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Building on the success of our inaugural meeting in Spring 2009, Florida Gulf Coast University's Center for Environmental and Sustainability Education, and Departments of Language & Literature and Communication & Philosophy seek again to join the international conversation on sustainability in our 2nd International Humanities and Sustainability Conference. To be held Thursday, October 7th to Saturday, October 9th, 2010, this conference will serve dual-but intertwined-purposes, one of which is to address the issue of sustainability in all of its complexity: the definition, ambiguity, and even problematic nature of the term; its widespread application to crises in ecology and culture; and especially its implications fo r and within humanities disciplines. In an era increasingly dominated by technology-, economics-, and business-related areas of study, the humanities' role in fostering environmental and cultural sustainability can only be appreciated if humanities disciplines are valued and pursued with the same enthusiasm that administrators, students, and the public show toward these more "practical" fields. The 2nd International Humanities and Sustainability Conference will thus also be a forum for addressing the sustainability of humanities study itself.
The 2010 conference will coincide with FGCU's annual Sustainability Week, sponsored by FGCU's Student Government. From Monday, October 4th through Friday, October 8th there will be a number of events showing how the University and its students and faculty are engaging the issue of sustainability.
Possible questions for investigation might include, but are not limited to:
. What have "nature," "culture," and "environment" come to mean? How have these concepts been constructed, for better or worse, in the academy, but also in the global community at large, and how have these constructions structured our relationship to what we refer to as the natural world, whether in a limiting or a liberating way?
. What role do the humanities have, not only in fostering awareness of global environmental and social issues, but also in creating thoughtful and productive analyses of these issues by questioning the way environment and culture is represented in humanities and non-humanities disciplin es alike, in addition to examining the role of media and information technology in establishing, complicating, altering, and/or breaking down those representations?
. What are the different ways we understand and relate to nature and society in the academy, both through humanities disciplines like religious and spirituality studies, cultural studies, new media studies, art, literature, and philosophy, and non-humanities disciplines like political, natural, and social sciences?
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