“Ecologies, Survival, Change” celebrates the many women across the Americas whose creative work fosters survival and envisions change by exploring the systems in which we live, labor and love. Toni Morrison is our touchstone: her works powerfully remind us that humans, however implicated in damaging structures, can also resist them through networks that sustain and transform.

We offer the term “ecologies” to signify the dynamic, interlocking systems that make up our world, from networks of family and friends to entrenched processes of environmental exploitation to hierarchies of race and gender. Material and discursive, natural and human created, entrenched and emergent – ecologies integrate diverse, even conflicting, values and effects. As the novel coronavirus demonstrates, global pandemics and other crises make many ecologies hyper-visible, calling attention to the sustenance which some provide while exacerbating the destructiveness of others.

Our conference embraces the capacity of creative work to represent existing ecologies and to imagine alternative ones.