Call for Articles
Xenophobic Landscapes: Sentience Reconsidered - June 2021 Special Issue for Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
The edited volume aims to bring together research on social imaginaries of sentient landscapes as racist, xenophobic, right-wing. The panel invites work from political geography, environmental studies, anthropology, and their cognate disciplines to explore alternative logics of sentient landscapes. Despite the field of sentient landscapes gaining attention in academia, the literature seldom seems to question the intentionality of sentient landscapes. Often romanticized as pure, good, and just, sentient landscapes are mainly imagined and analyzed as protectors of those who are powerless, indigenous, and colonized. Yet indigeneity is a social construct that has traditionally been claimed by political factions with wildly different agendas. Arguments against romanticizing Others and their political agendas have been made in gender theory (Ortner 1995, Mohanty 2003, Mahmood 2005, Abu-Lughod 2013), yet still need development in what concerns human-non-human binaries. While scholars have explored the field of sentient landscapes and political geographies (Elizabeth Povinelli 1995, Julie Cruikshank 2001, Nicolas Peterson 2011, Eduardo Kohn 2013, Ana Mariella Bacigalupo 2018, Piergiorgio Di Giminiani 2018, Gaston Gordillo 2018), little has been said about sentient landscapes embodying right-wing values. What can we gain from analyzing the subversive politics of sentient landscape as siding with those who have historically used their power to abuse? Could we imagine cosmopolitics where the moral agent is a far-right, xenophobic, racist landscape?
The maximum length for a Special Issue is 60,000 words, inclusive of all notes, references, introductions and afterwords. Individual research articles should ordinarily be 8, 000 words in length. No more than 50% of authors named in the proposal should be affiliated to the same institution.
Proposals (and any questions) should be sent to Alexandra Coțofană (siacotof@iu.edu) by October 30th, 2019. Proposals should include the following: The name(s), contact details and position(s) of the author; the proposed title of the paper; an abstract of 200 words an indication of whether drafts of each contribution are complete at the date of proposal.
Submission of a full manuscript will be submitted for peer review by March 13th, 2020. The successful issue will be published in June 2021.
Alexandra Coțofană is Assistant Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Zayed University. Alexandra's research explores intersections of politics, modernities and ontologies of governing. Alexandra’s scholarly interests focus on political ecologies, the ontological turn, the study of political elites and ways of governing, as well as the occult as a tool for governing, and discursive techniques employed in populist imaginaries to form racial, gender, and political Others.
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