Call For Papers
Island Sound Scales: Working Towards Aural Ecocriticism
(Special issue edited by Christina Kullberg and Kasia Mika-Bresolin)
We seek paper proposals for a special journal issue that critically explores how multimodal cultural expressions from islands and their environments engage with climate change by focusing on the workings of sound. Not only are islands particularly prone to the effects of global warming, their geopolitical histories blatantly show that the climate crisis cannot be separated from socio-political issues of racism, extractivism and inequality (Ferdinand 2019). Such historicities entangled with the present moment incite an investigation of how cultural expressions coming out of island spaces might invite us rethink theories and methodologies of ecocriticism.
While cultural expressions from island spaces certainly do respond to an alarming urgency, they do not necessarily configure environmental effects by turning to a discourse of crisis, resilience and linear end-times. Rather, often working across different media, they mobilize continuity and entangled temporalities, marked by centuries of racialized and gendered violence, porous geographies and layered spatialities. And while they might rethink political narratives of struggle, they also explore intimate bodily experiences, suffering, mourning and beauty. To better understand such embodiment, the knowledge it might produce, and the forms it might take, this special issue pays particular attention on the workings of sound across different media responding environmental issues, whether in the form of seemingly sudden disasters or “slow violence”. The sonic appears as a nexus to investigate perceptions of how effects of global warming and toxicity radically shatter notions of being and unpens stable notions of time and space. Working through acoustic knowledge is a means to capture both that which we can make sense of and that which is beyond our understanding but nonetheless affects us (Ochoa 2014). The aural “emanates, propagates, communicates, vibrates, and agitates; it leaves a body and enters others; it binds and unhinges, harmonizes and traumatizes; it sends the body moving, the mind dreaming, the air oscillating. It seemingly eludes definition, while having a profound effect,” to quote Brandon LaBelle (2012). Sound can also be conceptualized as a mode of aesthetic cognition, as in Steven Feld’s notion of “acoustemology” (Feld 1996), or Stefan Helmreich’s “soundstate” (2007), challenging the boundaries between nature and culture as well as notions of self and community.
In foregrounding sonic dimensions in various cultural expressions, the special issue seeks to explore if sound may actualize an alternative ecological sensibility; a form of sound ecology. The issue thus hopes to contribute to the important work of undoing epistemological and representational biases linked to visuality, on which Western discourses of domination build (Hill 2013; Munro 2022; Ochoa 2014). Ultimately then, the motivation undergirding this issue is that the aural can mobilize a mode of political emergence of l’inouïe, the unheard, i.e. not just voices but geographical, climatic and environmental sounds and vibrations as they are used in various cultural forms (elhariry 2021; Jullien 2019; Solheim 2017). This is crucial for a sustainable future: we must learn how to stay attuned to local ecological sensibilities to remap the unequal global order, which indeed frames and perpetuates climate change.
The theoretical framework draws on sound studies, ocean studies, island studies, ecocriticism, along with multimodal and decolonial approaches more broadly. We especially encourage research that interrogates how sound might mobilize an alternative cultural politics of turbulence, emanating from local cultural expressions working across different media. Researchers from all fields within the humanities, museum professionals, artists, and activists are invited to submit proposals, including but not limited to topics and approaches such as:
* Sound ecology
* Intermedial ecocriticism
* Oral narratives of disaster
* Practices of listening
* Sound in forms of performance
* Catastrophe and the aural
* The soundscapes of climate change
* Slow violence and sound
* Sound pollution
* Sound in cross-media approaches to environmental change
* Sounding out the language of disaster
* Alternative aural politics of aesthetics in the context of environmental change
Please submit a 300-word proposal and a short bio no later than December 15, 2024, to:
Christina Kullberg christina.kullberg@moderna.uu.se and Kasia Mika-Bresolin k.mika@qmul.ac.uk
Selected abstracts will be included in a proposal submitted to a leading double-bind peer-reviewed journal within the field of the environmental humanities.
Articles will be published open access with possible costs covered by the Swedish Foundation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.