Planetary ethics and aesthetics, interspecies communities, post-gender and anarchist societies, indigenous knowledge, vegetal sentience... The paths Ursula K. Le Guin has opened for our imagination to travel are numerous, subtle itineraries through which we might find ways to better inhabit the 21^st century. The international bilingual conference “Le Guin's Legacies” will engage with her work from a multiplicity of perspectives, tracing its literary, ecological, philosophical, socio-economical and anthropological ramifications: its potential for re-engineering the world we live in.

Program

June 18-21, 2019

Tuesday June 18

20:30 · Projection of documentary Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (Arwen Curry, 2018)

Cinéma Le Grand Action

5 rue des Écoles, Paris

Metro: Cardinal Lemoine / Jussieu

The projection is free for all presenters (+ one or two guests per presenter).

Wednesday June 19

Institut du monde anglophone (Grand amphithéâtre)

5 rue de l'École de médecine, Paris

Metro: Odéon

9:45 · Word of welcome

10:00 - 12:00 · Panel 1 · Anthropocene

• Chessa Adsit-Morris & Noel Gough (University of California, Santa Cruz) Post-Anthropocene Imaginings: Co-creating Imaginative Methodological Practices for Unnamed Epochs to Come
• Brad Tabas (ENSTA Bretagne) In the Dark that Nourishes. A Dark Guide to Dark Times: Ursula Le Guin and Ethics in the Anthropocene
• Kim Hendricks (Flemish Research Foundation / KU Leuven) Activating the Present: Imagination, Science Fiction and Resistance
• Supriya Baijal (Deemed University) Negotiating ‘Power’ and ‘Balance’ in A Wizard of Earthsea (1968): An Eco-Critical Study

12:00 - 13:30 · Lunch

13:30 - 15:00 · Panel 2 · Worlds, Bonds, Beings

• Eli Lee (Minor Literature[s]) “Another Way to Be” – Navigating the Possibility of Eco-Utopia in Always Coming Home
• Katie Stone (Birkbeck, University of London) The Ethics of Time Travel in the Short Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin
• Francis Gene-Rowe (Royal Holloway, University of London)

The Language of the Dusk: Finding Equilibrium in an Ending World

15:00 - 15:30 · Coffee break

15:30 - 17:00 · Panel 3 · Indigeneity

• Arwen Spicer (Clark College) Indigeneity and Utopia in Le Guin's Ekumen
• Miranda Iossifidis & Lisa Garforth (Newcastle University) Reading Le Guin: Ethnographic Figures and Speculative Sociologies
• Stefan Schustereder (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen)

A Cruel Mirror in Space? A Postcolonial Reading of Ursula LeGuin’s The Word for World is Forest

17:00 - 17:15 · Coffee break

17:15 - 17:45 · Keynote 1

• Julie Phillips (Biographer of Le Guin) Love and language: Ursula K. Le Guin in Paris

17:45 - 19:00 · Cocktail

Thursday June 20

11:00 - 12:00 · Panel 4 · New Epistemologies

• David Creuze (Université de Lille) Coming Back Home from the Abyss: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Yin Utopianism

Liesl King (York St John University) Moving Slowly with Le Guin – A Philosophy for Survival

12:00 - 13:00 · Keynote 2

• Brian Attebery (Idaho State University, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts) Always Coming Home, the Library of America, and the Hinge in Le Guin’s Career

13:00 - 14:30 · Lunch

14:30 - 16:00 · Panel 5 · Stages of Life

• Patrycja Kurjatto Renard (University of Tours) Redefinition of Human Family Paradigm in Selected Texts of the Hainish Cycle
• Joanna Gilar (University of Chichester / fabularosa.co.uk)

The Transformative Recovery of Death in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Fantasy and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials

• Meghann Cassidy (École Polytechnique) Subjectivity and Childhood in The Earthsea Quartet

16:00 - 16:30 · Coffee break

16:30 - 17:30 · Panel 6 · Utopia 1

• Sarah Lohmann (Durham University)Complexity and the Radical Systemic Utopianism of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed

Dennis Wilson Wise (University of Arizona) Unrealizable Ambiguous Utopias: Reading The Dispossessed through Leo Strauss and Plato

17:30 - 17:45 · Coffee break

17:45 - 18:45 · Panel 7 · Utopia 2

Joshua Abraham Kopin (University of Texas at Austin)

Fragile, Makeshift, Improbable: Le Guin’s Anarchisms of Fidelity

• Justin Cosner (University of Iowa) Revolutionary Rhetoric: “Effective Dreams” and Utopic Potentialities in Ursula Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven

20:00 · Conference dinner

Friday June 21

10:30 - 12:30 Panel 7 · Translation / transmission

• Stephanie Burt (Harvard University) Le Guin's mutants, Le Guin's gods: X-Men comics, The Lathe of Heaven, and the paradoxical essence of a superhero story
• Maria Skakuj-Puri (Independent scholar and translator) Translating Ursula K. le Guin in Communist Poland: Stanisław Barańczak and A Wizard of Earthsea
• Emily York (James Madison University) Le Guin in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) Pedagogies
• Diégo Antolinos-Basso & Damien A. Bright (Sciences Po / University of Chicago) Neither Heroism nor Tragedy. Learning to Make Way for New Correspondences between Science and its Questions through Ursula Le Guin's Writings on Writin

12:30 - 14:00 Lunch

14:00 - 15:00 · Panel 8 · Fiction-panier

• Noémie Moutel (Université de Caen) Sur, un récit écoféministe pour l'Anthropocène
• Éliane Beaufils (Université Paris 8 – Vincennes Saint-Denis) Des fictions-paniers aux non-héros contemporains

15:00 - 15:15 · Coffee break

15:15 - 16:15 · Panel 9 · Hors la maison du maître

• Quentin Dubois (Université Toulouse-Jean-Jaurès) Ursula Le Guin : une besace chaosmotique dans le Jupiter Space
• Thierry Drumm (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Raconter d’autres histoires avec Ursula K. Le Guin

16:15 - 16:30 · Coffee break

16:30 - 17:30 · Keynote 3

• Isabelle Stengers (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Penser sur le mode SF