CFP Special Issue Theme: Tropical Imaginaries & Climate Crisis – deadline 31 May 2021 (eTropic Journal)

About Special Issue Theme: Tropical Imaginaries & Climate Crisis

Heat waves and wave-inundated islands, prolonged droughts and rainforest fires, tropical storms and monsoon deluges, melting tropical glaciers and flooded rivers – although climate change is global, it is not experienced everywhere the same. Climate change has pronounced effects in the Tropics.

Global sea level rise is predicted to be higher in the tropics, especially the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Global warming increases intensities in El Niño and La Niña oceanic-atmospheric events which cause droughts, hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones across vast areas of the tropics and subtropics. While rainforests, tropical peat swamps and oceans are carbon dioxide sinks, global warming means sinks reach saturation. Rainforests and coral reefs are Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystems developed over thousands of years; deforestation and fires add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, while the phenomena of ocean warming, sea level rise and acidification bleach and kill coral reefs.[i] The tropics has become a critical zone of cascading tipping points, the site where the full scale and scope of climate change and its associated challenges and deathly consequences are becoming materially manifest.  

This year marks the long-awaited United Nations Climate Change conference. The agenda includes the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Following the Paris Agreement and the Kyoto Protocol, the conference aims to commit nations to a revitalized effort to urgently reduce anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions in order to limit global warming at 1.5˚  C.

While acknowledging the importance of the UN Climate Change global agenda, this Special Issue draws attention to the tropical regions of the world: regions that are undergoing rapid development, yet suffer serious poverty; are rich in biodiversity, and threatened by environmental destruction; are home to many of the world’s rainforest and maritime Indigenous peoples, but endure legacies of colonialism. We advocate that climate science requires climate imagination to bring science systems into relation with the human, cultural and social. In short, this Special Issue contributes to calls to humanise climate change.

To perceive the vast intricacies involved in climate change phenomena requires imagination; a poetics of thought. Tropical imagination invites papers informed by Indigenous knowing, ethnography, phenomenology, symbiosis and co-emergence, more-than-human worlds, worlding, patchy Anthropocene, Plantationocene, feral ecologies,[ii] rhizomatics, material poetics, biological poetics, archipelagic imaginaries, queer ecologies, ecogothic, ecocriticism, ecopoetry, ecofeminism, ecosophy, and tropical climate change storying.

CFP Tropical Imaginaries & Climate Crisis

Reflecting ecological biodiversity, this CFP is open to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary intertwinings, as well as new perspectives on established disciplinary approaches. It invites papers that consider the ecological interface between, for example: nature and culture, humans and animals, indigeneity and colonialism, science and literature, technology and poetics, histories and futures, reality and fiction, mythologies and mathematical models, climate science and climate imagination, spirits and humans, natural sciences and social sciences, the mundane and sacred, global and local, extinctions and emerging viral species.

The Special Issue invites a wide range of articles and creative works from researchers who engage with the tropical regions of the world. These include: tropical Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Indian Ocean Islands, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, the tropical north of Australia, Papua and the Pacific Ocean Islands, Hawai’i and the American South.

eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropicspublishes new research from Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences and allied fields on the variety and interrelatedness of nature, culture, and society in the Tropics. ISSN:1448-2940, free open access; indexed in Scopus, Google Scholar, Ulrich’s, DOAJ; archived in Pandora, Sherpa/Romeo; uses DOIs and Crossref, ranked Scimago Q2. 

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