The Irish Times reported in December of 2024 that a subcommittee of the International Union of Geological Sciences had decided after deliberating for 15 years that there is insufficient evidence to call our post WWII era the Anthropocene. The Union said that some disciplines will no doubt continue to use the term to refer to “human induced planetary scale changes, of nuclear weapons, human-caused climate change and the proliferation of plastics, garbage and concrete across the planet.” However, by their lights, we have not yet exited the Holocene, an era of stable climate that allowed human civilizations to arise.

Ireland’s EPA reports that in line with global trends, the island is experiencing its highest temperatures on record, intense storms, flooding and threats to wildlife, with 20% of species currently at risk of extinction according to the National Biodiversity Data Centre. As Sharae Deckard observes, “climate change promises to affect the whole web of life in Ireland.”

If some scientists have decided that our era is too close to call, some cultural critics have found that the term Anthropocene inadequately names the root causes of climate crisis by failing to include the role that capitalism and colonialism play in devaluing multispecies life. So we might take the opportunity to revisit and rename the difference of our time of soaring temperatures, droughts, devastating floods and fires, and mass extinctions. Is the Capitalocene, as James Moore has argued, a more apt description of an era of unrestrained capital accumulation that injures our planetary web of life? (Ireland’s Celtic Tiger era offers multiple examples.) Or does the Plantationocene better describe the harm inflicted on human and nonhuman life by colonialism and the forced labor of monoculture plantation practices? (Again, Ireland’s colonial history of
deforestation, sovereignty loss, and an ecology of political violence is a case in point.) Alternatively, is it more useful to adopt the aspirational language of Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene by envisioning a living, thriving mutually constituting and enabling multi-species earth? For Haraway, the term Anthropocene locates humans at the center of climate crisis rather than an historical, situated set of influences. One aim of this conference is to generate work that envisions, in more ways than one, a world beyond the Anthropocene.

Malcolm Sen has observed that “Climate change is a cultural problem and needs cultural solutions at least equal in measure to technical ones.” How do Irish authors, filmmakers, and musicians past and present tell stories about habitats, ecosystems, and species? How do contemporary Irish writers address the climate crisis? Are there threads from the past we might
helpfully draw into the present? How do makers of poems and narratives both witness to the present and conjure alternative futures? Or in Anna Tsing’s terms, in these final stages of capitalism when definitions of progress as material growth have stopped making sense, might we look around rather than look ahead and embrace the future as indeterminant and
multidirectional?

ACIS South invites paper and panel proposals for the 2025 regional conference to be held at Appalachian State, a university with a focus on sustainability in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Paper topics might include but are not limited to:

• Rewilding Ireland and Irish writing
• Ecology, empire, and economy
• The Blue Humanities in Irish writing
• Posthumanist futures
• Ireland’s climate, past and present
• Human exceptionalism in Irish writing and film
• Mutuality between species
• Habitable futures beyond the Anthropocene
• Soliphilia in Irish writing and film
• Irish multispecies soundscapes
• Colonialism, postcolonialism, and environment
• Irish landscapes, past and present
• Environmental grief and anxiety in Irish writing and film
• Conjuring cultures of care in climate crisis
• Irish cli-fi
• Deforestation in Irish writing
• Ecologies of political violence
• Local tragedies and global threats
• Earth as a character in Irish writing
• Ecological poetics/Animal poetics
• Climate crisis and trauma
• Apocalyptic visions
• AI in the ecosystem
• Beyond narratives of progress
• Beyond a traditional “sense of place”
• Ireland, cooperation, and symbiotic science
• Citizen assemblies in a multispecies world

We also welcome papers on any aspect of Irish Studies, and we encourage graduate student submissions. Besides individual and panel submissions (three to four participants), we invite roundtable discussions, performances, and dramatic readings. Plenary keynotes include poet Eammon Wall (University of Missouri-St. Louis) and Malcolm Sen (University of
Massachusetts, Amherst).

Please send submissions to [email protected] formatted in a Word.doc. Abstracts for individual presentations should be 250-300 words and include a brief (100-word) bio of the presenter. Panel proposals are no more than 500 words, including a rationale for the panel, plus a brief description of each paper and of the participants. Proposals of 500 words for
other presentations should include a rationale and short biographies. The deadline is July 1, 2025.