Beyond the Anthropocene: Special Issue of ASAP/Journal

https://asapjournal.com/call-for-papers/

Special Issue Editors: Sarah Dimick and Ben Stanley

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE: July 31, 2025

ESSAY SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 15 January 2026 

Now that the Anthropocene thesis has been thoroughly critiqued–by postcolonial, Indigenous, and Black studies–what becomes apparent in its wake? What issues, frameworks, or modes of reading did the Anthropocene obscure? What ideas are sprouting in the intellectual space it once held? We seek papers that think outside and beyond the Anthropocene, moving along other timescales or within other currents of environmental thought.

Rather than rehash critiques of the Anthropocene—which are thoroughly established —this special issue instead asks what comes into focus when scholars accept these critiques as necessary but accomplished groundwork. Having deconstructed the Anthropocene, what constructive work can now flourish? Which methodological currents can invigorate environmental scholarship committed to political, racial, and economic justice? If a post- Anthropocene dawns, what might be its conceptual fulcrum and its aesthetic tendencies? These are urgent questions for both scholarship and the arts, as creative responses will be crucial to picturing lifeworlds possible on a planet structured by continuations of the same harmful mechanisms that have been with us for hundreds of years. The realm of art and aesthetics will generate strategies and tactics of survival.

It is not a coincidence that Anthropocene critiques were issued by fields attuned to injustice and power; this special issue retains those emphases. If the Anthropocene concept generated a sense of urgency (and a vocabulary for interdisciplinarity), how can that sense of dire consequence invigorate environmental scholarship committed to political, racial, and economic justice? We attend to overlooked environmental threats, writing from geographies often elided in Anthropocene discourse, and narratives at scales more nuanced than the species. We welcome traditional scholarly articles but also creative or experimental interventions, from any discipline(s) within arts, humanities, or social sciences.

Please send your abstract of 400-500 words, accompanied by a 100-150 word bio, to the special issue editors, Sarah Dimick (sarah.dimick@northwestern.edu) and Ben Stanley (bstanley@udel.edu), by July 31, 2025. Decisions on abstracts will be communicated in mid-August 2025; full articles will be due January 15, 2026.  Completed articles should be submitted to the journal’s online submission site at: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/asapjournal.

Full-length essay submissions of 6000-8000 words (including notes but excluding translations, which should accompany foreign language quotations) in Microsoft Word should be prepared in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style. All content in the journal is anonymously peer reviewed by at least two referees. If the contribution includes any materials (e.g., quotations that exceed fair use, illustrations, charts, other graphics) that have been taken from another source, the author must obtain written permission to reproduce them in print and electronic formats and assume all reprinting costs. Manuscripts in languages other than English are accepted for review but must be accompanied by a detailed summary in English (generally of 1,000–1,500 words) and must be translated into English if they are recommended for publication. ASAP/Journal does not consider already published work or work simultaneously under consideration by another publishing source. Authors’ names should not appear on manuscripts; when submitting manuscripts, authors should remove identifying information by clicking on “File”/”Properties” in Microsoft Word and removing identifying tags for the piece. Authors should not refer to themselves in the first person in the submitted text or notes if such references would identify them. For additional submission guidelines, please see: https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/asap_journal/guidelines.html

Sarah Dimick (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor jointly appointed in the Department of English and the Program in Environmental Policy and Culture at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on portrayals of climate change and environmental justice in contemporary Anglophone literatures. Her first book, Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures was published by Columbia University Press in October, 2024. Sarah’s writing has appeared in journals including ISLE, Contemporary Literature, Post45: Contemporaries, Mosaic, and other venues. Her research has been supported by the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University, and the Greenhouse at the University of Stavanger. She currently serves as a co-editor for Under the Sign of Nature, a book series in the environmental humanities published by University of Virginia Press.

Ben Stanley (they/them/theirs) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Delaware, where they lead the university’s Center for Environmental Humanities. Situated in the postcolonial environmental humanities, their research explores how Global South authors and activists narrate and understand relationships among globalization, empire, and environmental precarity. Ben’s areas of focus include contemporary South Africa and India, food studies, and energy humanities. Their first book, Precarious Eating: Narrating Environmental Harm in the Global South, was published by University of Minnesota Press in December 2024. Ben’s work has appeared in journals such as The Global South, ISLE, and Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society; and in collections such as The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism Online, Cli-Fi and Class (University of Virginia Press), and Modernism and Food Studies (University Press of Florida). Ben is working on a new monograph tentatively titled “Mobilities: Energy and Movement in a Changing South Africa”.