[Commlist] Call for Abstracts: Intellect Handbook of Cinema & the Anthropocene 📢

Call for Abstracts: Intellect Handbook ofCinema and the Anthropocene

We are pleased to announce a forthcoming edited volume, Intellect 
Handbookof Cinema and the Anthropocene. The volume will bring together 
original scholarship that examines the relationship between cinema and 
the Anthropocene from a variety of perspectives. It is intended as a 
resource for scholars interested in film, media, and environmental studies.

Chapter proposals are now invited for consideration. Please see the 
below call for full details on the themes of the collection, proposal 
guidelines, and submission deadlines. Please also consult Intellect’s 
guidelines for reference on the kind of contributions we are seeking, 
available here: https://www.intellectbooks.com/intellect-handbooks 
<https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.intellectbooks.com%2Fintellect-handbooks&data=05%7C02%7Cfwd_lbaratt%40clemson.edu%7Ca80d167ed63d41991f7408dddff4c7c1%7C0c9bf8f6ccad4b87818d49026938aa97%7C0%7C0%7C638912965527670851%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=wCRzzMc2sl8P2dvPkeRIMhyLklxqUmYFhnprghZuQLo%3D&reserved=0>

Deadline for submission of abstracts is 15 November 2025. Invited 
contributors will submit full chapters by 30 June 2026.

Editors:Luca Barattoni (Clemson University), Massimiliano L. Delfino 
(Northwestern University)

In 2024, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) almost 
unanimously rejected the proposal to declare an Anthropocene epoch. 
Professor Jan Zalasiewicz of Leicester University lamented the ‘missed 
opportunity to recognize and endorse a clear and simple reality, that 
our planet left its natural functioning state, sharply and irrevocably, 
in the mid-20th century’. Nonetheless, the IUGS report acknowledged that 
the Anthropocene concept ‘will continue to be widely used…by social 
scientists, politicians and economists, as well as by the public at 
large. It will remain an invaluable descriptor’ of human–environment 
interactions. This controversy itself underscores a profound shift: the 
notion that the ‘physical world as previously conceived’ has ended 
challenges Darwinian uniformist assumptions and demands a rethinking of 
dualities such as nature/culture, alive/dead, human/animal, and 
organic/inorganic. In this new reality, the ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ 
collapse into unsettling assemblages, as humans increasingly appear as 
hybrids of flesh and machine whose bodily extensions (from prosthetics 
to digital avatars) both liberate new expressive potentials and entangle 
us in the neoliberal ‘entrepreneurship of the self’. Cinema, as both 
archive and speculative laboratory, offers a privileged space to 
visualize these entanglements and to dramatize the promises and perils 
of machinic agency in a world where human intervention has folded the 
past into the future and altered the collective horizon of expectations.

Cinema engages the Anthropocene on multiple levels. As an industry, 
filmmaking itself demands enormous energy. At the same time, cinema can 
reveal environmental realities and imaginaries. Documentaries and sci-fi 
films routinely use cinematic tools (time-lapse photography, satellite 
footage, CGI montages) to represent climate transformation. For example, 
projects like Chasing Ice (2012) employ time-lapse sequences to render 
visible the slow melting of glaciers that would otherwise elude our 
perception. In these ways, film both helps to construct a 
‘climate-change imaginary’ and exposes how our visual cultures are 
intertwined with global networks of energy and waste.

We invite proposals for an edited volume - The Intellect Handbook of 
Cinema and the Anthropocene- that examines the Anthropocene through the 
lens of film studies and media theory. Recent scholarship urges 
rethinking the human–planet relationship: Dipesh Chakrabarty, for 
example, argues that we must simultaneously adopt a human-centered 
‘global’ perspective and a decentered ‘planetary’ perspective to frame 
the Anthropocene. In this spirit, we seek contributions grounded in the 
latest theoretical currents (posthumanism, ecocriticism, new 
materialism, deep time, Gaia theory, biopolitics, postcolonial climate 
critique, etc.) that illuminate how cinema engages with Earth’s changing 
environment.

In accordance with Intellect Handbook guidelines, requiring 
‘comprehensive overviews and in-depth analyses of established theories, 
emerging debates, and contemporary developments across a wide range of 
academic disciplines’, we are especially interested in work that 
emphasizes conceptual and philosophical insights (e.g. Latour, Haraway, 
Barad, Chakrabarty, Bennett, Braidotti, Alaimo, Weik von Mossner, etc.) 
rather than film case studies alone. The volume will explore the 
different ways in which film can enact new ways of seeing and feeling 
our entanglement with nonhuman life. Drawing on recent ecocritical and 
affect-theoretical scholarship, which portrays cinema as a site for 
‘arts of noticing’ nonhuman vulnerability and agency, this handbook aims 
to map key debates and open new directions at the nexus of film and the 
Anthropocene.

Core Themes

Contributions may address (but are not limited to) the following core 
themes:

-Posthuman/Multispecies Perspectives: Theorizing cinema beyond the human 
subject. Drawing on Haraway, Braidotti, Bennett, Kagan, and others, this 
theme interrogates how filmic texts depict humans as co-constituted with 
nonhuman agents (animals, plants, machines, atmospheres) and breaks down 
human/non-human binaries.

-Ecocritical and New Materialist Approaches: Engaging new materialism 
and ecocritique in film analysis. How do Barad’s agential realism, Coole 
& Frost’s materialisms, Alaimo’s trans-corporeality, etc. reconfigure 
cinematic narratives? We welcome analyses that treat matter (water, 
earth, technology, filmic images) as vibrant and agentive, challenging 
inert ‘nature’ models. Topics include affective ecologies, the role of 
nonhuman objects, experimental forms that collapse nature/culture 
divides as well as early film found footage reinterpreted as 
post-extinction testimonies.

- Intersectional and Feminist Perspectives: Feminist, queer, antiracist 
and decolonial approaches to cinema and the Anthropocene. For example, 
ecofeminist analyses might critique the gendered and colonial legacies 
of environmental exploitation. Contributors might examine how films 
encode masculinist visions of technoscience versus more relational modes 
of human. This section invites proposals that interrogate gendered 
dimensions of environmental crisis, including how race, class, 
disability, and nonhuman difference intersect in cinematic worlds.

-Temporalities and Deep Time: Examining cinematic representations of 
time in the Anthropocene. This includes ‘deep time’ and geological 
temporality as conceptualized by Chakrabarty and others. Contributions 
might consider how films use nonlinear or long-duration formats, montage 
of past/future, or other devices to evoke planetary history or futures. 
Scholarship on collapsed or multiple time scales (e.g.Tsing’s ‘arts of 
noticing’) can be applied to film.

- Gaia Theory and Earth Systems: Investigating cinema’s relation to 
Earth as a living system. Inspired by Lovelock/Margulis and Latour’s 
political turn on Gaia, how do films reflect or contest the idea of 
Earth’s self-regulating feedback loops? Lovelock famously described the 
Earth as ‘more like a living organism than an inanimate machine’. 
Chapters might analyze ecological visuals (the ‘planetary sublime’), 
earth-bound narratives, or critiques of technology vs. organism paradigms.

- Biopolitics, Geontopolitics, and Climate Justice: Addressing power, 
governance, and inequality in Anthropocene cinema. Inspired by Foucault 
and thinkers like Povinelli, we consider how biopolitical regimes and 
their counterparts (so-called ‘geontopolitics’ or ‘necropolitics’) 
appear on screen. For example, films may depict surveillance/regulation 
of life, catastrophe and rescue, climate refugees or sacrificial 
victims. We especially encourage contributions with postcolonial and 
climate-justice insights: Chakrabarty notes that climate change is 
‘mediated by the global inequities we already have’, so colonial 
histories and uneven vulnerabilities are crucial. Discussions might draw 
on writers such as Chakrabarty, Yusoff, Spivak, Mbembe, or Povinelli.

- Cinematic Realism, Genre and Representation: Exploring shifts in film 
aesthetics and genre under the Anthropocene. How do documentary, 
science-fiction, disaster and speculative genres respond to ecological 
concerns? For instance, ‘cli-fi’ and eco-disaster films grapple with 
planetary crisis, while so-called ecocinema imagines more-than-human 
empathy. Chapters might examine how realism is unsettled (e.g. CGI 
nature, VR, multisensory aesthetics) or how narrative conventions (e.g. 
utopian/dystopian tropes) encode climate consciousness. Emphasis should 
remain on theoretical framing (ecocriticism, posthumanism, etc.), not 
mere film summaries.

-AI, Machinic Vision, and the Digital Anthropocene: Investigating 
artificial intelligence, computation, and machine perception as they 
intersect film and ecology. The ‘digital Anthropocene’ raises new 
environmental issues (data center energy use, e-waste) and aesthetic 
questions (algorithmic vision, CGI ecologies, virtual nature). Recent 
studies estimate that training one large AI model can emit tens of 
thousands of kilograms of CO

-We welcome essays on how AI and machine learning – from camera 
automation to deepfake environments – pose both ecological threats and 
opportunities for cinema. How do machine ‘ways of seeing’ challenge 
human-centric cinematography? How might cinema address the hidden 
materiality of digital media? This section bridges traditional 
Anthropocene concerns with emerging tech and its critique.

Submission Details
Please submit an abstract of ~500 words (not exceeding 600 words) 
outlining your proposed chapter and its key argument, along with a brief 
author bio (max. 150 words) to the editors.

Abstract Deadline: 15 November 2025. Selected authors will be invited to 
submit full chapters (~7.000–8.000 words) by 30 June 2026.

Style: Manuscripts should be in US English, Intellect Harvard style (see 
https://www.intellectbooks.com/asset/1748/house-style-guide-6th-ed..pdf 
<https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.intellectbooks.com%2Fasset%2F1748%2Fhouse-style-guide-6th-ed..pdf&data=05%7C02%7Cfwd_lbaratt%40clemson.edu%7Ca80d167ed63d41991f7408dddff4c7c1%7C0c9bf8f6ccad4b87818d49026938aa97%7C0%7C0%7C638912965527703047%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=tK2Zq7%2BvrHiF8pr7bbeahq8XZR7tvjH%2FL7QdW4Rzjf4%3D&reserved=0>), 
with consistent citations.

Contact:Send proposals or inquiries jointly to the volume editors: Luca 
Barattoni [(lbaratt /at/ clemson.edu) <mailto:(lbaratt /at/ clemson.edu)>] and 
Massimiliano Delfino [(m.delfino /at/ northwestern.edu) 
<mailto:(m.delfino /at/ northwestern.edu)>]. Include ‘Intellect Handbook’ in 
the email subject.

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