Lexicon for Animacy
Due Date: 10-01-2025
This critical-creative volume is an effort to make English hold realities outside of its ideological boundaries. We view this project as contributing to the decolonizing work so many writers, artists, and theorists—both Indigenous and otherwise—call for Western societies to undertake at this moment. English, as a colonizer language, has a long history of adopting the words of other peoples that are “useful” or that fit neatly inside its internal logics. This lexicon is a collection of words and concepts that push at the structures that ideologically shape English, and thus settler-colonial worldviews; it seeks words/concepts that rupture boundaries, illuminate weak spots in colonizing ideologies, accurately express lived reality, or that open new understandings.
In this volume, we seek two kinds of entries capacious enough to hold the animacy of our living planet.
1. Coined concepts/words that explore, define, deploy, and label animacy, broadly writ.
For example: Enrique Salmón’s “kincentric ecology,” Robin Wall Kimmerer’s pronoun “ki,” Donna Harraway’s “becoming with,” Báyò Akómólafé’s “nounism.”
2. Already existing words/concepts from other languages that attempt to reach into this space in beautiful, profound, or illuminating ways.
We specifically welcome words or phrases that offer other lenses through which to express animacy and human enmeshment beyond a settler-colonial viewpoint or language.
We are interested in a chorus of diverse language artists, including poets, linguists, scholars, musicians, artists, activists, teachers, organizers, and more.
Please submit 250-word proposals by 1 October 2025.
1. Send proposals to Brianna Burke and Zoë Fay-Stindt at lexiconforanimacy@gmail.com.
2. In your proposals, consider how your word or phrase troubles the colonial framework and its language, or how it refreshes old words or frameworks. Please include a pronunciation transcription (if needed).
3. Please include a brief biography (max. 100 words).
4. Full submissions will be due around February 2026; notification of submission deadlines, procedures, and style guides will be sent with acceptance emails.