- Expressions of interest by 3rd January 2025
- Contributions to be delivered by 31 March 2025
- View to publishing in the second quarter of 2025
About the CSPA Quarterly publication:
The CSPA Quarterly is a publication meant to give a longer format and deeper space to explore and reflect the myriad ways in which sustainability in the arts is discussed, approached and practiced.
The publication features reviews, interviews, features, artist pages, essays, reflections and photos. It is a snapshot of a moment in time, a look at the many discussions in sustainability and the arts through the lens of a particular theme.
You can check our previous issues here.
About the CSPA Quarterly Q46 thematic guideline:
Responding to our present biospheric challenges requires urgent revisions to conceptions of what constitutes the good life. Efforts are often hampered by the catastrophist, doomist, and anxiety-invoking affects triggered by the topic. Imperatives for ‘joyful’ climate activism endeavour to counter these challenges, although the label of the joyless environmentalist persists (Losada 2020).
Positive psychologists and historians of emotion identify joy as ‘the least studied positive emotion’ (Emmons 2020: 1). Philosophers and theologians of Western culture comment on joy in the divine, tragic, and erotic in literature and scripture, identifying a fleeting and unpredictable response-feeling that has been deployed to ideological and political ends, and an emotion that can be consciously nurtured in the face of adversity and injustice (Potkay 2007). Projects on feminist, Black, and queer joy sit alongside trauma rather than offering counternarratives, while some make ‘killing’ joy a political mission (Ahmed 2023).
Mindfulness and wellbeing industries urge us to ‘find joy in small things’ to persist under capitalism. In environmentalisms, joy can sometimes infer awestruck, reverent, pious or sanctimonious nature responses. Likewise, joy emerges from the frivolous, ironic, or camp ‘bad environmentalism’ invoked by Nicole Seymour (2018). How does joy’s ambivalence, along with its potential to strengthen social connectivity and attachment to life, feature in cultural responses to environmental crisis?
Expressions of interest by 3rd January 2025
Email submissions to evelyn@sustainablepractice.org with the following in the body of the email:
- Name of the author(s).
- Author(s) contact information: email
- Short bio (approx. 50 words)
- Short outline of your proposed contribution (short form 5/600 words, longer form 1000-2000 words, series of images etc.)
If you have any questions, please email evelyn@sustainablepractice.org