Cogent Arts & Humanities welcomes submissions of research articles, critical and curatorial essays to a special collection on “Seeds of fierce engagement: Creative work at the intersection of contemporary art with ecology, climate change, and environmental activism”. Artwork, films, audio pieces, datasets and other multimedia files can be submitted as supplementary material.

Humans are having an unprecedented and devastating impact on the earth. Our way of living is causing disastrous climate change, unsustainable levels of toxicity of the water, air, and soil, and shocking extinction rates of organisms that form the fabric of life. We have made decisions that led us to this current situation and we can make decisions to change course. What we need is fresh vision and collective will. Artists, activists, political and cultural theorists, philosophers, curators, architects, designers and others are doing creative, unconventional, and ambitious work to expand our vision in ways that cultivate positive change.

Although we welcome a variety of approaches, authors and artists are invited to consider the following questions in preparing submissions:

• What are the possibilities for and limitations of artistic and curatorial models that respond to climate change and ecological crisis, including the massive depopulation of non-human life on the planet known as the sixth extinction?
• In this time of climate crisis, what role is contemporary art playing in advancing an understanding and valuation of biodiversity, in shaping the relationships between people and the non-human world or in advancing rights for non-human entities?
• The Global North is largely responsible for the environmental problems at the heart of the climate change crisis. How are artists, activists and theorists working between the Global North and South to generate harmony and collaboration with the goal of environmental justice?
• How are creative practitioners and cultural theorists constructively troubling definitions of “nature” or “sustainability”?
• How are creative practitioners engaging ideas of energy futurism in relation to alternative structures of living and locality in production and consumption?
• How are artists, media producers and other visual culture practitioners catalyzing positive changes toward solving ecological concerns (a “Great Transition”) and against the paralyzing narratives of disaster capitalism?
• How does environmental activism function within the spheres of art / creative practice?
• How is the art historical field framing work by artists and artist activists engaged with issues surrounding climate change and political ecology?
• How does work in aesthetic fields join with activism and Indigenous philosophies to suggest a future of increased environmental justice?
• How might art recover environmental understandings held by indigenous populations that are lost or nearly lost?
• What role does art have in interrogating our assumptions about agricultural and industrial revolutions and about pre-modern peoples?
• What historic creative or scholarly works inform contemporary art as it grapples with climate and ecological crises?

To submit your work, and to view our author guidelines, please visit the journal’s website: https://www.cogentoa.com/journal/arts-and-humanities

The deadline for submissions for this special collection is 15th August 2017.

During the submission process you will be able to confirm that your work is intended for the special collection on art and environment.

We look forward to working with you to bring exciting new scholarship to the widest possible audience.

Zoé Strecker, Senior Editor for Visual and Performing Arts, Transylvania University.