[Commlist] CFP Communicating a World-in-Crisis

Call for Chapter Proposals

*/Communicating a World-in-Crisis/*//

Edited by Simon Cottle, Emeritus Professor, Cardiff University

*Deadline for chapter proposals: December 20, 2022.*

We live at the dawn of a new age, or, possibly, at the dusk of a dying 
age that presages no new ages at all. The language of civilizational 
collapse is starting to be heard. Whether in the considered prose of 
academic writing and scientific reports, in the expressive genres of 
film and fiction, or in the heartfelt chants of protestors, such as 
Extinction Rebellion, on the streets. The onward and accelerating crush 
of global crises and catastrophes is rarely absent, it seems, from TV 
and mobile screens or newspaper front-pages.

             Global crises are now /endemic/ to our contemporary 
/world-in-crisis/. For the most part they are globally /encompassing/ 
(which is not to say they are experienced equally around the globe). 
Importantly, they are also complexly /enmeshed /and/entangled /with each 
other/– /though too often this complexity is insufficiently recognised 
and understood. Based on the scale of their global reach, the depth of 
their ramifications, their synchronicity and mutual compounding, global 
crises today are without historical precedent. Whether approached 
individually or in interlocking combination, they pose /existential 
/threats to the continuation of human existence and quite possibly to 
much/all life on planet Earth. These cataclysms have their names. 
Climate change straddles the Earth as the most precipitous threat to 
humanity, but it is inept to think that this is the only existential 
catastrophe now bearing down on life on planet earth – critical as the 
climate emergency undoubtedly is. Pandemics, bio-diversity loss, the 
sixth mass extinction, energy, water and food insecurity, soil 
degradation, war and weapons of mass annihilation, all now pose further 
threats to existence. Preceding or sutured into many of them are global 
economic crashes and deepening inequality, increased political 
polarisation and instability, and failing supply chains as well as mass 
population movements and expanding humanitarian disasters. And 
theoretical ideas of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene and the Symbiocene 
and ecological civilisation, amongst many others variously help to 
provide conceptual coordinates of use in grasping the nature of the 
momentous ‘planetary emergency’ underway.

How today’s world-in-crisis becomes communicated and known and variously 
responded to, and how the play of strategic power and cultural symbols 
shape and define, or delimit and dissimulate, the nature of today’s 
interconnected world-in-crisis, and with what consequences, is probably 
the most critical and urgent communication question of our times.

/Communicating a World-in-Crisis /sets out to explore diverse media, 
genres and other forms of communication and the expression of today’s 
accelerating and deepening world-in-crisis. This edited collection, 
therefore, seeks out and will incorporate diverse academic and expert 
perspectives on the following:

  * contemporary journalism
  * documentary
  * film
  * eco-criticism and literature
  * photography
  * music
  * painting
  * performance arts
  * museums
  * education
  * performative communication of politics and protest
The book will bring together for the first-time different voices and 
perspectives engaged with the communication of the contemporary world 
and its human induced ecological and other existential threats. The 
volume is not only concerned with the communication of possible system 
collapse and ecological destruction. It is also keen to explore the 
politics (and psychology) of hope. Not the hope of deluded optimism that 
still informs dinosaur thinking wedded to normative ideas of unending 
economic growth and the continuation of business-as-usual and 
life-as-normal. But active hope that can be seen and won and 
communicated in the creative flourishing of ideas and practices that are 
already seeking, in myriad and diverse ways, to find pathways of 
transition and societal transformation. Chapters can be variously 
pitched across the theoretical-empirical, methodological-epistemological 
continuums.

*Submission details: *

As editor of this contracted volume, I would be pleased to receive 
abstracts for prospective chapters (title, 300-500 words, plus brief 
bio) by December 20, 2022. Decisions in the New Year.

The book is contracted and scheduled for publication by the publisher 
Peter Lang, in late 2023. Its brief is deliberately wide and 
encompassing and I am pleased to consider possible chapter ideas in 
addition to the areas noted above. Please forward to other possible 
interested colleagues.

Thank you, Simon Cottle ((Cottles /at/ cardiff.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(Cottles /at/ cardiff.ac.uk)>)

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