Care in the Environmental Humanities

Dear Colleagues,

In her new book, Cannibal Capitalism (2023), Nancy Fraser connects the climate and ecological crises to a contemporary crisis of care. Both, she argues, are rooted in a voracious form of capitalism that consumes the resources upon which our lives depend. This Special Issue seeks to build on a wave of recent writing that explores care as a valuable concept for the environmental humanities. ‘What’, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa asks, ‘does caring mean when we go about thinking and living interdependently with beings other than human, in “more than human” worlds?’ (13). Care is, Thom Van Dooren argues, ‘a vital concept for an engaged environmental humanities’ but ‘much more needs to be done to articulate what different kinds of careful scholarship might look like’ (294). We invite articles that engage with any aspect of the environmental humanities and take up this challenge of ‘thinking with care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 13). We are interested in questions of interdependence and intersectionality, and approaches which expand definitions of care including ecofeminism, queer and Black ecologies, indigenous and postcolonial perspectives. Interdisciplinary approaches are also welcome, including articles which engage with diverse cultural forms, such as literature, life writing, film, art and other media, and consider how scholarship might itself be considered an act of care.

Works Cited

• Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
• Van Dooren, Thom. “Care”. Environmental Humanities, vol. 5, no. 1, 2014, pp. 291-294.  

Dr. Alice Hall
Dr. Thomas Houlton
Guest Editors

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