Updating Ecocriticism: Perspectives from Gen Z

Eds. Başak Ağın, Z. Gizem Yılmaz, and Lenka Filipova

On September 10, 2020, NBC News gave the headline “Think 2020’s disasters are wild? Experts say the worst is yet to come,” with alarming news about future climate catastrophes.  Wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, and ever-increasing plastic pollution, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic, have spurred eco-anxiety around the globe. According to the same article by Associated Press, “University of Michigan environment dean Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist, said that in 30 years because of the climate change already baked into the atmosphere ‘we’re pretty much guaranteed that we’ll have double[d] what we have now.’” These catastrophic expectations confirm Timothy Morton’s assessment of global warming and climate change as hyperobjects: The end of the world has already happened, but Gen Z’ers are expected to carry on as the older generations did, even though they have spent most of their lives navigating an emotional ecology marked by eco-anxiety, solastalgia, compassion fatigue, ironic detachment, and eco-panic.

Since “the environmental emergency is also a crisis for our philosophical habits of thought,” to follow Morton, the increased digitalisation of the world seems to add to our daily environmental (or otherwise) concerns. For example, anxieties around cosmetic appearance and personal identity, amplified by digital interfaces, now shape much of everyday experience in online spaces. Attempts to manage these anxieties through social media filters or apps have, in turn, generated new utopian/dystopian imaginaries and technological disaster scenarios, all of which demand serious ecocritical attention. While enabling countless new modes of existence through avatars, filters, usernames, anonymous personas used in social media and adding new agendas to daily concerns, digitalisation also brought forth new concepts such as lovebombing, ghosting, bookstagram, Twitterature, CR (currently reading), and shelfie. Even reading habits, which were previously associated with concepts such as intellectuality, language skills and reasoning, have now evolved towards reading Twitter Flood stories. These are not just new cultural practices but also shifting modes of relationality, memory, and environmental imagination. In view of such dynamic transformation that affects every aspect of life, how do we navigate the difficult terrains of doing ecocriticism in the twenty-first century?

Bearing all these in mind, this is an open call for updating ecocriticism. We are looking for a variety of approaches from the time-tested methods of reading literature and the arts through ecological lenses to the study of new media forms such as video games, music videos, AI- or human-created content on social media and online platforms such as Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, and X. If ecocriticism, having already grown into the wider field of the environmental humanities, now summons “a new generation” of knowledge production, then we believe this kind of production must be fed by multiple perspectives, from medical to digital, embodied to algorithmic, speculative to scientific. This, we believe, requires a completely new mirror reflecting the humanities’ ongoing commitment to exploring meaning, imagination, and planetary ethics in a time of crisis. Emphasising a state of constant change and transformation in an endless process of becoming, this volume seeks to address challenges posed by doing ecocriticism in the current era, highlighting the need for a more interdisciplinary approach led by Gen Z scholars. We hope that this spontaneous interdisciplinarity of the ecocritical studies, sparked by new contributions from Gen Z, will lead to the questioning of conventional networks of relations. In the face of such profound shifts, ecocriticism itself must also transform, evolving with a new wave of thought, method, and imagination.

To contribute to this edited book as a Gen Z scholar, please e-mail your chapter proposal of around 250 to 500 words (with 3 to 5 keywords) and your short biography of 100 words to zgizemyz@gmail.com, bashak@gmail.com, and filipovalen@gmail.com by 17 November 2025. You will be notified of your acceptance by mid-December 2025, and if accepted, full chapters of 4500 words are to be submitted by June 2026. Students pursuing their Master’s and PhD degrees as well as scholars who have obtained their PhD within the last five years are welcome. Potential authors are welcome to email the editors directly with any questions or concerns.

We are thinking of securing a contract with a well-known publisher, such as Routledge, Bloomsbury, or Lexington.

About the editors:

Başak Ağın, PhD, is Associate Professor of English literature at TED University, Ankara, Türkiye. She is the founder of PENTACLE, the first Turkish website on environmental and post-humanities (https://thepentacle.org), the author of Posthümanizm: Kavram, Kuram, Bilim-Kurgu [Posthumanism: Concept, Theory, Science-Fiction] (2020), and the Turkish translator of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, published as Canlı Madde: Şeylerin Politik Ekolojisi (Akademim, 2024). In 2021, she edited the Turkish translation of Simon C. Estok’s Ecophobia Hypothesis (Routledge, 2018). She also co-edited two volumes, Posthuman Pathogenesis: Contagion in Literature, Arts, and Media (Routledge, 2022) and Beşerî Bilimlerin 50 Rengi: Çevreci, Dijital, Tıbbi ve Posthüman Sesler [50 Shades of Humanities: Environmental, Digital, Medical, and Posthuman Voices] (2023), the only handbook available for the Turkish academia in the relevant fields, the second volume of which is forthcoming. Her scholarly articles appeared in such journals as Ecozon@, CLCWeb, Neohelicon, Translation Review, Configurations, and EJES.

Z. Gizem Yılmaz, PhD, is an Associate Professor of English literature at Ankara Social Sciences University. She is one of the founding members of PENTACLE. She is a scholar and a performance artist at the same time. She translated and directed Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom with Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu; she adapted, staged and directed Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales;she made an ecocritical stage adaptations of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet; and her latest project was to translate and stage (in an elemental ecocritical way) Seneca’s Thyestes. Yılmaz also choreographs dance, and her choreography on plastic pollution was exhibited at the University of Helsinki. She is also the author of two Turkish books: Kozmik Koreografi: Bedenlerin Element Dansı [Cosmic Choreography: Elemental Dance of Bodies, 2023] and Tiyatronun Posthümanist Tarihçesi [Posthumanist History of Theatre, 2023]. She is also co-editor to Beşerî Bilimlerin 50 Rengi: Çevreci, Dijital, Tıbbi ve Posthüman Sesler [50 Shades of Humanities: Environmental, Digital, Medical, and Posthuman Voices, 2023]. Yılmaz, whose speeches on theatre and literature were broadcast on TRT Radio, combines posthumanism and ecocriticism with theatre and performing arts, and has published in such journals as ISLE, English Studies, Configurations, Neohelicon and CLCWeb.

Lenka Filipova, PhD, is an Assistant Lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin, where she teaches courses in literary and cultural studies. She is the author of Ecocriticism and the Sense of Place (Routledge, 2022). She is currently co-editing a special issue of Future Humanities titled “Climate Fiction and the Limits of Representation.” Filipova has contributed chapters to The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature (Routledge, 2022) The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature (Routledge, 2024), and published articles and chapters in the fields of environmental humanities and postcolonial studies.