CALL FOR CHAPTERS

Abstracts are invited for the book titled Staying Together: NatureCulture in a Changing World contracted by Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield. Contributors include: Caren Irr (Brandeis University), Alf Hornborg (Lund University), Dominic Boyer (Rice University), Subhankar Banerjee (The University of New Mexico), Scott Slovic (University of Idaho), Lenka Filipova (Freie Universitat, Berlin), Nikoleta Zampaki (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece), Micheal Northcott (University of Edinburgh & Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia) and others. The book will come out in 2023. 

This book is about ‘staying together’, living together, the dynamics and poetics of togetherness. It demonstrates, through a strong investment in nature studies, non-human studies and nature culture and cohabitative readings, a commitment to what William Connolly calls the ‘embeddedness’ or ‘interconnectedness. We are a part of a democracy of living which is both deterministic and conditioned and, most often, aberrant and beyond human cognition. Perhaps, this is why nature and culture have come to lose the hyphen in between and collapsed to become natureculture. This changes the pattern and principle of togetherness, the living and loving principle among human, the non-human other and the abiotic counterparts. It is much more subtle and differential than a mere Bruno Latour or Manuel DeLanda or Jane Bennett or William Connolly or Rosi Braidotti model of investigation. Being together can be planned and sustained; sustainability can be programmed and implemented; but sometimes nature is too temperamental and variegated to get framed in theory. It is in living and life experiences that nature tries to express itself. It can be uncanny, improbable and sublime; and with it the culture and our planetary ways of living are impinged upon, revised, modulated and projected without being deterministic and calculable all the time.

The nature culture dialectic stands deconstructed and the status of life and being embedded are complex and open processes. The movement of socio-cultural-natural forces can be with ‘thick universals or intrinsic purpose’, Kantian, and again, self-organizing, a continuum, and a “flow” (in the way in which Michel Serres conceives it). Living together is mechanical, deeply invested, experiential, a becoming, and often a disembodied space of being. The book speaks of a co-habitation, a kind of co-presence that happens for the good of all and has been happening before we realized its prevalence. This co-beingness is deeply founded in difference, differentiation and dispersion. Who am I is who We are. Staying together is exploring and investigating this fraught and profound “weness” at a variety of levels.  The book looks into forms of biocentrism and bioegalitarianism where there are opportunities for the affirmation of difference as much as declaration of complexities in co-specicism, co-occurrence and co-being. The argument of Staying Together lies in biodiverse and interconnective and intersubjective courtship where the human, the nonhuman and the more than human ‘stay” together in differentiation and transformation. In fact, “staying” is never exclusively ordinal and pedagogic; “staying” has in it an undercurrent of struggle, a co-sharing in forms of rights, justice, domination, hospitality and accommodation. Staying together, as part of a new cult of living, premises its dynamics and operative motor with a note of suspicion about the language of anthropomorphic convenience. Whether in aesthetic education or conservationism or human-nonhuman togetherness or technology-capitalism and transcendence, as the book argumentatively unravels, we encounter a de-essentialization and response-ability towards whatever is not human.

I am interested in submissions that are based on (yet not limited to):

• Staying together as the politics of conservation, restoration, intervention, and egalitarian ethics.
• Staying together as a fresh ethics of living. How does this togetherness approves one’s existence amidst other forms of existence: living with a butterfly and a bee as much as living with the air and the mountains as much as with a frog and a whale and plastic and industrial waste. It commits to places, builds spaces and subjectivities, and proposes identity amidst difference. Can we call this ecological tolerance?
• Should this transpersonal and transactional act of being and becoming get considered as bio-democratic survival and sustenance? How can the complexity of sustainability and survivality lead us to re-planetize the planet?
• Are we unworlding an Earth where the meaning and ethos “being together” demand reinvention and rearticulation?  

Interested scholars and colleagues may submit their abstracts by 30th November; selected papers need to be submitted positively by 10th March. Length of the chapters are expected to be between 5000-6000 words including notes. Please note we are maintaining a strict deadline of submission. The book is scheduled to come out late 2023.

All queries and abstracts must be send to this address:  kaushanimondal@nbu.ac.in .

Kaushani Mondal,

Assistant Professor,

Department of English,

University of North Bengal, India.