Deadline: 4/30/25
Contact: Orchid Tierney
Email: tierney1@kenyon.edu

To close gaps in a special issue with South Atlantic Quarterly, we are seeking abstracts for papers that can respond to the critical studies turn in scholarship.

Abstract

Responding to the undeniable reality of the Anthropocene, academic discourses have tried to contest and decenter the figure of the anthropos as the subject and root cause of our climate scene. Consequently, the environmental humanities have proposed several theoretical turns from the recasting of matter and relational ontologies to the current plant turn. It is within and against this background that we propose trash, compost, and matter of decay as the material and metaphorical productive ground for a different approach to Critical Plant Studies. This special issue focuses upon theorizations of life after life. That is, we will explore plant and plant-adjacent forms of life, such as mold, fungi, or single cellular life forms, that grow in the afterness of capitalist overconsumption and overproduction. For this reason, we invite explorations of what we call ecologies of decomposition that examine the materialities and temporalities of rottenness, trash, and the compost heap of Western metaphysics. Ecologies of decomposition defy Western definitions of what counts as life while imagining the possible ethical and political implications of biodynamic plants, fertilization, spores, mold, and other forms of life that resist and complicate obsolescence, reproduction, plant taxonomy, plant scale, and clearly defined ontologies of life and death.

The accepted papers will address Indigenous, Black, feminist, queer, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialism, and anarchic theories to the vitality of plants and plant-like forms of life from philosophical, aesthetic, and literary perspectives. We have a diversity of scholars committed to the project from internationally renowned figures in Critical Plant Studies to emergent voices in the field.

Final papers will be 7000 (plus notes).

Please submit abstracts (250 words) and bionotes (150 words) to Orchid Tierney (tierney1@kenyon.edu) and Cacao Diaz (cdiaz@wesleyan.edu) by April 30, 2025.

Posted on March 24, 2025