Deadline: 30 August 2026
Contact: Mohamed MLILESS, Lorena A. O. Borges, Davi B. de Albuquerque, Elza K. N. N. do Couto
Email: m.mliless@edu.umi.ac.ma
About the Volume
Decolonizing Ecolinguistics: Perspectives from Colonized Contexts seeks to make a focused and timely intervention in ecolinguistic scholarship by bringing decolonial thought into sustained dialogue with questions of language, ecology, power, and knowledge. It aims to foreground perspectives emerging from colonized, formerly colonized, Indigenous, and otherwise marginalized contexts, while critically examining the conceptual and epistemological foundations of ecolinguistics as a field.
Decolonization may be understood as the ongoing process of dismantling the political, cultural, material, and epistemic legacies of colonialism. Colonialism involved not only territorial conquest and economic extraction, but also the imposition of languages, categories of knowledge, and systems of representation that marginalized local ecological understandings. In this sense, decolonization is not limited to political independence; it also entails questioning inherited structures of authority, recovering silenced knowledges, and rethinking how knowledge is produced, legitimized, and circulated.
Ecolinguistics, broadly defined, studies the role of language in shaping relationships between humans, nonhuman life, and the environment. It explores the ways discourse can normalize ecological destruction, justify extraction, reinforce inequality, or promote sustainability, care, justice, and coexistence. Yet much ecolinguistic scholarship has developed within frameworks predominantly rooted in Western intellectual and academic traditions. As a result, many ecological worldviews grounded in Indigenous, local, oral, and community-based knowledge systems have remained peripheral to the field or have been interpreted through conceptual models external to their own contexts.
This project starts from the premise that such exclusion is not accidental. Coloniality continues to structure environmental discourse, institutional knowledge production, and linguistic representations of land, nature, development, and community. A decolonizing approach to ecolinguistics is therefore necessary not simply to expand the field’s geographical scope, but to interrogate its assumptions, revise its categories, and open it to more plural, historically grounded, and ethically accountable modes of inquiry.
The volume welcomes contributions that engage critically with the coloniality of environmental discourse and that explore how ecolinguistics might be reimagined through decolonial, anti-colonial, Indigenous, subaltern, and Global South perspectives. Rather than treating decolonization as a rhetorical gesture or an additive inclusion of non-Western examples, this project seeks chapters that address its theoretical, political, methodological, and ecological implications in rigorous and sustained ways.
Why This Volume Matters
This volume responds to an urgent need within both language studies and environmental humanities. Contemporary ecological crises cannot be separated from longer histories of colonial violence, land dispossession, extractivism, racial hierarchies, linguistic domination, and epistemic suppression. Colonial systems did not merely control territories; they also reshaped how land, resources, species, and human communities were named, classified, governed, and valued.
Language has been central to these processes. Colonial discourse has historically justified occupation, extraction, conservation dispossession, and environmental exploitation, while Indigenous and local ecological knowledges have often been erased, mistranslated, marginalized, or treated as secondary to dominant scientific or institutional forms of knowledge. At the same time, many communities continue to sustain ecological relations, ethical vocabularies, and place-based ways of knowing that challenge dominant environmental narratives.
A decolonizing ecolinguistics is needed, then, to examine how coloniality persists in environmental language and to create space for alternative ways of speaking, knowing, and relating to the more-than-human world. This volume seeks to contribute to that effort by bringing together chapters that critically rethink ecolinguistic theory and practice from perspectives historically excluded from its center.
Topics of Interest
This volume welcomes a broad range of chapter types, including theoretical essays, critical interventions, case studies, comparative analyses, discourse-based studies, field-informed research, interdisciplinary chapters, and community-centered or practice-based reflections. Interdisciplinary work is especially encouraged, and submissions from scholars working in ecolinguistics, applied linguistics, discourse studies, environmental humanities, postcolonial and decolonial studies, Indigenous studies, anthropology, sociology, literary and cultural studies, communication studies, and related fields are warmly invited. Contributions from early-career researchers and emerging scholars are also strongly encouraged. Proposed chapters may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:
• decolonial and anti-colonial approaches to ecolinguistic theory
• coloniality and environmental discourse
• language, land, memory, and ecological belonging
• Indigenous ecological knowledge and linguistic worldviews
• oral traditions, storytelling, and environmental ethics
• place naming, toponymy, and colonial cartographies
• language endangerment, ecological loss, and biocultural diversity
• environmental justice and linguistic justice
• extractivism, development discourse, and ecological violence
• climate change discourse in colonized and formerly colonized societies
• conservation narratives and the erasure or exclusion of local communities
• human–nonhuman relations in Indigenous or local languages
• ecofeminist, Indigenous, and decolonial intersections in language and ecology
• translation, epistemic violence, and ecological untranslatability
• Global South perspectives on language and environment
• activism, resistance discourse, and community-based ecological communication
• pedagogies and curricula for decolonizing ecolinguistics
• literary, media, and cultural representations of ecology in postcolonial contexts
• linguistic imperialism and environmental knowledge production
• intersections of race, class, gender, language, and ecology
Important Dates
• Abstract submission deadline: 30 August 2026
• Notification of acceptance: 15 September 2026
• Full chapter submission deadline: 30 December 2026
• Final manuscript preparation: 30 March 2027
Submission Process
Prospective contributors are invited to submit the following:
• an abstract of 300–500 words
• a short biographical note of 100–150 words
• 5 keywords
• institutional affiliation, where applicable
Submissions should be sent to:
Mohamed MLILESS, Lorena A. O. Borges, Davi B. de Albuquerque, Elza K. N. N. do Couto
Email: m.mliless@edu.umi.ac.ma
Posted on April 30, 2026
