Call for Book Chapters: "Environments of Art, Recording, and Containment"

Vernon Press invites book chapters for a forthcoming edited volume on the subject of "Environments of Art, Recording, and Containment."

With each passing year, the pressures of climate change make it clear that the natural world and human endeavor are irrevocably intertwined. We invite scholars to explore how the concept of “adaptation” can serve to further questions of ecologies: the relationships between living organisms and their environments. Adaptations, after all, are always already about networked relationships, exploring not only the connections between texts – including the written word, film, and media – but also the relationships between images and music, performers and performance, human and nonhuman, and bodies and physical spaces that are both "organic" and "constructed" for a variety of humanistic purposes, such as surveillance, containment, sustenance, manufacture, learning, healing, and recreation. Where do film, literature, and media fit within the larger web of global ecologies, and how can ecological thinking enrich our understanding of the interactions between nature, culture, and adaptation? Inspired by historical humanist questions regarding Naturalism and Individualism, Determinism and Free Will, and Non/Post-Human relations, as well as recent work in the environmental humanities, we invite proposals that bridge the study of the environment (broadly conceived in urban, rural, and uninhabited or undeveloped settings) and the study of textual adaptation.

This edited volume will bring forth a wide swath of scholars from different disciplines in an effort to discuss ecocritical media adaptations from an interdisciplinary perspective. This approach will bring a unique mixture that provides a greater level of diversity and discussion concerning the intersections of environmental humanities and media adaptation studies. While we welcome papers on any aspect of film and media studies, we are especially interested in papers exploring one or more of the following topics concerning ecology and adaptation.

Possible contributions include (but are not limited to):

• The environment as text/cinema
• Landscapes and adaptations
• Adaptation and the anthropocene
• Parasitic and symbiotic adaptations
• Apocalypse or post-apocalypse and adaptation
• Multiverses and alternate realities and adaptations
• Relationships between past, present, and future
• Worldbuilding and transmedia storyworlds as narrative ecologies
• Narratives of survival
• The relationship between biological adaptation and textual adaptation
• Ecocritical re-imaginings of well-known stories
• Fandoms as evolving ecosystems
• How adaptations operate within media ecosystems

Final Essays should be approximately 5000-8000 words. Please submit an abstract no longer than 500 words with a brief bio note to volume editor, Mattius Rischard at mattius.rischard@msun.edu by March 31, 2024.