Call for Chapter Contributions: Routledge Handbook of the Digital Environmental Humanities

 Scholars in the emerging field of digital environmental humanities (DEH) observe that  “the idea of nature is becoming very hard to separate from the digital tools and media we use to observe, interpret, and manage it.”[1] The ‘digital turn’ of the last quarter century, and the existential threat of climate change are converging and forcing our species to “reorient  . . . profoundly in relation to the world, to one another, and to ourselves.”[2] Whilst external environments are roiling due to global warming and socio-political conflict, the inner “saturation of our intimate and physical lives by digital, wireless, and virtual technologies,”[3] are causing adaptations on personal, regional, social, theoretical, technological, and ideological scales.

Our ideas, our standards, for what is natural are distributed and maintained in digital tools and media like databases, computer models, geographical information systems and so on.”[4]  Though an automation predicated on algorithms has become the touchstone for thinking about the future of privacy and consent, issues around data colonialism, data hacking and Lo-TEK point to complicated, ongoing social inequalities in terms of access and inclusion, as well as the resilience and future-facing nature of a range of environmental aesthetics.

Employing historical, philosophical, linguistic, arts practice-based, literary and cultural lenses, DEH has/have confluences with fields that foreground earthly processes and forms (environmental humanities), interrogate technological apparatus, techniques and framings (digital humanities) and draw out shifting biological, neurological and psychological strata that subtend a ‘human’ being (medical humanities).  Ontologically and epistemologically, the concept of the DEH raises a few pertinent questions:

  • What new objects, relations, capacities and affects are being located and marked for analysis?
  • What kinds of data are being foregrounded as objects of analysis and as the bases of  empirical findings?
  • What techniques are being brought to bear, for what purpose and with what import?
  • And what kinds and forms of story-telling are being undertaken, by what kinds of actors, with what agencies, and for what audiences, users, and communities of interest and practice?

In addition,  humanities, scientific, artistic, geographical, cartographical, informatic and computing disciplines are finding a common space in DEH, and are bringing the use of digital applications, coding and software into league with literary and cultural studies, feminist, queer and critical race studies, and the visual, filmic and performing arts.  As such, DEH is empirically, critically and ethically engaged in exploring digitally mediated, visualized, and parsed framings of past, present and future environments, landscapes and cultures, as well as the ways in which these operate to produce scale, from the intimate and personal to the global and planetary.  Conceptualizations such as Plantationocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, Anthropo-scene, Anthropobscene, and so on provide alternate framings of ecological and social collapse, loss and extinction, that emphasize the specific time-space emergence of crises, a diversity of lived experiences across the globe, and the work of words (images and graphs) as analytic formulations as well as descriptors.

 

Call for Chapters

 

This volume, edited by human, physical,  and critical geographers, geomaticians, GIScientists, and literary, digital and environmental humanities scholars, aims to help produce a capacious, eclectic space of knowledge on DEH.

We are calling for chapter contributions from researchers in the arts, humanities and sciences, scholars in commensurate fields,  practitioners and professionals, artists, activists, poets, filmmakers and storytellers who engage the environment and the digital and are situated or situate their work in the Global South and Global North (terrestrially and subterraneous) the Oceans, the Arctic, Antarctica (surface and benthic), the Atmosphere and its layers, the Moon, Solar System, Interstellar space and Galaxies beyond.

We seek chapters on the DEH engagements, practices, pedagogies and applied cases that facilitate trans-disciplinary encounters between fields as diverse as human cognition, and gaming, bioinformatics and linguistics, social media, literature and history, music, geography, geosciences, anthropology, archaeology, painting, philology, philosophy and the earth and environmental sciences.  Potential themes: mediations/ remediations, reflections, experiences, delvings, contestations, challenges, praxes,  and pedagogies. Potential subjects (contributors may suggest their own as well):

  • Applied DEH studies.
  • Art-historical questions, geographic concepts, and digital methods.
  • Aural and visual exhibits, performances.
  • Atmosphere.
  • Big data, longue durée, geographical history. 
  • Climate histories-historiographies.
  • Cyborgs, biologies, environments.
  • Cities, sub-urbs.
  • COVID-19 Pandemic Digital Ecologies
  • DEH activisms.
  • DEH critiques / critiques of DEH.
  • DEH colonizations / decolonizations.
  • DEH facilitating knowledge production in novel transdisciplinary constellations.
  • DEH guides, tools / theories / techniques.
  • DEH hacking.
  • DEH identities, genders, sexualities, networks.
  • DEH pedagogies.
  • DEH and the earth and environmental sciences.
  • DEH storytelling.
  • Digital food production, transportation, consumption geographies.
  • Digital performances, remediations of place.
  • Digital recovery of texts, objects, and traces of human experience thought long since lost to time.
  • Digital watersheds, riverines, oceanic and benthic systems.
  • Dynamic digital platforms for integrated environmental humanities data management, analysis, synthesis and knowledge dissemination.
  • E-Epidemiology.
  • Film and cinematic approaches.
  • GIS, Geoinformatics, R, Neogeography.
  • Graphesis / counter-visualizations.
  • Open-Source DEH.
  • Indigenous Studies (Indigital).
  • Posthuman landscapes, environments, atmospheres, waters, extra-terrestrial spaces.
  • Resource extraction.
  • Small data and capta.
  • Your own idea here:______________.

Publication Schedule:

1 January 2021, Submission of Abstracts

15 February 2021, Response of Editors to Authors

1 May 2021, Submission of Draft Chapters by Authors

1 June 2021, Editorial Comments / Revision Suggestions Returned to Authors

1 August 2021, Final Submission of Chapters by Authors

1 September 2021, Submission of  DEH Handbook to Routledge

 

Submission Instructions:

Listed below are the names and emails of the editors of the Routledge Handbook of the DEH. You may submit your abstract / expression of interest to any one of the editors based upon mutual interests or preference.  Please submit an abstract, or expression of interest, describing the subject of your chapter contribution by 1 January 2021.

 

Editors:

Sources

[1] Finn Arne Jørgensen. 2014. “The Armchair Traveler's Guide to Digital Environmental Humanities.” Environmental Humanities 4: 95-112.

[2] Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. 2010.  “Introducing the new materialisms.” New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics: 1-43.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Jørgensen, The Armchair Traveler's Guide to Digital Environmental Humanities. 109.

Contact Info: 

 

  • Luke Bergmann 
  • Arlene Crampsie 
  • Deborah Dixon
  • Steven Hartman
  • Robert Legg
  • Francis Ludlow
  • Charles Travis