[Commlist] Call for chapters: Feeling Contemporary War

*Feeling Contemporary War: *

*How Global Regimes of Sensing and Emotion Facilitate and Resist 
Military Power*

*Editors: Drs. Alex Adams & Amy Gaeta*

In some ways, war does not change. In others, it is constantly in flux. 
Contemporary warfare is aided, disrupted, and mediated by 
ever-developing digital technologies, semi-autonomous and autonomous 
weapons and equipment, deepfake AI propaganda, mediation through social 
media, and much more. These shifts suggest that contemporary warfare is 
in some sense a ‘new’ modality of conflict, or at least that it has new 
and distinctive characteristics that are in urgent need of analysis and 
critique. What is clear is that we must scrutinize the utility of the 
central binaries that structure our knowledge of war—wartime and 
peacetime, battlefield and safe zone, innocence and complicity—in order 
to understand the state of contemporary armed conflict. Before we can 
understand contemporary war, we contend, two interpretive gestures are 
necessary: firstly, to more fully sense war and apprehend the multiple 
ways that war becomes embodied; secondly, we must account for war’s 
multivocality and expand the ‘we’ of who gets to speak about their 
embodied experience of war.

This book investigates the multiform ways in which war is sensed and 
felt by underrepresented perspectives that diverge from the hegemonic 
norm, and by doing so, strives to arrive at an expanded vision of the 
sensorial complexity of contemporary armed conflict. Looking beyond both 
established ways of comprehending war and formally declared wars, the 
edited volume aims to examine an expansive range of exercises in 
military power: settler colonial violence, state-sanctioned genocide, 
enslavement, militarized policing, and wars against non-human entities 
such as drugs or COVID-19. All of those involve state force in ways that 
echo or replicate the forms of violence that are commonly referred to 
under the rubrics of war. If we are willing to critically reflect on the 
regimes of sensing and emotions we each differently inhabit, we contend, 
these insights can enrich and deepen our understandings of war, state 
power, and—crucially—the ways that they may be resisted. In particular, 
we ask:


  *

    How do the current apparatuses of warfare and state power function
    to produce, transmit, and circulate affects within and across
    frontlines?

  *

    Through what factors and within which limits do feelings become
    ‘legitimate’ political information recognized by the state or other
    entities (e.g., activists, anti-state actors, publics) engaged in
    discourse around martial power?

  *

    How are sensorial apprehensions of warfare connected to actions and
    materialities, such as solidarity, boycotts, or violence (whether
    active participation or indirect/figurative investments)?

  *

We seek to highlight the intimate ways that bodies and war interact, 
refract from one another, across time and space, and affirm that the 
body is a valuable site of knowledge. In particular, we aim to provide 
an alternative to what Eve Tuck (2009) calls a “damaged-centered 
framing” of warfare which entrenches a certain set of political and 
representational conventions around war—suffering, violence, death, 
bitterness, revenge, defeat—which, though doubtlessly important, can 
overdetermine and reify the ways war is known. By focusing on the 
sensory texture of ordinary life under conditions of war, including the 
transgenerational reverberations of past wars, this volume aims to 
undercut such totalizing narratives or conceptualizations about the 
experience of state force, which, after all, is so multiform and complex 
that generalizations about it are often doomed to fail. Further, the 
discourse surrounding the ambiguous concept of the ‘civilian experience 
of war’ is often built upon attitudes towards the impacted civilians and 
the nature of the war itself that are themselves clearly open to 
critique and readjustment.

This edited collection builds on our special issue /Militarisation and 
Pleasure <https://www.atadamswriting.com/militarization-pleasure>/, in 
which the editors elaborated on the feminist insight that the ‘civilian’ 
and the ‘military’, so often considered discrete and separate, are often 
foundationally interconnected in a complex range of granular and 
capillary ways (Howell 2018). This volume is a sort of sequel as it will 
examine the ways in which matters of military force are differently 
sensed. We are interested in different types of qualitative methods from 
a range of humanities and social science disciplines. In particular, we 
think the following fields and theoretical dispositions will best fit 
our vision for the edited collection: Critical and Feminist IR, Critical 
Surveillance and Security Studies, Political Geography, Gender and 
Sexuality Studies, STS, Visual Cultures, Disability Studies, Mad 
Studies, Critical Race Studies, AI Ethics, Cultural and Literary 
Studies, and Decolonial and Postcolonial Studies. We are especially keen 
to hear from scholars from the Global South, including diasporic voices.


The editors invite scholars of all disciplinary and professional 
backgrounds to submit a 350-500 word abstract for consideration. Final 
papers will be expected to fall within the range of 6000-8000 words. We 
welcome papers that explore any aspect of the topic, but are especially 
interested in the following:

*Infrastructures, Contexts, and Mobilizations*

  *

    Incarceration, policing, borders, psychiatric institutions, detention

  *

    Protests, movements, resistance, riots, and activism

  *

    Supply chains, capital flows, trade infrastructure, war economies

  *

    Transnational solidarities, coalitional labour, mutual aid

  *

    Digital infrastructure, algorithms, platform moderation, online
    censorship

  *

    Surveillance, snitching, community watch

  *

    Architecture, real estate, city planning (especially in the context
    of settlement)

  *

    Climate disaster, extraction, weaponization of natural resources

  *

    Structures of desire, sexual norms and ‘deviances,’ and sexual
    communities

*Materialities, Texts, and Images*

  *

    Video games, films, literary texts, music

  *

    Pornographic and violent content; recordings of unsimulated sex &
    violence

  *

    Social media, apps, podcasts, memes, generative AI content

  *

    Witness accounts (memoir, testimony, documentation)

  *

    Material culture (fashion, toys, collecting)

  *

    Content regarding food, leisure, lifestyle, exercise

  *

    Domesticated military technologies (e.g., GPS, drones, consumer
    robotics)

*Feelings, Emotions, and Embodiments*

  *

    Ennui, boredom, numbness, saturation

  *

    Avoidance, distance, trying not to feel war

  *

    Doom, fatalism, hopelessness, dread

  *

    Pleasure, comfort, excitement

  *

    Humour, laughter

  *

    Empowerment, hope

  *

    Anxiety, paranoia

  *

    Confusion, overwhelm

*Each proposal must: *

  *

    Be between 350-500 words.

  *

    State clearly how it directly addresses the central themes of the
    edited collection. Proposals that do not demonstrate a clear link to
    the topic are much more likely to be rejected (even if we otherwise
    like them).

  *

    Include a 150-200 word author bio.

  *

    Include a brief sample bibliography, which should aim to give the
    editors a clear sense of the author’s citational practice,
    materials, and intellectual context (not included in word count).

  *

    Indicate whether visual materials will be included, and if so how
    many. Please note that authors are responsible for ensuring that
    they have the right to reproduce any visual materials that they plan
    to include.

  *

    Be sent to (sensingwareditedcollection /at/ gmail.com)
    <mailto:(sensingwareditedcollection /at/ gmail.com)> by July 19th, 2025.

*Schedule*

Please submit all proposals no later than July 19th, 2025. Authors can 
expect a response no later than September 1st, 2025. The subsequent 
schedule is to be determined with the publisher, although we anticipate 
that full-length submissions will be due Spring 2026 with peer review 
and appropriate revisions to follow; final publication is anticipated in 
early 2027. We are willing to accommodate extensions where necessary, 
but inclusion in the final manuscript requires a commitment to meeting 
this schedule.

*We are currently in discussions regarding a number of potential 
publication avenues, but please be aware that the volume does not 
currently have a finalized home. The final publication venue will be a 
reputable peer-reviewed academic press with global distribution.*

*
*

*About the Editors*

*
*

*Alex Adams <https://www.atadamswriting.com/> *is an independent scholar 
and musician. They have published four monographs on the representation 
of contemporary political violence, most recently /Kill Box: Military 
Drone Systems and Cultural Production 
<https://www.atadamswriting.com/kill-box>/ (2024, Rowman & Littlefield). 
They are writing /Godzilla: A Critical Demonology 
<https://www.atadamswriting.com/godzilla-a-critical-demonology>/, which 
will be a full critical account of every Godzilla movie. Learn more at 
atadamswriting.com <http://atadamswriting.com/>.

*Amy Gaeta <http://amygaeta.com/>* is an academic, teacher, poet, and 
disability justice advocate. Currently, they are a Research Associate at 
the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence and the Center for 
Drones and Culture at the University of Cambridge. They hold a Ph.D. in 
English and Visual Cultures from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 
and have strong research interests in: Drone Studies, Critical 
Disability Studies, Feminist STS, Visual Cultures Theory, and 21st 
American Transnational Literatures and Cultures. Learn more at 
amygaeta.com <http://amygaeta.com/>.


---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ commlist.org)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------