The Art-Eco Project is pleased to announce a call for proposals for a peer-reviewed, edited book project on art and EcoJustice. The collection of articles from various authors will enlighten different ways of studying, supporting, and sharing the themes of socio-ecological issues through artistic practice.

The principal aim of EcoJustice thinking is to understand the essential interdependence among humans and with the more than human world. It is crucial to acknowledge the fact that we are mutually responsible to and dependent on others. Any assumption that we are superior to or outside this interdependence will cause damage.

EcoJustice work (teaching, scholarship and art) thus works along three interrelated strands of analysis: 1) The first involves an understanding that the present problems of ecological and social violence are rooted in the deep cultural assumptions underlying modernity. Our taken-for-granted value-hierarchized worldview, including anthropocentrism, linear thinking, individualism, science based rationalism and instrumentalism, has to be challenged in order to change the course of action towards regarding all life as equally valuable. 2) The second strand is focused on identifying those patterns of belief and behavior that lead to mutual care and the protection of more sustainable ways of life both within modern societies and traditional indigenous communities. We name this process revitalizing the commons. 3) The third strand argues for imagination as an important means of engaging the forms of responsibility needed to generate healthy communities. As Wendell Berry has written, “for humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it” (2012, p. 15). We must, that is, imagine that it is possible to live ethically on this earth and what that could look like.

This book will be organized to explore how artistic practice intersects with and informs this EcoJustice framework. We recognize that this is an interdisciplinary field with many diverse entry points. Scholars draw from a range of philosophical and social theoretical view points—post structuralism, phenomenology, post-humanism, feminist theory, queer theory, new materialism, for example—as well as artistic practices—culture jamming, environmental art, improvisation, participatory art, community dance, documentary theatre, just to name a few. And we ask questions about what the intersection of these theories and practices could mean for education.

We thus invite essays that explore intersections among art practice and the EcoJustice framework. Essays could focus on (but are not limited to) the following:

• empathy, compassion and art
• performing identities and differences (race, gender, sexuality, ability, etc.)
• imagination and transformation
• time and space-based art
• indigenous or place-based knowledge and understanding
• immaterial art and consumerism
• environmental art as activism
• street art and the property of place

Specific Guidelines: Proposals should be approximately 500 words and include a brief abstract of 100 words. Include a brief bibliography. Priority will be given to those works that make clear their connection to the EcoJustice framework.

Deadline for proposals is Feb 29th 2016.

Please send your proposal (in file format .doc or .pdf) to raisa.foster@artecoproject.com.

The book is edited by Raisa Foster, Ph.D. (research director, Art-Eco Project), Jussi Mäkelä (researcher, Art-Eco Project) and Rebecca Martusewicz, Ed.D. (Eastern Michigan University).

AEJE_call for proposals (pdf)