Deadline: July 31, 2025
Contact: Sarah Dimick and Ben Stanley
Email: sarah.dimick@northwestern.edu

Now that the Anthropocene thesis has been thoroughly critiqued–by postcolonial, Indigenous, and Black studies–what becomes apparent in its wake? What issues, frameworks, or modes of reading did the Anthropocene obscure? What ideas are sprouting in the intellectual space it once held? We seek papers that think outside and beyond the Anthropocene, moving along other timescales or within other currents of environmental thought.

Rather than rehash critiques of the Anthropocene—which are thoroughly established —this special issue instead asks what comes into focus when scholars accept these critiques as necessary but accomplished groundwork. Having deconstructed the Anthropocene, what constructive work can now flourish? Which methodological currents can invigorate environmental scholarship committed to political, racial, and economic justice? If a post- Anthropocene dawns, what might be its conceptual fulcrum and its aesthetic tendencies? These are urgent questions for both scholarship and the arts, as creative responses will be crucial to picturing lifeworlds possible on a planet structured by continuations of the same harmful mechanisms that have been with us for hundreds of years. The realm of art and aesthetics will generate strategies and tactics of survival.

It is not a coincidence that Anthropocene critiques were issued by fields attuned to injustice and power; this special issue retains those emphases. If the Anthropocene concept generated a sense of urgency (and a vocabulary for interdisciplinarity), how can that sense of dire consequence invigorate environmental scholarship committed to political, racial, and economic justice? We attend to overlooked environmental threats, writing from geographies often elided in Anthropocene discourse, and narratives at scales more nuanced than the species. We welcome traditional scholarly articles but also creative or experimental interventions, from any discipline(s) within arts, humanities, or social sciences.

Please send your abstract of 400-500 words, accompanied by a 100-150 word bio, to the special issue editors, Sarah Dimick (sarah.dimick@northwestern.edu) and Ben Stanley (bstanley@udel.edu), by July 31, 2025. Decisions on abstracts will be communicated in mid-August 2025; full articles will be due January 15, 2026. Completed articles should be submitted to the journal’s online submission site at: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/asapjournal.

Posted on May 20, 2025