Deadline: 31st of October 2025
Contact: Dr. Nikoleta Zampaki
Email: nikzamp@phil.uoa.gr
Call for Papers:
(RE)IMAGINING SYMBIOSIS BETWEEN HUMANITY AND NATURE
Issue’s Editors:
Mieke Bal, ASCA, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Peggy Karpouzou, Associate Professor of Theory of Literature, Faculty of Philology, School of Philosophy, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.
Nikoleta Zampaki, Postdoctoral Researcher, Faculty of Philology, School of Philosophy, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.
Abstracts’ deadline (title, abstract 250 words, 5-7 keywords, bioprofile 100 words):
31st of October 2025. The material should be sent to Editors’ e-mails pkarpouzou@phil.uoa.gr and nikzamp@phil.uoa.gr
Acceptance notice: 30th of November 2025
Book reviews: Please contact Professor Peggy Karpouzou at pkarpouzou@phil.uoa.gr and Dr. Nikoleta Zampaki at nikzamp@phil.uoa.gr and provide us with the title of the book you intend to review, aligned with the topic of the special issue. The final texts should be in English and should observe the guidelines as they appear on the website: https://www.metacriticjournal.com/for-authors. The final submission should include a 1,500-2,000-word book review, including a list of references (only cited works).
Deadline for the accepted full articles of 5,000-7,000 words for articles, including references, 150 words abstract, 5-7 keywords, 150 words bioprofile and book reviews of 1,500-2,000 words: 15th of February 2026
Website: htttp//metacriticjournal.com
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Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory is an open-access, peer-review, online publication for academic research, published twice a year by the Faculty of Letters, Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj, Romania. It promotes free-access for academic work and it welcomes authors who want to share their research and resources with their peers. It encourages, recognizes and rewards intellectual excellence in interdisciplinary and intermedial approaches of literary culture, visual culture and theory. The journal welcomes papers in English (or, for regionally oriented topics, Romanian) from the following domains: comparative studies, including digital and posthuman studies; literary studies, cultural studies, including social and gender studies; media and film studies, literary criticism and theory, cultural poetics.
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The Anthropocene raises several questions about the future of Earth systems and humanity, particularly regarding the various kinds of relationships between humans and nonhumans. Symbiosis —a Greek-rooted term— describes different organisms that live together and are in close connection. Symbiosis has a growing recognition in natural sciences, such as biology, and has replaced an essentialist conception of individuality. However, the theoretical and empirical reconsiderations that symbiosis entails for agency and subjectivity call for further analysis in the Humanities. A way to understand symbiosis, its role and impact on life-forms is to get through the various embedded assemblages, systems and collaborative networks, such as the study of “Gaia hypothesis” (Margulis & Lovelock, 1974), “actor-network-theory” (Latour, 2005), “vital materialities” (Bennett, 2010), “intra-actions” (Barad, 2007), “compost kinships” (Haraway, 2016), “contamination” (Fourier, 2020) and “trans-corporeality” (Alaimo, 2014). All the concepts and approaches lay the ground to re-conceptualize the symbiotic entanglements of life-forms as a network of flows, energies and webs.
The narratives of symbiotic entanglements convey environmental understanding and knowledge via spatiotemporal organization, characterization, narratological techniques, and so forth, offering new perspectives and approaches to the re-connection and repairing of the relationship between humans and nonhumans (e.g., James and Morel, 2020; Caracciolo, 2018). The complex relationship between the human and the non-human in various symbiotic environments raises a variety of questions, such as: What are the implications of shifting to a “symbiotic turn”? How do symbiotic eco-narratives work, and what idea of nature emerges from them? What can representations of symbiotic eco-narratives as matter-in-transformation reveal about human and nonhuman corporeality and identity? How does ‘agency’ challenge ideas about the relationship between humans and nonhumans? What is the aesthetics of symbiotic eco-narratives? What forms of alliance, both human and non-human, do cultural and other texts enable us to imagine in the face of an anthropogenic endgame?
The special issue aims to bring together scholars from a variety of research disciplines to explore symbiotic eco-narratives. The key idea is to show how interdisciplinary topics are integrated into collective or institutional narratives, what function they perform, and how they operate in public discourses. Our intention is to demonstrate how symbiotic eco-narratives and the meanings they carry can influence the conceptions and processes of social organizations and how symbolic value is created within cultural systems. In doing so, this special issue will significantly contribute to the development of transdisciplinary dialogue between the Humanities and Natural Sciences, studying the context of the rapidly developing agenda of the Environmental Humanities.
This special issue also represents a point of departure for filling this research gap by reevaluating the “symbiotic turn” from the vantage point of various theoretical approaches and disciplines that undergird a great range of Humanities terrain. This ‘turn’ manifests that ‘thinking as/with nonhuman agencies’ is not only an approach but also a mode of actively seeking inspiration and bio-centered webs among the life-forms within the broader ‘symbiotic geographies.’
This special issue explores questions that facilitate an interdisciplinary dialogue between scholars across the globe who study various symbiotic eco-narratives and critically approach the relationship between humans and nonhumans We invite articles related, but not necessarily limited to, the following topics:
o symbiosis in -cene (e.g. Anthropocene, Symbiocene, Capitalocene)
o symbiotic ecologies in storytelling of green/blue imaginaries, queer green/blue ecologies, eco/-biosemiotics, material ecocriticism, empirical ecocriticism
o symbiotic econarratives in:
• comparative, global and Indigenous literature
• continental and global philosophy
• visual, media and film studies
• arts
• eco-theological and eco-psychological approaches to symbiosis
• biopolitics and political sciences
• environmental justice
• environmental history
• ecolinguistics
• green/blue pedagogies
• social studies
• migration and diaspora studies
• anthropology studies
• cultural and social geography studies
• marine sciences, climatology, volcanology
• island, archipelagic studies, and Mediterranean studies
• architecture, design studies and biomimetics
• urban studies (cities and citizenship)
• citizen science
• tourism studies
• business studies
• catastrophes and civil protection
o symbiotic sustainable futures, narratives of re-connecting, re-storying and repairing humanity with nature
o symbiotic intersections of various strands of environmental humanities (p.e, environmental digital humanities, blue humanities, arctic/antarctic humanities, plant humanities, animal studies) with posthumanities, medical humanities, energy humanities, public humanities, citizen humanities, and so forth
o future matters of Symbiocene and symbiotic “turn”
Under these premises, a “symbiotic turn” is this special issue’s aspiration to contribute to the rethinking of human subjectivity and agency in the 21st century and the future of humanity as shaped by the dynamic interplay between nature, technology, science and culture (Karpouzou & Zampaki 2023).
References
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures. Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014).
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
Caracciolo, Marco. “Notes for an econarratological theory of character”, Frontiers of Narrative Studies 4.1 (2018): 172–189. doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/fns-2018- 0037
Fournier, Lauren. “Fermenting Feminism as Methodology and Metaphor,” Environmental Humanities 12.1 (2020): 88–112. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-8142220
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
James, Erin & Eric Morel. (eds.), Environment and Narrative. New Directions in Econarratology. (Ohio: The Ohio State University Press, 2020).
Karpouzou, Peggy and Nikoleta Zampaki (eds.). Symbiotic Posthumanist Ecologies in Western Literature, Philosophy and Art. Towards Theory and Practice. (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2023).
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Lovelock, James E., and Margulis, Lynn. “Atmospheric Homeostasis by and for the Biosphere: The Gaia Hypothesis,” Tellus 26.1 (1974): 2–10. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2153-3490.1974.tb01946.x
Posted on July 19, 2025
