Guest editor: Maxime Fecteau

Primordial and born of Chaos, Gaia wears many faces. In Hesiod’s Theogony she is a fertile, earth-bodied mother; she is also an insurgent force—ally to the Titans and to violent births. This constitutive ambivalence—nourishing ground and upheaval, regeneration and revolt—guides the 15th issue of MuseMedusa. We follow the figure to probe the regimes of time and action it exceeds, while noting how modern representational devices have narrowed its plurality of faces (Latour, 1991; 2015). In short, understanding Gaia today means holding Greek myth together with attention to planetary change.

Modernity flattened Earth into a measurable “globe,” gave time the clock and history a straight line (Cosgrove, 2001), and in the process smoothed out the many lives and voices Gaia bears. In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), Amitav Ghosh shows how our canonical imaginative forms increasingly falter: the realist novel, inherited from the nineteenth‑century, remains largely blind to unlikely natural events and to nonhuman scales. That blindness, he suggests, has a geological lineage. Uniformitarianism—the backbone of modern geology—normalized steady change and statistical plausibility, an outlook the realist novel absorbed into its chronotope, favoring middling duration, ordinary causality, and probable events. Anthropocene temporalities, by contrast—nonlinear and marked by tipping points—exceed those frames (Chakrabarty, 2009). They operate at scales and frequencies that render extremes plausible and unsettle realism’s conventions.

The “Mother Nature” presumed generous and docile is asserting herself: flash floods, megafires, acidifying seas, mass displacements, extinctions. In response, the arts and letters do more than represent; they build perceptual and positional devices that redirect attention and recompose the sensible (Rancière, 2000; Ingold, 2011). Earth refuses to be a backdrop: she steps onstage as a shape‑shifting protagonist and redraws our frames of attention (Latour, 2015). Hence the call for other narrative regimes: shift from character arcs to processes; scale up without losing situated footholds; braid evidence with fiction; assemble archives; stage polyphonies that include nonhuman voices; reinvent cartography; choreograph works that make cycles, gradients, and feedback palpable (Tsing, 2015).

This reframing speaks to what Isabelle Stengers, in In Catastrophic Times (2009), calls “the intrusion of Gaia”: the end of smoothed‑over presentations of the Earth, the collapse of the illusion of a silent nature, and the irruption, in the present, of temporalities that exceed us. These temporalities interlock—latencies (bioaccumulation, slow decay), feedback loops (permafrost thaw, reef bleaching), and rapid shifts when thresholds are crossed—and they recast horizons of action (Nixon, 2011). Moreover, these dynamics are unevenly distributed: coasts, archipelagos, mining basins, and urban centers face different speeds and risks (Malm, 2016). The ecological fallout of the “Great Acceleration” is not reducible to curves on graphs; it appears in the incalculable ways Earth elbows into our lives and reshuffles markers inherited from the nineteenth century (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2013).

Where geological scale meets human rhythm, our narrative and representational forms grind their gears: how do we tell what spans millennia yet burns now? Who should speak to phenomena that are massively distributed, nonlocal, and that pierce and “drain” the present (Morton, 2013)? From such formal questions follow ethical and political stakes, inseparable from choices on the page: responsibility and accountability; community consent; tempos of decision, care, and repair; and, in counterpoint, critique of imperial inheritances and fossil capitalism that shape imaginaries and the infrastructures of disruption (Yusoff, 2018; Liboiron, 2021). Here, formal invention already takes a stand (Haraway, 2016). Choosing how to tell matters as much as what is told. Forms carry assumptions about agency, causality, and community; altering them redistributes roles and makes other relations with the living possible.

In the wake of the Gaia hypothesis—as James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis framed it: Earth self‑regulating through symbiosis—reinterpreted notably by Bruno Latour, we propose to revisit imaginaries of time and action: not as a melancholic counterpoint to modern “progress,” but to test rhythms, phases, and metamorphoses where the human is neither hero nor hub (Le Guin, 1989). We invite contributions that try out forms equal to the clash of scales. Which narratives, images, and gestures render shareable processes that are at once slow and abrupt, planetary yet felt from particular places? Which devices displace the subject, make room for nonhumans, and reconfigure how we perceive and tell, from local grounds to earthly vistas? Between two temporal regimes—slow continuities (uniformitarianism) and sudden ruptures (catastrophism)—how do literature and the arts compose with Gaia: her self‑regulation, thresholds of tolerance, and apparent passivity that flips into reaction? What narrative, visual, stage, or sonic assemblages can hold processes in gradients, in latency, in abrupt events, in archives of becoming, and answer the “great derangement” Ghosh points out? We seek contributions that braid theory with situated approaches, description with sensory experiences, evidence with invention—to open ways of composing with a restless Earth: uneasy, agitated, increasingly damaged (Tsing et al., 2017).

Submit original articles, creative texts, or unpublished visual works—in French, English, or German—by November 15, 2026 to musemedusa@umontreal.ca, copying Maxime Fecteau (fecteau.maxime.2@courrier.uqam.ca).

Each submission (except creative works, for which a short note and two keyword lists suffice) should include a brief bio‑bibliography, two abstracts, and two lists of 10 keywords, in French and English (see submission guidelines).