Deadline: February 8th, 2020
Contact: Dr. Alexa Dare
Email: dare@up.edu

Call for chapter proposals for Intimate Relations: Communicating (in) the Anthropocene

We invite submissions for an edited volume to be published in late 2020 that address communication in the Anthropocene. The book is under contract with Lexington Press.

The Anthropocene, the human-shaped geologic era we now occupy, presents challenges too huge to comprehend, damage too tragic to contemplate, and a reality that mocks the wholly insufficient language of “solutions” many humans yearn to imagine. We have spent too long fretting about the impossibility of “fixing” the damage that humans have done to the environment, whether climate change, mass extinction, or ecosystem destruction. And the vast majority of the writing about both environmental destruction and possible (or impossible) solutions is from a human-centered perspective with limited acknowledgment of the web of entangled relations that make up our human-nonhuman world. We use the lens of intimacy to offer different insights into the challenges and opportunities tied to the Anthropocene.

This volume seeks to engage the concept of the Anthropocene from a range of different (disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, and creative) perspectives. Using evocative and engaging examples that cut across traditional disciplines, the chapters in this volume should take seriously the idea that worlds are made (possible) through mundane, everyday practices. Historically, the communication discipline has a rich tradition of research and theory that examines how mundane everyday practices “construct” social worlds (influenced by sociological theories that privilege the way in which social structures are constructed rather than fixed or natural). Our volume seeks to expand this sense of construction by paying attention to how interspecies intimacy, entanglement, and relations form the building blocks of the Anthropocene.

Contributors are invited from a variety of different disciplines, especially those working in Environmental Communication and the Environmental Humanities and/or with posthuman, critical animal, indigenous, postcolonial, or ecofeminist theories.

Topics might include (among many others):

Eco-affect

Hyperobjects and communicating crisis at the scale of the planetary

Nonhuman ethics

Interspecies solidarity

Grief and loss

Nonhuman legal personhood

Queer ecologies

Capitalism, colonialism and mass extinction

Indigenous perspectives on conservation and natural worlds

Death and responsibility in the Anthropocene

Mainly we seek the most thought-provoking research on any topic related to environmental communication. We also seek original artwork, poetry, drawings, etc. for possible inclusion. Please submit an artwork proposal by the below date.

Proposal Submission Process:

The tone should be academic, yet written for a general readership. With the urgency of the challenges of the Anthropocene, we are committed to moving quickly through review, revisions, and edits. The book will be complete by August 1, 2020 and be published by Lexington shortly thereafter. All authors will be asked to commit to a timeline that facilitates this publication schedule.

Potential contributors should (a) send an abstract of 250 words that describes the proposed focus and content of the chapter and (b) a short bio of each author. To submit, please send your abstract and bio by Saturday, February 8th, 2020 to BOTH editors (contact information below). If your work is invited for inclusion in the book project, completed manuscripts will be due in early June 2020 and will be no more than 20 pages, excluding reference list and footnotes, and conform to Chicago style.

Please send proposals, questions, and inquiries to both editors: Dr. Alexa Dare (dare@up.edu), Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Portland, and Dr. Vail Fletcher (fletcher@up.edu), Associate Professor of Communication, University of Portland.

Posted on February 2, 2020