Guest Editors: Farah Polato (Università di Padova) and Gaia Giuliani (University of Coimbra)

This call aims to engage with the fertile mutual contamination generated within artistic and media production by the encounter between environmental approaches to the Human and Social Sciences, and postcolonial and decolonial reflections and practices that traverse Political ecology, Cultural, Gender and Queer studies, Indigenous, Black and Critical race studies. Within this framework, the centrality of notions such as “body” and “territory” as material realities and sites of asymmetric, physical and epistemic occupations, is accompanied by a vision of society and human history as necessarily environmental, that is, always originating within the interdependence between the human and the non-human.

Prompted by these interconnections, an artistic and media production has emerged that focuses on the multiple dimensions of the catastrophe – whether real or metaphorically constructed – and explores post- and trans-human perspectives on it. In these narratives, the dimension of visuality, in its multiplicity of forms, has reaffirmed a powerful impact: from cinema to audiovisual media, from expressive arts to comics and video games – , aesthetics and visual language emerge as sites of creation or vectors for communicating conceptions and practices of feeling-thinking (sentir-pensar, Orlando Fals Borda), of escrevivência (Conceição Evaristo), and of turning the past, present and future catastrophe into memory, thereby subverting the assumptions through which it is hegemonically codified in the present. What appears is a highly diversified corpus, shaped as much by the themes it addresses as by the ethical perspectives informing each work’s mise-en-place. These perspectives involve i.e. relationships with places, people, memory, opacities, politics of reparation, and radical hopes; the labour politics underlying the entire production and distribution chain of the works; the use of materials specific to each medium; the type of public access; and the “political” forms of restitution – that is, the restitution in terms of visibility and political agency of the communities, collectives, individuals, non-human beings and environments involved in the work

Through this call for papers, we aim to gather both analytical studies on the contributions of individual works or productions, and cross-sectional analysis paths of practices or productions on how visual has rethought the idea of catastrophe, whether in ways akin to or radically divergent from hegemonic narratives. With the intention of exploring and promoting diverse forms of practice and thought, alongside critical and theoretical essays, the project also welcomes visual essays and dialogue formats – conversations with filmmakers, artists, curators and other protagonists – through which, in the crossings of gazes, intentions, issues and outcomes of artistic effort may emerge in polyvocal form, as materialised in the artistic, cinematic and curatorial poetics under discussion.

Contributions may therefore take the form of:

• critical essays on cinema and art
• theoretical essays
• visual essays
• dialogues/conversations between the author(s) and artists, filmmakers, curators or the protagonists of the oeuvre

Please send your proposals for articles (500 words), reviews, interviews or creative interventions (previously unpublished) to Farah Polato (farah.polato@unipd.it) and Gaia Giuliani  (giuliani.gaia@gmail.com) by April 15th, 2026

 Acceptance of proposals will be notified by May 15th, 2026

 Deadline for article submission: September 15th, 2026

 Deadline for submitting accepted peer-reviewed articles: January 15th, 2027

Suggested bibliography

Akomolafe, B. (2017), These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
Alaimo, S. (2010), Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Armiero, M. (2021), Wasteocene. Stories from the Global Dump. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Binns, D., Najdowski, R. (2025), Confronting the Climate Crisis: Activism, Technology and Ecoaesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan: London.
Bould, M. (2021), The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture. London: Verso. Braidotti, R. (2013), Post-human. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Ceretta, M.; Dividus,A.; Trocini, F. (a cura di) (2025), Immaginari distopici contemporanei: discontinuità e conflitti. Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura.
Claeys, G. (2016), Dystopia: A Natural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cubitt, S., Monani, S., Rust, S., (eds) (2012; 2023), Ecocinema: Theory and practice 1 & 2. New York: Routledge. Cubitt, S., Monani, S., Rust, S., (eds.) (2016), Ecomedia. Key Issues. New York: Routledge.
Demos, T.J (2020), Beyond the World’s End: Ecologies of Catastrophe, Just Futures, and Arts of Living at the Crossing. Durham: Duke University Press.
Demos, T.J. (2017), Against the Anthropocene. Visual Culture and Environment Today. London: Sternberg Press.
Di Minico, E. (2018), Il mondo contemporaneo tra controllo, utopia e distopia. Milano: Meltemi, Milano.
Dobrin, S.I. (ed.) (2020), Eco Comix. Essays on the Environment in Comics and Graphic Novels. Jefferson: McFarland Publishing.
Fabbri, G. (a cura di) (2024), Narrazioni dall’Antropocene. (Pre)visioni della crisi ambientale nella letteratura e nella cultura visuale. Verona: ombre corte.
Fraser, N. (2022), Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It. London: Verso.
Giuliani, G. (2021), Monsters, Catastrophes and the Anthropocene. A Postcolonial Critique. London and New York: Routledge.
Glissant, É. (1990), Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.
Graham, E.L. (2002), Representations of the Post/Human. Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers.
Grebowicz, M. (ed.) (2007), SciFi in the Mind’s Eye. Reading Science through Science Fiction. Chicago: Open Court.
Haraway, D.J. (2016), Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kääpä, P., Gustafsson, T. (eds.) (2013), Transnational ecocinema: film culture in an era of ecological transformation, Bristol: Intellect. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Kirkup, G., Janes, L., Hovenden, F. and Woodward, K. (eds) (2000), The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge.
Kothari, A., Salleh, A., Escobar, A., Demaria, F. and Acosta, A. (eds) (2019), Pluriverse. A Post-Development Dictionary. New Delhi: Tulika Press.
Lear, Jonathan (2006), Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lino, M. (2014), L’Apocalisse postmoderna tra letteratura e cinema. Catastrofi, oggetti, metropoli, corpi. Firenze: Le Lettere.
Luckhurst, R. J. (2015), Zombies. A Cultural History. London: Reaktion Books.
Malvestio, M. (2021), Raccontare la fine del mondo. Fantascienza e Antropocene. Milano: nottetempo.
Mbembe, A. (2022), The Earthly Community: Reflections on the Last Utopia community. Rotterdam: V2.
Menga, F., Davies, D. (2019), “Apocalypse yesterday: Posthumanism and comics in the Anthropocene”. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 3(3), 663-687.
Molloy, M., Duncan P., Henry C. (2023), Screening the Posthuman. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Muzzioli, F. (2021) Scritture della catastrofe. Istruzioni e ragguagli per un viaggio nelle distopie. Milano: Meltemi.
Souvik M. (2017), Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pasolini, A.; Vallorani, N. (2020), Corpi magici. Scritture incarnate dal fantastico alla fantascienza. Sesto San Giovanni: Mimesis.
Past, E. (2019), Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Povinelli, E. (2016), Geontologies. A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Seed, D. (2000), Imagining Apocalypse. Studies in Cultural Crisis. London: Macmillan.
Terry, M. (2020), The Geo-Doc: Geomedia, Documentary Film, and Social Change. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tsing, A.L., Deger, J., Saxena, A. K. (2024), Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene. The New Nature. Stanford University Press.