CfP: Endnotes 2026: Environment, Extraction, Evolution (Submission Deadline Jan. 25)
Endnotes is the annual graduate conference of the Department of English Language & Literatures at the University of British Columbia-Vancouver, which is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam First Nation. The English Graduate Caucus invites proposal submissions for presentations, panels, and creative or multidisciplinary works on the theme of Environment, Extraction, Evolution.
“What do I want from literature, anyway?
A new way of living, a new way to talk
About the trees that doesn’t endanger them”
- Billy-Ray Belcourt, “Endnotes”
In “Endnotes”, Billy-Ray Belcourt meditates on the project of writing Indigiqueer poetry in a colonial language in so-called Canada. Belcourt points towards two significant practices of extraction: colonial language as an erasure of Indigenous languages and histories, and the creation of taxonomies that delimit the environment into human categories of ‘knowability’ and thereby reduce it to a collection of extractable resources. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has proposed in “The Climate of History: Four Theses”, these linguistic projects can be understood as one expression of the fundamental entanglement between humanist epistemologies and environmental exploitation – a relationship that determines not only historicization but also the present analytical frameworks perpetuating global climate instability.
These scholars draw our attention to how ecological destruction is enacted through what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence”, which “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction [...] dispersed across time and space”. We extend this critique to examine how distancing renders both the causes and results of ecological crisis as abstract, inconsequential, and ultimately futile to address. These trivializing and obfuscating rhetorics ultimately justify endless growth and development at the cost of sustainable futures, as illustrated by the mass adoption of resource-intensive generative AI technologies. The costs borne out of this developmental, determinist ideology are increasingly made visible in our present moment as we witness accelerating fascism, genocide, and mass displacement on a global scale. In the face of these ongoing crises, we ask: are language and literature able to meet Belcourt’s challenge? Can they offer “a new way of living [and a] new way to talk”?
We encourage submissions that explore modern and historical topics, including but not limited to:
- Generative AI, technological developments, and their implications
- The Anthropocene
- Environmental racism
- Extractive policies of settler states
- Indigenous and/or decolonial resistance movements
- Neocolonial and Colonial knowledge (un)making
- Linguistic, intellectual, industrial, and labor extraction
- Zones of exclusion, inclusion, and contact
- Climate migration
- Urban housing and land ownership
- (Un)Sustainable Agrarian Practices
- Politics of preservation
- Climate doomerism, accelerationism, and other millenarianisms
- Provincializing environmentalisms
- Relationships between the land, human, animal and more-than-human
- Consumption, sustainability, and the market economy
- Energy humanities
- Globalization, gentrification, and displacement
Environment, Extraction, Evolution will be held on a tentative date in March 2026 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In addition to traditional academic presentations, we welcome creative submissions, including literary work, visual art, performances, and multimedia presentations related to the conference theme. Individual presentations should be around 15 minutes each. We welcome submissions from scholars, artists, activists, and researchers from across disciplines and career phases, though we are particularly interested in graduate-level work.
For submissions, please email your abstracts (200-350 words) and a brief bio (150 max) to endnotesconference@gmail.com by January 25th. Please include a provisional title if possible.
We look forward to receiving your submissions. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please reach out to endnotesconference@gmail.com.
Endnotes 2025 Committee
Department of English Language and Literatures, University of British Columbia