ecocriticism and environmental studies

Concept Note:

Storytelling, from the metamorphic narratives of the Indian epics such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and Ovid’s ancient transmutations to the evolving interfaces of the present, has been an act of survival through transformation. Metamorphosis is the underlying imperative of the twenty-first century; it is not just a biological inevitability but a relentless ontological pulse beating beneath the surface of our global narratives. We inhabit a world amid a grand moulting, where the traditional mediums of storytelling, like the printed page, the physical body, and the ancestral soil, are being reshaped under the pressures of a planetary crisis.

We invite chapter proposals for an edited collection of essays based upon our split-panel session, Adventures in Ecocriticism, at SAMLA 97. We plan to propose this collection for the Bloomsbury Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series, at the encouragement of the series editor, Douglas Vakoch.

Call for Contributions

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies

Vol. 53 No. 2 | September 2027

Call for Papers

Critical Agrarian Humanities:

Farming and World-Making in the Anthropocene

Guest Editors

Shiuhhuah Serena Chou (Academia Sinica)

Scott Slovic (Oregon Research Institute)

Deadline for Submissions: December 31, 2026

Technological futures are not given. They are made, and they can be made differently. EMERGE 2026: Contested Futures takes place at a moment when AI systems have become central to the organization of economic power, political control, and social sorting, while democratic institutions struggle to keep pace and ecological costs mount. Rather than treating technological change as inevitable or neutral, the conference invites critical reflection on how emerging technologies are developed, governed, narrated, and contested.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: RAIN AND ROOTSA Nature & Earth Haiku Anthology

Fresh Words – An International Literary Magazine

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/freshwordsmagazine/announcements

Key Dates

• Submission Deadline: August 15, 2026

Join a panel at the 14th annual CSULA Eagle Con!  Eagle Con is an annual event devoted the power and potential of speculative and fantastic media to critique social formations, interrogate subjectivities, and constitute alternative worlds. 

Eco-Poetics and Environmental Artivism
A Transdisciplinary Conference
July 16-17, 2026
July 16: In person participation at Pembroke Lodge, Richmond Park (and online)
July 17: Fully online
Conference Page: https://labrc.co.uk/2026/01/21/ecopoetics2026/

Fees** (for both attendees and presenters):
£180 (In person participation)
£100 (Online participation)
**Prices exclude Eventbrite fees

Call for Presentations:

Call for abstracts - Forward Thinking: New Voices for the Future

In an era marked by ecological breakdown, epistemic instability, and widening global precarity, the very notion of “the future” has become a site of intense conceptual struggle. We invite scholars carrying out visionary work across the humanities — philosophy, literary theory, political thought, cultural studies, and related fields — to articulate bold and innovative interventions on what it means to think futurity today. 

Agricultural and Rural Development in the Twentieth Century
Yearbook for the History of Global Development

Volume co-editors Leo Chu (University of New South Wales) and James Lin (University of Washington, Seattle)

Gothic Nature is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that engages with the Gothic conceptions of, and relationship to, the natural world. For the TV and film review section of its sixth issue, the journal seeks reviews for ecoGothic television series and films released in the last couple of years (2023–2026). Issue VI of the journal is unthemed, so there is no restriction on the types of film and TV we’d like reviews for. As a general guideline, we’d be interested to see reviews of the following (please note that this is not an exhaustive list, reviews of other relevant films and programmes are more than welcome):

Film:

Background

The Just Transition Knowledge Network (JETNET), an initiative of the Just Transition Research Centre at IIT Kanpur, invites national and international participants to its Annual Conference 2026.

Animal Adaptations

We invite proposals for a small number of additional chapters for an edited volume on animal adaptations, edited by Justyna Włodarczyk (University of Warsaw) and Michael Fuchs (University of Innsbruck).

SESSION DESCRIPTION

Afrofuturism, Latinx altermundos, Indigenous futurisms, solarpunk, cli-fi — the speculative modes through which BIPOC writers have imagined, contested, and survived the present are not marginal subgenres. They are among the most politically urgent literary formations of the last half-century, and among the least fully mapped by existing scholarship. This special session invites papers that read across these formations to ask: what does speculative fiction do when it is written from the borderlands, from the barrio, from the reservation, from the maquiladora corridor, from communities that have been made to inhabit the dystopian present that other traditions only project?

The deadline for abstract submission has been extended until 30 June, 2026.