in cultural, social, ethical, political, historical, and philosophical analysis, community engagement, social and political change, creative writing, storytelling, and visual, sound, and performative arts.

As an association, our approach to the environmental humanities is inclusive, transnational, and multilingual. We engage with interconnected areas such as Indigenous knowledge, decolonization, critical race studies, animal studies, gender, sexuality, disability, and education. We welcome the participation of individuals from any related scholarly, activist, or artistic communities, and we aim to facilitate collaboration across life experiences and career stages.

ALECC supports its members through an array of volunteer-driven initiatives. We organize a biennial conference, publish our journal The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada, maintain an active membership and listserv , run our website, and award the Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize. We regularly fund member-organized local and regional events, such as poetry readings; and we build and maintain connections with other environmental and cultural organizations. Graduate students play leadership roles in ALECC and are supported with conference travel funding when possible.

For general and website queries, please contact us by email.

The Goose.

An online publication, The Goose is ALECC’s official publication. It features articles, book reviews, and original poetry on topics relating to environment, place, and nature writing by Canadian and international writers.

ALECC’s Organization

ALECC is a Not-for-Profit organization, following the rules, regulations and guidelines set out in our constitution as developed in 2007 and amended in 2011, 2020, and 2022.

ALECC 2022 EXECUTIVE

ELECTED, VOTING POSITIONS:

Co-President: Lisa Szabo-Jones, English, John Abbott College

Lisa Szabo-Jones, a photographer, writer, walker, scholar, and educator, grew up by the Salish Sea. She co-founded (2005) and is past co-editor of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada. She is a co-editor of the collections Activating the Heart and Sustaining the West and of an ARIEL special issue, Postcolonial Ecocriticism among Settler-Colonial Nations. She is published in Canadian Literature, ISLE, Alternatives Journal, ESC, HA&L, Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times, and Greening the Maple and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy. She currently teaches literature at a CÉGEP near Montreal.

Co-President: Jordan B. Kinder, Mahindra Humanties Center, Harvard University

Jordan B. Kinder is a scholar of media studies and environmental humanities from a resource town in what is now called northern British Columbia, Canada. He is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities with the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University having recently finished a SSHRC-FRQSC postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. In Fall 2023, he will be an assistant professor in the Departments of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. As an authoring member of the After Oil Collective, he recently published Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice (University of Minnesota Press), edited by Ayesha Vemuri and Darin Barney. Forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press in collaboration with meson press in 2023 is Digital Energetics, co-authored with Anne Pasek, Cindy Lin, and Zane Griffin Talley Cooper. His first solo-authored manuscript, which studies the emergence of the pro-oil movement through social media in Canada and is titled Petroturfing: Refining Canadian Oil in the Age of Social Media, recently passed peer review and is under advanced contract with University of Minnesota Press.

Secretary: Lyn Baldwin, Biology, Thompson Rivers University

Lyn Baldwin is a plant conservation biologist who uses art and science to help mitigate society’s extinction of experience with the botanical world. From her home in the sagebrush-steppe and coniferous forest of the South Thompson Valley, Lyn teaches botany, ecology and creative writing at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC. For more than two decades, she has worked to cultivate care between the people and plants of place by sharing the stories she finds with her illustrated field journal in art galleries and science museums, and within the pages of journals such as The Goose, Camas, Hamilton Arts and Letters, The Fourth River, Terrain, and The Journal of Natural History Education and Experience. Lyn’s first book Drawing Botany Home: A Rooted Life is forthcoming from Rocky Mountain Books in Spring 2023.

Treasurer: Joshua Schuster, English and Writing Studies, Western University

Joshua Schuster is an associate professor of English at Western University. He is author of The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (University of Alabama Press, 2015). He has co-written with Derek Woods the book Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). Recent essays have appeared in the journals Resilience, Cultural Review Studies, Parrhesia, and in edited volumes on Derrida, Roberto Esposito, and contemporary ecopoetics. He is currently finishing a book on the conceptual and cultural meanings of extinction titled What Is Extinction? (Fordham UP, 2023). He is also in the early stages of a new book project on contemporary ecopoetics and the necessity of developing extreme forms of poetic address.

Member-at-Large: Ariel Kroon, English, Independent Scholar

Ariel Kroon is an independent scholar and recent PhD graduate of the U of Alberta English and Film Studies department, where her research focused on crisis narratives in Canadian post-apocalyptic science fiction 1948-1989, and how we can interpret (and hopefully learn from) these narratives in an age of climate catastrophe. Her thesis is available online here, and she was recently commissioned to write about queer utopian futurism for The Art Gallery at University of West Florida; she has also published on queer utopia in SFRA Review and the anthropocene in The Goose. She is currently a research assistant with SpokenWeb at the University of Alberta, and co-hosts and produces the podcast Solarpunk Presents. Connect with Ariel at her blog or on Mastodon.

Member-at-Large: prOphecy sun, Interactive Arts + Technology, Simon Fraser University

prOphecy sun (PhD) is an interdisciplinary performance artist, queer, movement, video, sound maker, and mother of three. Her practice celebrates both conscious and unconscious moments and the vulnerable spaces of the in-between in which art, performance, and life overlap. Her recent research has focused on ecofeminist perspectives, co-composing with voice, objects, surveillance technologies, and site-specific engagements along the Columbia Basin region and beyond. She is the Arts Editor for Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities and a sessional faculty member at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She performs and exhibits regularly in local, national, and international settings, music festivals, conferences, and galleries and has authored several peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and journal publications on sound design, installation, performance, and domestic spheres. https://prophecysun.com

Member-at-Large: Jessica Marion Barr, Cultural Studies, Trent University

Jessica Marion Barr (she/her) is a contract Assistant Professor at Trent University and artist-researcher of Celtic, various European, and matrilineal Haudenosaunee ancestry whose interdisciplinary arts-based practice explores creative and collaborative approaches to issues around climate change, species decline, and social/ecological justice. Recent projects include Confluence, a watershed-attuned research-creation project for ALECC 2022, and Our Bodies, These Lands: Practising Reciprocity, a land-based movement and video collaboration with Algonquin dancer-scholar Dr. Jenn Cole for the Journal of Embodied Research. Jessica is also a single parent to a spirited 8 and 3/4 year old.

APPOINTED, NON-VOTING POSITIONS:

Social Media Coordinators: prOphecy sun, (Simon Fraser University)

The Goose editors:

Co-Editor of The Goose: Rina Chua, Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities, Simon Fraser University

Dr. Rina Garcia Chua is a Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University and she completed her PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She is the editor of the first anthology of Philippine ecopoetry, Sustaining the Archipelago, which was published with the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House in 2018 and is co-editor of Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific, forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press in October 24, 2022. Rina is also the co-diversity officer for the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), poetry editor of Tiger Moth Review in Singapore, and co- editor of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada.

Co-Editor of The Goose: Rachel Webb Jekanowski, English, Memorial University – Grenfell

Rachel Webb Jekanowski is an interdisciplinary scholar working between film and media studies and the energy humanities. She earned her PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University and works as an Assistant Professor of English at Memorial University’s Grenfell Campus in Newfoundland and Labrador. Her scholarly practice is deeply informed by relationships to place and a commitment to social justice. Rachel’s current book project, Cinemas of Extraction: Land, Resources, Settler Imaginaries, examines environmental and colonial entanglements of twentieth-century nontheatrical and documentary filmmaking in North America. Follow her on Twitter @stalebreadzine and find out more about her work at https://rjekanowski.ca.

Co-Editor of The Goose: Jessica McDonald, English, University of Saskatchewan

Jessica McDonald is a Sessional Instructor at the University of Saskatchewan, where she teaches introductory courses in English literature and Indigenous, Canadian, and Decolonizing Literatures. She researches the literatures of Canada in relation to social and environmental justice, and she has published on Nalo Hopkinson, Michael Crummey, and Douglas Coupland. Most recently, her research studies the social, spatial, and environmental politics of so-called “non-places,” like Walmart, as represented in literature and culture. She is a community-engaged scholar activist and the host of the scholarly podcast Teachin’ Books, all about the ways people teach, learn, and work with literature.

Alanna Bondar Committee (ALECC 2024 conference):

Committee Chair: Finis Dunaway, History, Trent University

Sonnet L’Abbe, Creative Writing and Journalism, Vancouver Island University

Paul Hebner, English, Athabasca University