[Commlist] CFP: Our Sentimental Natures: environmental commitments, media and feeling 18/3/2022

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Special issue of /Continuum: journal of media and culture/, to be 
published 2023

This special issue will examine the ways media mediates our emotional 
entanglements with ‘nature’. While there is a rich scholarship on film 
and literature, sentiment in other media engaged with, exposing or 
constituting environmental matters has been less fully explored. The 
special issue aims to broaden this discussion to consider the way 
photography, comics, visual art, social media and games as well as print 
and film, might cultivate feeling for spaces, places and environmental 
politics.

Feelings can occupy an ambivalent position in relation to environmental 
thinking. Ecologies can suffer from an excess of feeling in 
decision-making: picturesque or sublime landscapes are not the only ones 
worth saving. Aesthetic values are not necessarily aligned with 
ecological ones. Emotions, held strongly, can also lead to feelings of 
paralysis as we are overwhelmed by visions of environmental destruction. 
Feelings are central to much environmental communication: most campaigns 
are aimed at changing people’s attitudes at the level of feelings as 
anything else.Such emotions have been framed in humanist terms (love of, 
sympathy for, empathy with ‘nature’) and posthumanist ones (affects and 
atmospheres, co-constitutions, becoming-with ‘nature’).

We are particularly interested in exploring the concept of 
sentimentality with all its resonances with hierarchies of value and 
gender binaries. Some feelings, and the feelings of some people, are 
more legitimate than others. Feelings are thought to ‘get in the way’ of 
objective and rational decision making, and progress. Nonetheless, as 
David Ingram suggests, “Sentimental attachments to the natural world 
are, from both an experiential and a political point-of-view, as 
importantas scientific analyses, and are a vital part of environmental 
concern.”

We encourage submissions around:

  * genealogies of sentiment and its implications for environmentalism
  * sentimental connections to place and critiques of sentiment
  * feeling and being country
  * disgust and abjection in environmental media
  * gendered media, emotion and value in environmental politics
  * fear, rage and environmental justice
  * the pleasures of the proprietorial colonial gaze
  * circuits of activist media and cultivation of a feeling for place
  * climate grief – media and the management of feeling
  * media and the politics of care in the Anthropocene
  * mediating human-more-than-human feelings
  * eco-phobic narratives
  * Cassandra’s compensation – the dubious pleasures of “I told you so”
  * alternatives to apocalyptic tropes and story-telling
  * beyond binaries: thinking, feeling and media forms

Papers of no more than 6000 words due for submission by March 18, 2022

Submissions will be via Continuum’s online submission process.

If you have questions or need more information contact 
(Nicole.Matthews /at/ mq.edu.au) <mailto:(Nicole.Matthews /at/ mq.edu.au)> or 
(Ian.Collinson /at/ mq.edu.au) <mailto:(Ian.Collinson /at/ mq.edu.au)> with the 
subject line “Our Sentimental Natures”


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