CFP: Environment: From A Humanities Perspective (Nov 2018)

deadline for submissions: 
November 10, 2018
full name / name of organization: 
Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry

Environment: From A Humanities Perspective (Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 5.1)

In the last decades, we have witnessed concerted efforts from worldwide organisations such as the UN or from leaders of powerful nations to adopt strategies that aim to preserve our planet and raise environmental awareness among the public. These efforts have been accelerated partly by world environmentalists such as Rachel Carson, Wangari Maathai, Chico Mendes and others and partly by global social movements such as the Chipko Movement in India, Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Plastic Pollution Coalition, etc. Such interventions have enthused humanities and social sciences scholars to participate in discussions, controlled earlier by hard sciences and understand how environmental issues have affected human life, society, and culture.

With neoliberal capitalism’s aggressive strategies of accumulation and rising academic concerns about the term ‘Anthropocene’ in the twenty-first century, humanities and social sciences scholars have attempted to engage with environment in an interdisciplinary fashion. For instance, literary critics have borrowed from fields such as marine biology, toxicology or physical sciences while economists and sociologists have drawn upon literary and cultural theories to make sense of our environment in a holistic manner. Through such studies, it has become clear that strategies relating to preserving our environment from destructive practices to building awareness programmes cannot be adopted without engaging the humanities which critically study, the behaviour, imagination, perception, and communication between humans, not to mention the human-non-human exchanges. As a result, in the last two decades at least, there have been increasing academic studies in the humanities about environment, about human and post-human, animality, species preservation, forests, resource extraction, energy crisis, environmental philosophy and ethics, sustainability, and others.

This current issue attempts to understand how humanities have engaged with environmental scholarship. We will explore questions like the following. How do humanistic fields contribute to imagining, perceiving, and understanding the environment? In what way does the field register environment’s impact on society and culture? Do literary and cultural works offer any insight into environmental scholarship? What relevance do geological terms like ‘Anthropocene,’ ‘Meghalaya,’ or ‘Capitalocene’ have for the humanities? How does humanities make sense of aspects such as resource extraction and resistance movements for a humanistic environmental scholarship?

Focussed areas will include but are not limited to:

Environment in conversation with humanities

Anthropocene debates in humanities

Literature of climate change

Environment, literature, and natural sciences

Representation of environmental disasters

Theorising Environment

Environmental ethics

Planetary consciousness

Neoliberalism, resource extraction, and resistance

Social Movements regarding environment

Species extinction

Animal Studies and environmental issues

Environment, humanism and post-humanism

Please e-mail your unpublished, full papers (a minimum 5000 to a maximum of 7000 words including endnotes and bibliography, along with a 200 word abstract, 6 keywords and a 100 word bio-note) as MS Word attachments, in accordance with our journal style guidelines (see the relevant section in Sanglap’s website) to by November 10, 2018. We will get back to you after the peer-reviews by January 10.The issue will be published in March 2019.