Call for Papers – Towards a Posthumanistic Mountain Humanities

Scroll this

Towards a Posthumanistic Mountain Humanities

Deadline for abstract submissions: 31 October 2026 (approx. 500 words)

Online Workshop: 11 December 2026, 2-5 p.m. GMT

Format: academic papers, creative contributions

Submission: Please send abstracts to mountainstories@st-andrews.ac.uk, copied to the three convenors: Jonathan Westaway, University of Lancashire, jwestaway@lancashire.ac.uk; Jason König, University of St. Andrews, jpk3@st-andrews.ac.uk; Jonathan Pitches, University of Leeds, j.pitches@leeds.ac.uk

As part of the ‘Mountain stories, mountain futures: exploring new directions for the Mountain Humanities’ project, funded by the UK British Academy-Leverhulme Small Grants scheme (August 2026-July 2028), we invite contributions to our first online workshop – ‘Towards a Posthumanistic Mountain Humanities’ taking place on Friday 11 December 2026.

To address the challenges of the Anthropocene the humanities must exceed their historical focus on the human to incorporate more-than-human worlds and in-human worlds.  Our research explores a new posthumanistic approach to space and place that we have termed the Mountain Humanities. 

We draw deeply on the scholarship of the geontological and geo-social that re-naturalizes humanity as geologic in the Anthropocene, where being becomes geological and social thought incorporates planetary perspectives (Povinelli, 2016; Yusoff, 2024; Bobbette, 2023; Clark & Szerszynski, 2021).  Drawing on the spatial and volumetric turn within geography (Elden, 2023), we theorize mountain spaces as boundary objects, helping us to think at scales that exceed normal disciplinary boundaries, enabling global and comparative analysis and transdisciplinary approaches.  Thinking with mountains can help us to address the problems of asymmetry and scale that Bruno Latour has identified as problematic in comprehending geocide (Latour, 2015). 

We believe there is an urgent need for a posthumanistic Mountain Humanities to inform interregional mountain research, which tends to be dominated by STEM disciplines with their focus on empirical, quantitative, and reproducible results.  To this the humanities bring idiographic perspectives, emphasising subjective, context-specific and imaginative approaches essential for understanding human responses to the challenges of climate change in mountain regions.  The Mountain (Post) Humanities bring new temporal perspectives to the spatial, and new methodologies and affordances, incorporating an emphasis on memory and orality, history and archives, embodiment and performance and narrative and storytelling.

In her defence of the humanities, Martha Nussbaum identified the narrative imagination as critical for developing a new hermeneutics of care for the more-than-human world (Nussbaum, 2025).  The Mountain Humanities synthesises traditional approaches to the humanities from the classical humanistic tradition with the relational ontologies of various forms of assemblage theory, new materialism and new animism (Knutson, 2021; Bennett, 2010; Durant, 2021).  Informed by Indigenous scholars and animist and immanentist perspectives, the Mountain Humanities explores the idea of sentient and agentic landscapes and ecologies characterised by an extended nonhuman personhood where mountains are co-partners with us in our research (Cadena, 2015; Cadena & Blaser, 2018). 

Suggested topics for contributions include (but are not limited to):

  • Anthropocene mountains and the geontological turn.
  • Mountain cryohistories.
  • Glaciers, grief and rituals of extinction.
  • Indigenous mountains and ontological plurality.
  • Sentient and agentic mountains.
  • Xenophobic mountains.
  • Political geologies, racialized stratigraphy.
  • Scalar and temporal affordances of thinking with mountains.
  • Ungovernable mountains, catastrophe, slow violence.
  • Mountains as elemental media.
  • Pyrocene mountains.
  • Mountain cosmopolitics.
  • Transborder Indigeneity, decolonial approaches.
  • Beings in assembly, multi-being demos.
  • Indigenous research methods, decolonial research practice.
  • Mountain dramaturgies
  • Performativity and Mountains
  • Mountains and site sensitive performance.
  • Imaginary mountains
  • Mountains in translation
  • Mountains, movements and mobilities

We expect to run two further online workshops, in March and June 2027. If you are not in a position to present in December but would like to be involved in either or both of those later events, please do get in touch!

We are open to submissions in any area of the mountain arts and humanities, including both creative and academic contributions, and on any period from the prehistoric past to the 21st century. We are particularly keen to encourage new voices in the field, especially from disciplines and geographical areas that have historically been underrepresented in mountain studies.

For more information on the project, and on the associated Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures podcast series, please see the project website: https://msmf.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk.

To subscribe for regular updates, podcast episodes, and links to the project’s online events, click on the ‘Subscribe’ link bottom right-hand side of the project website, or email selby-sympa@st-andrews.ac.uk with ‘subscribe msmf-network’ in the subject line.

References:

Bennett, Jane, (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press).

Bobbette, Adam (2023), The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java, (Duke University Press).

Cadena, M. de la, (2015), Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (Dike University Press)

Cadena, M. de la & Blaser, M. (2018) A World of Many Worlds (Duke University Press).

Clark, N. & Szerszynski, B., (2021) Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences (Polity Press).

Durrant, S. (2021) ‘Critical Spirits: New Animism as Historical Materialism’, New Formations:

a journal of culture/theory/politics, 104/105. pp. 50-76.  https://doi.org/10.3898/NewF:104-105.03.2021 

Knutson, Sara A., (2021), ‘Itinerant Assemblages and Material Networks: the Application of Assemblage Theory to Networks in Archaeology’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 28(9). DOI:10.1007/s10816-020-09494-3

Latour, B. (2015) ‘Waiting for Gaia: Composing the Common World Through Art and Politics’, in Albena Yaneva & Alejandro Zaera-Polo (eds.), What is Cosmopolitical Design?, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 21-33, 2015. https://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/446.html 

Nussbaum, Martha C., ‘The Role of the Humanities in Education as a Cornerstone of Democracy, with a Special Emphasis on Environmental Issues’, Revista de Estudios Sociales 91: 177-184.  https://doi.org/10.7440/res91.2025.10 

Povinelli, E., (2016), Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, (Duke University Press).

Yusoff, Kathryn, (2024), Geologic Life: Inhuman intimacies and the Geophysics of Race (Duke University Press)

Contact Email: jwestaway@lancashire.ac.uk

Feature Image: Sir Charles Bell Archive, World Museum Liverpool.

The following two tabs change content below.
My Twitter profile

Jonathan Westaway

Dr. Jonathan Westaway is a Senior Research Fellow in History in the School of Humanities, Languages and Global Studies at the University of Central Lancashire, UK and is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers, the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Royal Asiatic Society. He is a cultural and environmental historian. His research focuses on imperial cultures of exploration in both polar and mountain environments. A recent article in Atlantic Studies entitled ‘The Inuit discovery of Europe? The Orkney Finnmen, preternatural objects and the re-enchantment of early-modern science’ has explored the early-modern scientific fascination with the circulation of Inuit artefacts and culture throughout the North Atlantic World and its subsequent impact on regional identities in the Northern Isles. He is currently writing a book for Manchester University Press about Orkney’s cultural and environmental links with the Arctic entitled Worlds Made by Winter: A Journey into Arctic Orkney.

Call for Papers – A World of a Thousand Cuts: Forests, Wood, and Industrialisation Across the Globe in the 19th and 20th Centuries

NiCHE encourages comments and constructive discussion of our articles. We reserve the right to delete comments that fail to meet our guidelines including comments under aliases, or that contain spam, harassment, or attacks on an individual.