Updating Ecocriticism: Perspectives from Gen Z

Eds. Başak Ağın and Lenka Filipova

On 10 September 2020, NBC News ran the headline “Think 2020’s disasters are wild? Experts say the worst is yet to come,” reporting alarming projections 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 an Associated Press report, “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 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, yet Gen Zers are expected to carry on as 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,” following Morton, the increased digitalisation of the world appears to add to our daily environmental (and other) 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 and apps have, in turn, generated new utopian and dystopian imaginaries and technological disaster scenarios, all of which demand serious ecocritical attention. Digitalisation enables new modes of existence—through avatars, filters, usernames and anonymous personas—while also introducing new agendas to daily life. It has even given us a vocabulary of its own: love-bombing, ghosting, Bookstagram, Twitterature, CR (“currently reading”) and shelfie. Even reading habits, once associated with intellectual cultivation, language skills and reasoning, have shifted towards short-form formats such as Twitter/X threads. These are not merely new cultural practices but shifting modes of relationality, memory and environmental imagination. In view of these dynamic transformations that affect every aspect of life, how do we navigate the difficult terrain of ecocritical work in the twenty-first century?

Bearing all this in mind, this is an open call for updating ecocriticism. We welcome a variety of approaches—from 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, and AI- or human-created content on platforms including 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 this production should be nourished by multiple perspectives, from medical to digital, embodied to algorithmic, speculative to scientific. This, we believe, requires a new mirror reflecting the humanities’ ongoing commitment to exploring meaning, imagination and planetary ethics in a time of crisis. Emphasising constant change and transformation in an ongoing process of becoming, this volume seeks to address the challenges of practising ecocriticism in the current era, highlighting the need for a more interdisciplinary approach led by Gen Z scholars. We hope that the spontaneous interdisciplinarity of ecocritical studies, sparked by new contributions from Gen Z, will prompt a re-examination of conventional networks of relation. 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 bashak@gmail.com and filipovalen@gmail.com by 17 November 2025. You will be notified of the outcome by mid-December 2025; if accepted, full chapters of 4,500 words are due in June 2026. Students pursuing master’s and PhD degrees, as well as scholars who 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 aim to secure 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.

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.