Call for Submissions – Emotional Ecologies

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Emotional Ecologies: Where We’re Going and Where We’ve Been

A NiCHE Series

Proposal Deadline: February 28, 2023

Series Publication: June 2023

How has environment shaped emotion? 

How has emotion been mobilized to shape environments? 

What role does emotion have in connecting us to our environment? 

In what ways does emotion shape interspecies relationships?

When Professor Elizabeth Wilson presented an appraisal of Silvan Tomkins’s work on affect theory to a department of psychology, a member of the audience “expostulated, ‘Yes. But you can’t study shame in a rat!”1 Yet, for many of us, questioning whether animals have feelings and complex inner worlds seems outdated, problematic, and deeply colonial. Even modern animal welfare groups, such as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, have historically urged that people should see animals as beings with “feelings, hopes, fears and wants like ourselves.”2 Recent scholarship exploring historical relationships between environments, the more-than-human world, and affect has demonstrated the interconnected, entangled, and embodied nature of such relationships. Environmental historians have not widely taken the “affective turn” to make emotions a central category of analysis. But scholarship bringing together ecocriticism, environmental history, and the history of emotions is on the rise.3 Scholarship exploring emotional ecologies, which situates emotions in a web of relations with other creatures and things, offers opportunities to consider the affective texture of where the living planet is headed and where it has been.4

Following Grace Moore’s observation that “[…] there is still a great deal of work to be done to connect the history of emotions to environmental history,” we aim to explore these connections and to make space for imagining emotional ecologies supporting sustainable futures.5 

NiCHE invites proposals for a special series on Emotional Ecologies: Where We’re Going and Where We’ve Been that explores the history of emotions and emotional futurity from an ecocritical and intersectional view. This issue will be edited by environmental historian Dr. Jessica DeWitt and York University doctoral candidate, emotions historian, and interdisciplinary gender studies scholar Sarah York-Bertram. Some of the questions this series considers include:

  • In what ways do emotions and environments intersect and how are they entangled? How has emotion mobilized to shape or respond to environments and environmental change? Can emotion be understood as an environmental force?
  • How have human feelings about environments and animals changed or continued over time? What do place-based, migratory, and/or comparative approaches to emotional ecologies reveal?
  • How can more-than-human beings’ feelings be centered or, at the very least, included in explorations of emotional ecologies? What does ecocriticism, environmental history, and the history of emotion offer when exploring more-than-human’s feelings and experiences? 
  • What do environmental history and the history of emotion offer when exploring emotional ecologies and futurity? How do we imagine the more-than-human world and the living planet will feel in the future? How do we cultivate sustainable and thriving emotional ecologies?

We invite proposals for:

  • Blog posts (800-1200 words)
  • Poetry
  • Creative nonfiction
  • Creative fiction
  • Photo essays 
  • Video essays 
  • Audio content 
  • Digital and multimedia art

Possible topics include but are not limited to emotional ecologies and:

  • Histories
  • The more-than-human world/experiences
  • Human and non-human relations
  • Environment
  • Place
  • Migration
  • Embodiments
  • Futurity
  • Ecocriticism
  • Environmental Justice
Mari Eyice: “What to do next in the history of emotions?“

Submit a 250 word proposal describing your proposed submission and its contribution to the field of environmental history/studies more broadly, as well as a short bio using the Google Form below by February 28, 2023.

Applicants will be alerted of their submission status by March 15, 2023. Please email Jessica DeWitt, jessicamariedewitt [at] gmail dot com, with any questions or other inquiries.

NiCHE offers $100 CAD honoraria to contributors without adequate or consistent access to institutional support. Learn more about our honoraria policy here.

Emotional Ecologies Proposal Submission Form

Suggested Reading

  • Beaven, Lisa, “Trees and Disease: The Ecology of the Roman Campagna in the Seventeenth Century,” Environment and History 28 (3), August 2022, 455-472.
  • Gaynor, Andrea, Susan Broomhall, and Andrew Flack. “Frogs and Feelings Communities: A Study in History of Emotions and Environmental History,” Environment and History 28 (1), February 2022, 83-104.
  • Handley, Sasha. “Lusty Sack Posset, Nuptial Affections and the Material Communities of Early Modern Weddings,” Environment and History 28 (3), August 2022, 375-395.
  • Handley, Sasha and John Emrys Morgan. “Environment, Emotion and Early Modernity,” Environment and History 28 (3), August 2022, 355-363.
  • Kheraj, Sean. “Episode 76: Methodological Challenges in Animal History” Nature’s Past: Canadian Environmental History Podcast, https://niche-canada.org/2022/11/30/natures-past-episode-76-methodological-challenges-in-animal-history/.
  • Lee, John S, “Sylvan Anxieties and the Making of Landscapes in Early Modern Korea,” Environment and History 28 (3), August 2022, 415-433.
  • Macfarlane, Daniel, “Emotional and Environmental History at Niagara Falls,” Network in Canadian History and Environment, September 28, 2017, https://niche-canada.org/2017/09/28/emotional-and-environmental-history-at-niagara-falls/
  • Meredith, Tayler, “Summer, Sun and SAD in Early Modern England,” Environment and History 28 (3), August 2022, 473-490.
  • Morgan, John Emrys. “An Emotional Ecology of Pigeons in Early Modern England and America,” Environment and History 23 (3), August 2022, 435-452.
  • Tarantino, Giovanni. “‘The Sky in the Place of The Nile’: Climate, Religious Unrest and Scapegoating in Post-Tridentine Apulia,” Environment and Society 28 (3), August 2022, 491-511.
  • Winchcombe, Rachel. “Foodways and Emotional Communities in Early Colonial Virginia,” Environment and History 28 (3), August 2022, 397-414.
  • Wright, Rebecca. “The Emotional Energy Consumer,” Network in Canadian History and Environment, January 21, 2019, https://niche-canada.org/2019/01/21/the-emotional-energy-consumer/.

Notes

1 Frank, Adam J, and Elizabeth A Wilson, A Silvan Tomkins Handbook: Foundations for Affect Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 3.

2 Gaynor, Andrea, Susan Broomhall, and Andrew Flack. “Frogs and Feeling Communities: A Study in History of Emotions and Environmental History.” Environment and History 28, no. 1 (2022), 95.

3 See the entire  28 no. 3 (August 2022) issue of Environment and History on Environment, Emotion and Early Modernity for example.

4 This definition of emotional ecology can be found in John Emrys Morgan’s article “An Emotional Ecology of Pigeons in Early Modern England and America,” Environment and History 28 no. 3 (2022), 435.

5 Grace Moore, “Nature,” in Broomhall (ed.), Early Modern Emotions, p. 346.

Feature Image: “Noisy Attribution” by @jbedrina is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.
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Sarah York-Bertram and Jessica DeWitt

Sarah York-Bertram (she/they) is a historian, a qualitative researcher, and a PhD candidate at York University. Their doctoral research is a history of emotions examining the affective basis of judgments and narratives surrounding sexual commerce during Canada’s westward expansion in the nineteenth century and western Canadian colonial worldmaking in the twentieth century. Sarah has fifteen years' experience in intersectional, transnational, and community-based feminist research and eleven years' experience in queer and feminist digital methods. She is a member of York University’s Centre for Feminist Research’s Feminist Digital Methods Research Cluster. Sarah was born and raised in Treaty 6 territory in Saskatchewan and currently lives in St. Catharines, Ontario. | Jessica DeWitt (she/her) is an environmental historian of Canada and the United States, editor, and digital strategist. She is co-editor-in-chief and social media editor for the Network in Canadian History and Environment. She is also a member of York University’s Centre for Feminist Research’s Feminist Digital Methods Research Cluster.

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