Call for Chapters: Ecocultural Identity

(Due to editors: AUGUST 27, 2017):

Book Title: Ecocultural Identity

Co-Editors: Tema Milstein (University of New Mexico) & José Castro-Sotomayor (University of New Mexico)

This edited book will bring transdisciplinary cultural, discursive, spatial, political, and ecological lenses to a much overlooked yet profoundly important issue of our time: ecocultural identity. We understand ecocultural identity as comprising the materially and discursively constructed positionality, subjectivity, perception, and practice that inform one’s emotional, embodied, ethical, and political sensibilities regarding the more than human world (Abram, c1996.). The book and its chapters will identify, examine, and reflect upon the cultivations, constraints, and force of these symbolically and materially emergent identities in our everyday and extraordinary lives.
We intend this book to foster a radical epistemology focused on ways ecocultural identities are being, and can be, thought, felt, performed, and experienced in ways directly relevant to regenerative Earth futures. This examination entails reflecting upon a type of politics that engages with the plurality of ecological subjectivities and environmental identities in flux and formation in the Anthropocene/Capitalocene (Moore, 2015)/Chthulucene (Haraway, 2016). Chapters in this book will trouble the tendency to conceive of the ecological as a subsidiary of the economic, political, historical, and cultural and will examine the ecological as mutually constituted with identity, meaning, and experience (Milstein, 2011). In defining, illustrating, and analyzing the processes, expressions, and functions of ecocultural identity, contributors will explore humans as diverse, always ecological beings.

As extremist rhetoric shatters conventional political scenarios, and demonstrations of climate denial, racism, sexism, and xenophobia intoxicate much of the political arena, ecological perspectives on identity open windows to different ways of understanding the world that are both broadly ethical and potentially liberatory. Indeed, multi and transdisciplinary academics and practitioners have been doing this work for some time. We hope some of this book’s chapters will explore and bridge the disconnect between such ongoing ecocentric troubling and knowing and the great transformative shifts in praxis that must prevail to enact these identities and knowings at a systems scale.

This book has an individual-local-global focus, and beyond an interest in grounded theoretical essays we are interested in a broad range of case studies including but not limited to such lived spheres as traditional and nontraditional ecocultural identities in networks of actions for ecological and cultural protection, radical environmental discourses emerging from global South identity-based resistance movements, and Western-infused identity struggles to target and dismantle passivity and dissociation normalized by market-driven logics. While divergent ecocultural identities emerge from different material, territorial, and temporal experiences, these identities are a shared entry point to environmental embeddedness in shared understandings and engagements of anthropogenic planetary disruption and renewal.

Questions contributors could address in their submissions include but are not limited to:

-       In what ways are ecocultural identities produced, performed, and negotiated?

-       How do varied ecocultural identities inform different ecological relations and how does the more-than-human world inform different ecocultural identities?

-       What are the cultural boundaries of ecological identities and how are those borders patrolled and transgressed?

-       What are some mutually constitutive relationships between specific political ecologies and interrelated ecocultural identities?

-       How does an ecological perspective on identity transfer into the realm of politics?

-       How do different bodies experience and perform ecocultural identity?

-       What are the implications of different or similar ecocultural identities for environmental movements or systems of environmental governance?

-       How might coalitions and alliances of ecocultural identities shape transnational politics?

-       How might diverse or intersecting ecocultural identities contribute to more or less antagonistic sociopolitical, economic, cultural, and environmental public spheres?

-       What are the roles of media in shaping, reproducing, and transforming ecocultural identities?

-       How do embodied, sensory, spiritual, and/or emotional understandings illuminate the formation of ecocultural identities?

-       How do wider cultural shifts from holistic and mutualist ways-of-being to more individualistic and dualist ones inform ecocultural identities?

-       How do the material conditions of places in environmental distress or generativity influence ways people think about and experience their ecocultural identity?

-       How do modes of thought and practice such as post-humanisms, rewilding, novel ecosystems, or re-indigenizing emerge from and/or inform ecocultural identities?

-       What is the relevance of ecocultural identities in conducting research? What kind of privileges are troubled by ecocentric versus anthropocentric positionalities in scholarship?

The book will have an international and transdisciplinary focus to represent the range of approaches and perspectives on issues of ecocultural identity. Scholars, educators, practitioners, and graduate students across disciplines are invited to submit full papers or abstracts for consideration. Chapter proposal submissions should be in the form of: (1) a 200-word author bio AND (2) a complete paper (5,000-7,000 words including references) OR extended abstract (400-500 words) (in either form, use APA 6th edition for citations/references).

For consideration, email submissions (author bio and paper/abstract) by August 27, 2017, to José Castro-Sotomayor at castrosotomayorj@unm.edu.
TIMELINE NOTE: We have verbal interest from a top academic press and plan a quick turnaround for formal consideration. As such, with chapter submissions due on August 27, we plan on contacting chapter submitters with decisions on revise/resubmit or acceptance by August 31 and delivering the book proposal to publishing houses as early as September 1. Those receiving revise/resubmit decisions on chapter submissions and those submitting abstracts that receive further consideration as complete papers will submit revisions and/or complete papers to the editors by Nov. 1, 2017.

References

Abram, D. (c1996.). The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world. New York : Pantheon Books,.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Milstein, T. (2011). Nature Identification: The Power of Pointing and Naming. Environmental Communication, 5(1), 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2010.535836
Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the web of life: ecology and the accumulation of capital (1st ed.). New York: Verso.
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Joe Mazer, jmazer@clemson.edu

2018 Basic Course Directors Conference—June 1-2, 2018

Clemson University is pleased to host the 56th Annual Basic Course Directors Conference at The Westin Poinsett Hotel in Greenville, South Carolina on June 1-2, 2018. Please review the conference website here: http://bit.ly/2uPUSGE

We will be disseminating information about the conference on our Facebook page (Basic Course Directors) as well as via the basic course director’s listserv (to join the listserv contact Sam Wallace at wallace@udayton.edu). Please consider joining these groups for more updated information on registration information and the conference schedule. Questions? Contact Joe Mazer at jmazer@clemson.edu