Gaia: Intrusions of a Restless Earth
Due Date: 11-15-2026
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 fifteenth issue of MuseMedusa. In short, understanding Gaia today means holding Greek myth together with attention to planetary change.
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.
Submit original articles, creative texts, or unpublished visual works—in French, English, or German—by 15 November 2026 to musemedusa@umontreal.ca, copying Maxime Fecteau (fecteau.maxime.2@courrier.uqam.ca).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).