Deadline: 31st of August 2024
Contact: Dr. Nikoleta Zampaki, -, -
Email: nikzamp@phil.uoa.gr
Phone: -
Special Issue of Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies
Guest Editors: Professor Peggy Karpouzou and Dr. Nikoleta Zampaki
Colors in Econarratives about the Human and More-than-Human World
Colors are not only visual stimuli, but also social constructs that play a pivotal role in our perception, psychology, behavior and communication. Colors also evoke a range of emotions, senses and memories that are deeply rooted in various cultural, national and traditional contexts. The meaning, role and impact of colors can vary widely across different linguistic, cultural and historical periods, reflecting complex interactions between language, aesthetics and relationships. The various differences in color symbolism illustrate how cultural beliefs and practices surrounding our daily life, events, occasions and habits can shape the meanings attributed to colors that can evolve over time, e.g. the color black symbolizes death or evil, the color white symbolizes peace and purity (e.g., Conroy, 1921; Birren, 2013; Feisner and Reed, 2014). Colors’ varieties are actually described in terms of “color pluralism” (Mizrahi, 2023), which is not only restricted to the varieties of colors, but it is open to the different perspectives between humans and species when both perceive each other via senses e.g. see them, feel them, taste them in food, etc.
Understanding the complex and dynamic relationship between colors and nature requires an interdisciplinary approach in Environmental Humanities that draws on multiple fields of knowledge, such as literary theory and cultural criticism, psychology, linguistics, arts, philosophy, etc. in order to understand the colors’ nature, function, role and impact on life-forms and the world around us. For instance, ecophenomenology and ecopsychology focus on the embodied experience and psychology within nature respectively, e.g., how we perceive and interpret the colors around us as well as how they affect our psychology by often considering them as a ‘healing space’. Our thinking is oriented to the study of nature, ecology and colors articulated in terms of “prismatic ecology” which delves into the matter of how the vibrant worlds are formed by colors (Cohen, 2013), the reflections, symbolisms, function and role within the natural processes and phenomena as well as their impact on the human and more-than-human world (e.g. flora, fauna, micro-organisms, etc.).
An ecological narration describes human interactions with other species and the physical environment, drawing from narratology, ecology, critical discourse analysis as well as ecolinguistics, offering insights on how ecology, language and narration raise awareness and play a pivotal role in structuring our life. Econarratives’ kinds, structure, content, rhetoric and poetics convey environmental understanding and knowledge via spatiotemporal organization, characterization, narratological techniques etc., paving the way to offer new perspectives and approaches to re-connect humanity with nature. We query how readers perceive and engage with econarratives and how the processes of encountering them stand to affect real-word behaviors and values (e.g., James and Morel, 2023; von Mossner, 2017; Slovic, 2008). In this sense, econarratives mobilize affect and offer factual insights into the functioning of ecologies by describing life-forms and their entanglements.
By studying econarratives of colors we will focus on questions such as what kind of narrations are embodied theoretically, literally, philosophically, etc. How do cultural norms and values shape our ecological thinking on colors? How are colors involved with our senses and what kind of visual streams are offered? How about colors’ representations in cultural, e.g. literal, aesthetic, etc. texts, and how about the role and impact of colors in human and more-than-human life-forms’ behaviors, senses, emotions, moods, thinking and welfare? How is our thought expanded to colors beyond texts and works (Iovino and Oppermann, 2013)? How do colors communicate e.g., social, political and religious meanings in different cultures, including indigenous communities? How do environmental concerns affect the production and consumption of colors? How do authors, artists, etc. use color to express eco-aesthetic, symbolic, or functional ideas? How do scholars study colors in Environmental Humanities, Posthumanities, etc.?
In this special issue, econarratives of colors explore the complexities of pairing material environments with their representations with narrative forms of environmental understanding and ‘propose’ a change in how we interact with the environment today. This endeavor could be effectively executed while exploring storytelling of coloring imaginaries and sustainable futures as ‘narrative rehabilitation’ to draw attention to values and responsibilities and envision strategies to avoid possible ‘disastrous narrative endings’. Econarratives of colors could also be a new approach to overcoming the traditional dichotomies of how we see the world around us, including ourselves, laying the ground to think beyond colors in a more-than-human world. They might also encourage us to think beyond the classical narratological analysis, and consider new analytical tools suited to the current planetary challenges.
Possible topics may include but are not limited to the following:
narratives of colors in Environmental Humanities, Posthumanities, Environmental Digital Humanities, Blue Humanities, Ocean Humanities, Plant Humanities, Animal Studies, Medical Humanities, Energy Humanities, Public Humanities, Citizen Humanities
colors in -cenes, e.g. Anthropocene, Symbiocene, Capitalocene, etc.
colors in ecocriticism, eco-poetics, ecofeminism, queer ecologies, etc.
econarratives of colors in comparative and global literature
econarratives of colors in continental philosophy
econarratives of colors in visual, media and film studies
colors and soundscape ecologies
colors in eco-/bio-art
colors in food studies
ecotheological, ecopsychological and indigenous environmental approaches on colors
colors and biopolitics
the term, concept and language of colors in ecolinguistics
colors in green pedagogies/education studies
storytelling of re-connecting/repairing humanity with nature via colors
storytelling of coloring imaginaries and sustainable futures
The working language is English. Please send an abstract of up to 300 words and further queries to Professor Karpouzou’s e-mail at pkarpouzou@phil.uoa.gr and Dr. Zampaki’s e-mail at nikzamp@phil.uoa.gr until the 31st of August 2024. After the abstracts’ final selection and approval/acceptance, the Editors will notify the author(s) to submit their full in articles (6.000-8.000 words) to their e-mails by the end of February 2025.
URL: https://nebraskapressjournals.unl.edu/calls-for-papers/
Posted on February 29, 2024
