Submissions

Dossier Landscapes and environments of the new climate regime: the Anthropocene imagined by the sonorous, visible and sensitive

Guest Editors: 

André Araujo
Marcelo Bergamin Containing

The Anthropocene as a geological epoch, initially proposed by geology and the sciences of the Earth system, has already discursively contaminated several other areas of knowledge, especially the humanities. In addition to (or below) the environmental impacts that humanity causes to the earth's surface and atmosphere, it is urgent to be able to develop ways of thinking, feeling and acting in the face of catastrophe. This is where the importance of artistic, cultural and communicational works that are capable of dealing affectively with the Anthropocene, of awakening changes in semiotic and perceptive habits to prepare us sensitively for the shocks that will come. This dossier aims to investigate the concept of the Anthropocene and its forms of representation and intelligibility as expressed in the media and communication technologies, exploring its manifestations in images, sounds and narratives.

Some topics relevant to the dossier, but not limited to these, are:

1. The concept of the Anthropocene and the problems it presents for Communication, especially in its visual, sound and cinematographic dimensions;
2. The discussion about the types of visuality and sound regimes that can emerge taking into account the Anthropocene environment;
3. The ecological dimension that underlies the materiality of the media, the environmental impacts brought about by communication technologies (extraction, energy, disposal) and proposals of artists and filmmakers who discuss in their works the relationship between media and the environment;
4. The different ways of representing environments and landscapes from artistic, aesthetic and semiotic dimensions, such as soundscapes and visuals in view of the changes brought about by the Anthropocene;
5. The productivity of concepts such as environment, atmosphere and zone, when thought of in a communicational context and their semiotic, sound and visual materializations;
6. The notion of territory, especially from the ideas of habitability, refuge and occupation, in the context of climate change and the crisis of space;
7. Communicational perspectives that displace the Western perspective, opening up the possibility of investigating the Anthropocene from different worldviews, as well as decolonial, racial, feminist, and queer perspectives;
8. Ways in which different cultural works are dedicated to the issue of non-humans, building discussions about the ideas of translation, alliance and becoming;
9. Issues related to denialist discourses and different problematizations about public communication in the Anthropocene;
10. Figurations of the future in visual or sound works, which explore the potentialities and limits, utopian or dystopian, of the Anthropocene.

The articles can both propose reflections of a strictly theoretical nature and deal with communicational and artistic objects. The dossier is interested in texts that analyze cultural works (films, audiovisuals and sound pieces) that evoke discussions about different communicational, semiotic and aesthetic strategies for the elaboration of a thought for the Anthropocene through its productions. It is suggested to operate transversally through the media, not limiting oneself only to a single format, but reflecting on how a way of thinking crosses more than one support - from cinema to conceptual arts, from poetry to music, from video to painting.

Schedule:

Deadline for submission of texts: July 30, 2025

Publication forecast: October 15,  2025.

Dossier Urban Connections

GUEST EDITORS:
Janice Caiafa (ECO-UFRJ)
Fernando Gonçalves (Uerj)
Jane Maciel (UFMA)

By attracting people and ideas, by circulating things in multiple spaces, the city can be a place of experimentation with ties of a very particular kind. Certainly, there is also a vertical development that generates inequalities, such as housing, mobility, income, race and gender, and which is stipulated to a large extent by the imperatives of capitalist economic and subjective production. At the same time, however, the city exists in a horizontal movement, to the extent that its heterogeneous spaces are crossed by flows that ceaselessly renew social relations, subjectivities and communication.

In this case, the strangers who circulate there breathe together these airs of variation and can cultivate ties that escape hierarchies to some extent and, less tight than those of family and circumscribed groups, gather in a space of fluidity and freedom.

In this dossier, we intend to discuss these suggestions, highlighting analyses and reflections on practices that could trigger these urban links. 

We understand these practices in many forms and in a broad spectrum: whether provoked by authorial or anonymous gestures, individual and/or collective, or the result of fortuitous encounters or even the magnitude of events organized by institutional or popular initiatives.

In this sense, street art, graffiti, posters and other visual marks on the streets, such as on lamp posts or walls, form palimpsests, or other marks that mobilize various senses. The same thing applies to cultural and artistic manifestations in  music, performance, cinema, photography and activism in public spaces, related to urban links and their experimentation.

We suggest that these practices, in the heterogeneous and constantly moving urban environment, are aggregating — either when they bring together strangers in the same space to participate in common activities, or when, by triggering signs produced by strangers in the city environment, leading us to an aesthetic fruition, they form an audience, as the newspaper would have done (Gabriel Tarde) in the sense of a "spiritual collectivity" at a distance.

We welcome both empirical works — focusing on one or more cities, or on any segment in the urban context, such as neighborhoods, streets, communities, the moving spaces of public transport or other possible settings — as well as analytical texts of a theoretical or essayistic nature and visual essays (film, video, photography), which discuss the city in its powers of visual aesthetics,  sound and tactile, subjective experimentation in the urban environment or other pertinent aspects.

Schedule:

Deadline for submission of texts: August 31, 2025

Publication forecast: December,15,  2025,

Articles

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