Call for Papers

Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media Vol. 33, issue 1/2025

 

ECOLOGICAL EMERGENCIES ACROSS MEDIA 

 

We live in a state of planetary environmental emergency; scientific research as well as global news reports and local or Indigenous testimonies witness an increase in alarming signs of current and future destruction. Even though anxiety is widespread, the very basic premises of the current state remain utterly complex: the meaning of terms such as ‘climate’, ‘environment’, or ‘emergency’ are under continuous discussion in various academic disciplines. 
We are looking for papers who wish to discuss how environmental emergencies per definition are mediated and often narrated phenomena. This means that we are confronted with the crisis by way of what has been called ‘ecomedia’, the broad range of media types representing different aspects of the ecological crisis. 

This thematic issue wishes to contribute to cultural and literary studies as well as the broader fields of environmental humanities and media studies. In addition to this diverse range of artistic humanities studies, the volume also has an intermedial point of view, regarding both the mixed media character of all artistic forms, including literature, but also the transports and transformations of content from one medial constellation to another.

Together, the articles we are looking for should be informed by intermedial studies to help understand the complex role that artistic and storytelling media forms play in communicating the environmental crisis. 
As one of the main tasks, we need to ask how artistic mediations have an impact on the ways in which we configure and conceive of ways of acting ethically, culturally, politically, and cognitively in the complexity of the environmental emergency. We include contributions from relevant academic, creative/artistic research, and activist disciplines

We invite contributors to this special issue of Ekphrasis who wish to examine issues related to the articulation of at least (but not limited to) two main questions concerning Ecological Emergencies Across Media.

Building on the lively discussions across both humanities and natural and social sciences, the notion of emergency needs elaboration, not least when this is brought into contact with the specific ideas about climate and ecological crises.
Taking seriously the intermedial idea that all representations are necessarily mediations, a deepened understanding of the usefulness, or the disadvantages of current intermedial theoretizations regarding societal challenges will be welcome.

 

References:

Andermann, Jens et al., Editors, Natura: Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape,
Diaphones, Zürich, 2018.
Bruhn, Jørgen & Schirrmacher, Beate (red.), Intermedial studies: an introduction to meaning
across media, Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, 2022.
Demos, T.J., Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing, Duke University Press,
Durham, NC, 2020.
Goodbody, Axel and Johns-Putra, Adeline, Editors, Cli-fi: A Companion, Peter Lang,
Frankfurt a.M., 2019.
Hart, Heidi, Climate Thanatology: Companioning What Remains, Really Simple Syndication
Press, Copenhagen, 2022.
Iovino, Serenella and Oppermann, Serpil, Editors, Material Ecocriticism, Indiana University
Press, Bloomington, IN, 2014.
Jue, Melody, Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater, Duke University Press, Durham,
NC, 2020.
Kusserow, Karl, Editor, Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2021.
Latour, Bruno, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, ed. C. Porter,
Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, 2021.
López, Antonio, Chang, Alenda Y., Chu, Kiu-wai, Ivakhiv, Adrian, Rust, Stephen and Tola,
Miriam, Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies, Routledge, New York, 2023.
Maxwell, Richard et al., Editors, Media and the Ecological Crisis, Routledge, New York,
2015.
Morton, Timothy, All Art Is Ecological, Penguin Random House, New York, 2021.

Nixon, Rob, Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2011

Salmose, Niklas and Bruhn, Jørgen, Intermedial Ecocriticism. The Climate Crisis Through Art and Media, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, New York, 2024.

Guidelines:

We are welcoming proposals for papers from all theoretical approaches and also from
practice-based researchers or artists.
Article proposals: 15 March 2025
Acceptance notice: 25 March 2025
Final submission deadline: (5,000-9,000 words for articles, including a 300 word abstract, 5-7
keywords, and a list of references): 1 June 2025.
Issue editors: Heidi Hart, Ola Ståhl, Jørgen Bruhn
email: ecoemergency@lnu.se

 

Note to authors: Both the proposal and the final text should observe the submission guidelines to be found on our website: https://www.ekphrasisjournal.ro/index.php?p=subm and the recommended MLA citation style.  

The articles should be original material not published in any other media before.

Ekphrasis is a peer-reviewed academic journal, edited by the Faculty of Theatre and Television, “Babes-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Ekphrasis is indexed in Emerging Sources Citation Index (Clarivate Analytics), SCOPUS, ERIH PLUS, EBSCO, NSD, and CEEOL.