Deadline: December 31, 2020
Contact: Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad
Email: tatiana.konrad@gmx.net

Special Issue of AM Journal of Art and Media Studies

Guest Editor: Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad

This special issue of AM Journal of Art and Media Studies invites scholars in the environmental and energy humanities, media studies, film studies, musicology, sound studies, and cultural studies to probe climate change and environmental degradation from the visual and sound perspectives and their intersection. We are particularly interested in how various visual and sound media, including film, TV, theater, art, and music, address the problem of the invisibility of the current environmental crisis and censure our insufficient action to save the planet, even as these media are ultimately seeking to make these issues visible and audible to audiences worldwide. The special issue also examines the ways in which images and sounds of the degrading planet formulate the cultural understanding of environmental crisis. How, through various kinds of visual and acoustic performances, do authors, artists, and activists challenge the existing sociocultural and political attitudes to climate change, ecological decline, environmental degradation, and the destruction of the planet, so that their works emphasize the urgent necessity to act in order to preserve life of humans and nonhumans on Earth? The articles in this special issue will not only foreground the power of visual and acoustic texts to re-envision climate change, the planet, and the role of the human in the current environmental crisis but also illustrate how visual and sound media can be effectively used to directly tackle climate change and environmental destruction.

Some of the issues that the articles might focus on are (but not limited to):

– Ecocinema as activist cinema

– Environmental documentaries and their visual narratologies

– Songs about the environment and climate change

– Acoustic ecology

– Art and environmental crisis

– Visual eco-performances

– Gender and climate change

– Racism, nature, and the environment

– Survival in the age of climate change

– Postcolonial visual and acoustic eco-narratives

– Animal voices

– Silence and the environment

– Visibility/invisibility and sounds/silence of environmental collapse

– Ecological posthumanism and multispeciesism

– Sounds, images, and the affect theory

Potential contributors are invited to submit their abstracts of 300 words and short bios (about 150 words) by December 31, 2020. Full articles of 3,000-5,000 words, formatted according to the Journal’s guidelines, will be requested by March 31, 2021. All articles will undergo double-blind peer review. The issue is scheduled to be published in September 2021. Please email your abstracts and inquiries to the editor of the special issue:

Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad: tatiana.konrad@gmx.net

About the editor: Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna, Austria. She holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Marburg, Germany. She was a Visiting Researcher at the Forest History Society (2019), an Ebeling Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society (2018), and a Visiting Scholar at the University of South Alabama, USA (2016). She is the author of Docu-Fictions of War: U.S. Interventionism in Film and Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), the editor of Transportation and the Culture of Climate Change: Accelerating Ride to Global Crisis (West Virginia University Press, 2020) and Cold War II: Hollywood’s Renewed Obsession with Russia (University Press of Mississippi, 2020), and a coeditor of Cultures of War in Graphic Novels: Violence, Trauma, and Memory (Rutgers University Press, 2018).

Posted on November 17, 2020