Cognitive Ecologies: Thinking With, Through, and Against Environments
A Special Issue of The Apollonian: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies

Complete articles of up to 5,000 words due 30 September 2026. Personal essays, photo essays, poetry, and translation also invited.

Thinking does not happen only in heads. It is scaffolded by material surroundings, mediated by technological systems, shaped by sensory and affective conditions, and entangled with social, cultural, and ecological contexts. Work in cognitive anthropology, philosophy of mind, media theory, and the environmental humanities — Hutchins, Clark and Chalmers, Malafouris, Hayles, Tribble and Sutton — has made this claim familiar: cognition is distributed, situated, extended, ecological.

This special issue asks what follows politically. If environments condition thought, their distribution is never neutral. Some environments hold thinking; others deplete it. Attention is farmed and resold. Cognitive labour is extracted, and its exhaustion returned to the worker as a personal deficiency. Access to the conditions of sustained thought is stratified by disability, class, race, geography, and institutional position. Cognitive ecology has been better at describing distribution than at asking who bears its costs.

We invite work that thinks with environments, through them, and against them: against environments that are hostile, extractive, or disabling, and against the conceptual habits that make such hostility invisible by relocating cognitive failure inside individual heads.

Provocations rather than prescriptions:

• What does the extended-mind tradition still owe to the individualism it set out to displace?
• What becomes visible when neurodivergent thinking is read as ecological practice rather than as impairment?
• Who is environmental design for, and what does accessible cognitive infrastructure actually require?
• When does a platform scaffold thought, and when does it farm it?
• How should burnout be theorised — as individual pathology, or as an infrastructural effect?
• What forms of cognitive labour are rendered invisible by the environments that depend on them?
• What does ecological crisis do to the conditions under which sustained thinking is possible?

We welcome theoretically rigorous work that is also conceptually adventurous. Contributions may draw on cognitive science, phenomenology, posthumanism, disability and neurodiversity studies, media theory, or environmental thought, and should remain accountable to the methods of their own traditions rather than adopting a common idiom.

Forms

The Apollonian publishes personal essays, photo essays, poetry, and translation alongside academic articles, and this issue invites all of them. The invitation is not decorative. If cognition is scaffolded by environments, then the forms in which thinking is made public are themselves cognitive infrastructure — and the conventional article is one environment among others, with its own affordances and its own exclusions. Work that argues in another form is enacting the issue's claim rather than describing it.

We are particularly interested in:

• Personal essays (1,500–2,500 words) on environments in which thinking has been possible, or impossible: sickrooms, commutes, open-plan offices, kitchens, waiting rooms, the internet at three in the morning.
• Photo essays (6–12 images with a text of up to 400 words) on cognitive environments — the architecture of attention, spaces built to hold thought or to hurry it, infrastructures of concentration and of its collapse.
• Poetry and translation engaging cognition, attention, or environmental thought, including work on untranslatability and on what fails to cross between languages.

Submissions in these categories follow the journal's standard requirements for length and format and are read alongside the academic articles.

Submissions

Complete work to tcaloped@myune.edu.au and apollonianjournal@gmail.com by 30 September 2026, with "Submission–The Apollonian–[Author's Name]" in the subject line.

Prepare submissions for blind peer review: a cover page carrying title, abstract, keywords, and biographical note, with no identifying details from the second page onwards. MLA 9th edition, Times New Roman 12pt, 1.2 line spacing, unlinked endnotes only (no footnotes), Word format (.doc or .docx). Full guidelines: https://theapollonian.in/?page_id=195

Peer review takes two to three months, with provisionally accepted authors asked to return revisions within a fortnight.

This is a direct call for finished work rather than a two-stage abstract process, and the issue will be correspondingly selective. Work already at an advanced stage of drafting is very welcome, and anyone considering a submission is warmly encouraged to write with a short description of the piece before the deadline so I can advise on fit. I am glad to hear from early career researchers, independent scholars, and contributors writing from outside the Anglophone North.

Guest editor: Tess Ezzy, University of New England, Director of the Neurodivergent Creative Methods Lab.