Deadline: 31st of May 2022 at the latest
Contact: Alexa M. Dare
Email: dare@up.edu

“How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother

“Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren’t we talking more about that?”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

As we enter year three of the global pandemic, it is clear that mothering is both essential and chronically undervalued. For the two editors of this special issue, we are among millions who are raising kin (human and nonhuman alike) in the Anthropocene. Who both worry desperately for what the future will look like, and who practice love and care in the face of crisis, extinction, contamination, aggression, and more. We are interested in taking seriously mothering and other forms of caregiving as radical acts of ecosurvival. We invite human animal collaborators to submit articles to this special issue to help us collectively think through the ways in which love, intimacy, mothering, caregiving, and/or kinmaking are practices of resistance or solidarity or world-making.

As feminist theorists have painstakingly noted over the years, mothering is perpetually ignored and devalued in both scholarship and western culture. And as ecofeminists such as Carol Adams have noted, the similarities between the treatment of women/minoritized others and nonhuman animals highlight the ways in which human liberation is intertwined with the care and recognition of nonhuman suffering. We propose this special issue not just as a corrective to the historical silencing of mother- experience(s) in the humanities. We suggest that the intimate, embodied, and relational dimensions of human entanglement with the nonhuman world can best be captured and understood by focusing on mothering and other forms of caregiving and kinmaking.

We especially seek submissions that engage the visceral, the embodied, and the disruptive dimensions of labor and mothering: the ways in which the pregnant body is both one and two at the same time; the otherworldliness of early motherhood; the monstrousness of the mother-body; the placenta as both a literal organ and yet a metaphor for birth, life, death, and thriving (e.g., topsoil as earth’s placenta); the emotional labor of bearing witness to suffering and grief as near constants; the disappearance of bodies and laboring bodies.

We are also interested in how we can pay attention to the role of plant mothers and nonhuman animal mothers and fungi mothers, among other types of caregiving and caretaking. We call for papers that engage the ways in which mothering, birthing, or embodied care are animal and plant acts, sites of (messy) possibility for seeing our human entanglement with the nonhuman world more fully. In line with the Journal of Ecohumanism’s aims, we seek work that wrestles with the ways in which changing definitions of ecological citizenship offer strategies for living and loving that hasten the end of the Capitalocene.

Potential topics:
Love as a political project (beyond species’ boundaries or kin-ties)
Interspecies caregiving/Interspecies mothering
Mothering/caregiving/love and/against capitalism
Transcorporeality and endangered species
Nonhuman animal mothering
Plant mothering
Plant communication
Sensuous engagement with nonhuman others
Indigenous and nonwestern approaches to mothering, kinship, caregiving
Decolonizing mothering/kinship/caregiving
Emplaced and/or Out-of-place care (invasive plants, animals, monstrous bodies)
Grief and loss

Art as a space to queer boundaries between flora and fauna
Folklore, Mythologies, and Oral Histories
Witchcraft and Witches

Editors
Alexa M. Dare, Associate Professor of Communication and Media, University of Portland, Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
C. Vail Fletcher, Professor and Chair, Department of Communication and Media; Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, Co-Director, University of Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.

About the Submissions
Potential contributors should (a) send an abstract of 250 words that describes the proposed focus and content of the paper and (b) a short bio of each author. Please send the abstract and bio by May 31, 2022 to BOTH editors (contact info below). Full-length papers of approximately 5000-6000 words will be due in December. The language of submissions is only English. All submissions shall follow the latest guidelines of APA style referencing. More information about the style sheet is found here: [https://journals.tplondon.com/ecohumanism/about/submissions]. The submissions of abstracts and full-length papers, including an abstract and short bio/CV, will be sent directly to both Editors’ e-mails as well as any queries that you may have. The Editors’ e-mails are [dare@up.edu] and [fletcher@up.edu].

Deadlines:
Abstracts’ submissions to be sent to the Editors until the 31st of May 2022 at the latest.
Final papers’ submissions to be sent to the Editors until the 31st of December 2022 at the latest.

Posted on February 24, 2022