Scholarly Ecotones in the Information Landscape

Authors

Drew Hubbell, Susquehanna UniversityFollow
John Ryan, University of Western AustraliaFollow

Abstract

For this issue of Landscapes, we invited contributors to reflect on the concept of ecotone as a method of interrogating intersections between literature, culture, art and landscapes. We wanted to encourage the ecocritical and creative arts communities (including poets, writers, photographers, painters and graphic artists) to engage with this term in the hopes that ecotone would do for the environmental humanities what Mary Louise Pratt’s contact zone did for cultural and post-colonialist studies (see, for example, Pickles and Rutherdale). Taking our cue from Donna Haraway’s provocative study of interspecies contact zones in When Species Meet, we proposed the use of ecotone to rethink ecocritical assumptions about the natural world as a harmonious, organic, integrated space to which humanity must relearn its connection.

Author Biography

Drew Hubbell is Associate Professor of British Nineteenth Century Literature at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, PA, USA and Adjunct Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia. From 2009 to 2015, he was Head of the Department of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna. His most recent essay, ‘“It Cannot Be a Sin to Seek / To Save and Earth-Born Being”: Radical Ecotheology in Byron’s Heaven and Earth,’ appeared in Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies, ed. Dewey Hall (2016). He has just completed a monograph, Byron’s Nature: A New Theory of Romantic Ecology.

John Ryan is Honorary Research Associate in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia. From 2012 to 2015, he was Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Communications and Arts at Edith Cowan University. His most recent books include Posthuman Plants (2015) and The Green Thread (2015, co-edited with Patricia Vieira and Monica Gagliano).

Recommended Citation

Hubbell, D., & Ryan, J. (2016). Scholarly Ecotones in the Information Landscape. Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language, 7(1).
Retrieved from https://ro.ecu.edu.au/landscapes/vol7/iss1/24