Island Sound Scales: Working Towards Aural Ecocriticism
Due Date: 12-15-2024
We seek paper proposals for a special journal issue that critically explores how multimodal cultural expressions from islands and their environments engage with climate change by focusing on the workings of sound. Not only are islands particularly prone to the effects of global warming, their geopolitical histories blatantly show that the climate crisis cannot be separated from sociopolitical issues of racism, extractivism, and inequality (Ferdinand 2019). Such historicities entangled with the present moment incite an investigation of how cultural expressions coming out of island spaces might invite us rethink theories and methodologies of ecocriticism.
While cultural expressions from island spaces certainly do respond to an alarming urgency, they do not necessarily configure environmental effects by turning to a discourse of crisis, resilience, and linear end-times. Rather, often working across different media, they mobilize continuity and entangled temporalities, marked by centuries of racialized and gendered violence, porous geographies, and layered spatialities. And while they might rethink political narratives of struggle, they also explore intimate bodily experiences, suffering, mourning and beauty. To better understand such embodiment, the knowledge it might produce, and the forms it might take, this special issue pays particular attention on the workings of sound across different media responding environmental issues, whether in the form of seemingly sudden disasters or “slow violence.”
The theoretical framework draws on sound studies, ocean studies, island studies, ecocriticism, along with multimodal and decolonial approaches more broadly. We especially encourage research that interrogates how sound might mobilize an alternative cultural politics of turbulence, emanating from local cultural expressions working across different media. Researchers from all fields within the humanities, museum professionals, artists, and activists are invited to submit proposals, including topics and approaches such as
- Sound ecology
- Intermedial ecocriticism
- Oral narratives of disaster
- Practices of listening
- Sound in forms of performance
- Catastrophe and the aural
- The soundscapes of climate change
- Slow violence and sound
- Sound pollution
- Sound in cross-media approaches to environmental change
- Sounding out the language of disaster
- Alternative aural politics of aesthetics in the context of environmental change
Please submit a 300-word proposal and a short bio no later than 15 December 2024, to Christina Kullberg and Kasia Mika-Bresolin.
Selected abstracts will be included in a proposal submitted to a leading peer-reviewed journal within the field of the environmental humanities. Articles will be published open access with possible costs covered by the Swedish Foundation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. View the full call for papers.