Deadline: 31 March 2027
Contact: Nikoleta Zampaki
Email: nzampaki@wsiz.edu.pl
Reading the Naval Lexicon: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Maritime Power and Ecology
Submission deadline: 31 March 2027
This special issue of Social Sciences & Humanities Open proposes a convergent method by reading the sea across interdisciplinary domains, like language and narrative, literature, media, and representation, and socio-educational practices (including ecological and infrastructural dimensions).
Guest editors:
Dr. Nikoleta Zampaki – University of Information Technology and Management, Rzeszów, Poland
Dr. Paula Wieczorek – University of Information Technology and Management, Rzeszów, Poland
Special issue information:
This special issue advances the emerging field of “hydro-criticism” (Winkiel, 2019) by offering the first systematic, cross-disciplinary framework that reads naval power, environmental change, language, media, and social practice as co-constitutive. While existing scholarship tends to silo these dimensions—naval history, marine biology, literary ocean studies, soundscape ecology, and critical military studies rarely ‘speak’ to one another—our issue demonstrates that a sonar ping is simultaneously an acoustic signal, an ecological disruption, a linguistic utterance, a narrative device, and an intermedial translation. By integrating these perspectives, the issue makes three specific contributions:
Methodological synthesis: It provides a replicable model for “convergent reading” across disciplines that normally use incommensurate methods (e.g., conversation analysis of bridge commands alongside bioacoustic mapping of cetacean stress responses).
Empirical filling of a gap: Environmental humanities have extensively studied commercial shipping, fishing, and climate change, but the naval dimension of ocean exploitation remains undertheorized. This issue foregrounds how military sonar, wrecks as toxic heritage, and naval bases as speech communities and polluted sites shape marine realities.
Critical vocabulary: It introduces and refines concepts such as “hydrolect” (specialized maritime lexicons), “toxic memory” (contested commemoration of polluted naval heritage), and “intermedial sonar” (how acoustic pressure becomes screen image, introducing biases). These terms enable future research across the humanities and social sciences.
Manuscript submission information:
You are invited to submit your manuscript any time before the submission deadline: 31st March 2027. Please select the article type “VSI: Reading the Naval Lexicon” while submitting your manuscript using the link https://www.editorialmanager.com/ssho/default.aspx.
Don’t hesitate to contact the guest editors with any inquiries about the appropriateness of contribution topics.
Guest editors:
Dr. Nikoleta Zampaki – nzampaki@wsiz.edu.pl
Dr. Paula Wieczorek – pwieczorek@wsiz.edu.pl
Articles should be 6,000-8,000 words and follow SSHO guidelines.
Keywords:
(naval studies) AND (environmental humanities) AND (hydro-criticism)
Why publish in this Special Issue?
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All articles in this special issue will be reviewed by no fewer than two independent experts to ensure the quality, originality and novelty of the work published.
Posted on July 8, 2026
