Call for Book Chapters: "Entangled and Empowered: Agency in Multispecies Communities"

Vernon Press invites book chapter proposals for a scholarly collection of essays on the power of living and dwelling amid entangled relationships in multispecies communities, edited by Dr. Keri Stevenson of the University of New Mexico-Gallup.

Entangled relationships, inescapable and inevitable as they are, can be a source of frustration and constraint for those humans, animals, plants, and landscapes tied into them. However, they can also offer a chance for agency, and for augmentation and improvement of more than one species’ lives as these communities journey together into the future of the more-than-human world. This collection welcomes multidisciplinary perspectives, including those from literature, film studies, animal studies, and popular culture studies, on how these entanglements produce agency and empowerment for the beings involved in them. 

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Examinations of agency in fictional and nonfictional narratives founded on entanglement (e.g., Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World) 
• Evaluations of real and fictional species in commensal or mutualistic relationships with humans or each other
• Reevaluations of pest and invasive species and their effect on other species in their communities, including agency in dealing with them or the establishment of new, mutually beneficial relationships between these species and others
• Focus on species recovery and extinction prevention in local communities
• Productive entanglements between biological and technological “species” such as the cyborg and the android 
• Recoveries of lifeways in Indigenous communities
• Studies of agential entanglements between marine and terrestrial species from a blue humanities perspective
• Emphasis on a multispecies relationship as the “protagonist” in literature or film
• Analysis of popular science narratives that encourage perceptions of kinship between humans and other species to foster conservation or other preservatory action
• Engagement with the idea of “wilderness” as a separatory factor between different communities and how it fosters/does not foster agency (and what might persist as agency in spite of it)
• Reexamination of traditionally “negative” genres like dystopian fiction to see what benefits emerge to a multispecies community outside of humanity

Submission Instructions 

We welcome both individual and co-authored pieces. Please submit your 500-word proposal to Keri Stevenson at Keristevenson@unm.edu by June 1st, 2023.

Timeline: 

1 June 2023: Proposal submissions due 

1 July 2023: Acceptance/rejection emails sent 

20 November 2023: Full chapter manuscripts due 

31 January 2024: Responses from editor with suggestions sent 

1 April 2024: Revised manuscripts due 

1 June 2024: Full manuscript submitted to the publisher