Call for Papers
Edited Volume (Brill)
Decolonizing Environmental Imaginaries: Climate, Heritage, and the Postcolonial South
Editors:
Paweł Piszczatowski (Hg.)
Neha Khetrapal (Hg.)
Book series:
Culture – Environment – Society. Humanities and beyond
Publisher: Brill
About the Volume
Recent debates in the environmental humanities — including works by Macarena Gómez-Barris (The Extractive Zone, 2017) and Farhana Sultana (“The Unbearable Heaviness of Climate Coloniality,” Political Geography, 2022) — have made it increasingly clear that climate change, heritage discourses, and environmental imaginaries cannot be understood apart from the colonial legacies of extraction, epistemic exclusion, and uneven modernities.
Postcolonial and decolonial approaches have demonstrated that contemporary ecological crises are inseparable from histories of displacement, enclosure, and structural inequality. Foundational contributions such as Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (DeLoughrey, Didur & Carrigan, 2015) and S. Rahman’s “The Environment of South Asia: Beyond Postcolonial Ecocriticism” (South Asian Review, 2021) underscore how environmental thought emerging from the Global South foregrounds questions of justice, mobility, cultural survivance, and more-than-human relationality. Farhana Sultana’s concept of climate coloniality further exposes how ostensibly universal discourses of climate responsibility continue to reproduce geopolitical asymmetries between the Global North and the Global South.
Complementary perspectives from disability studies, feminist theory, and critical heritage studies — for instance Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory (ed. Sibara & Ray, 2017) — have further expanded this field by interrogating the colonial, ableist, and anthropocentric assumptions embedded in dominant Western notions of the body, resilience, and environmental agency. Together, these frameworks signal a profound epistemic realignment: a shift away from Eurocentric universalism toward plural, situated, and relational ecologies.
This decolonial turn has also gained increasing traction in Central and Eastern European scholarship, which situates local semi-peripheral contexts within broader global debates. Volumes such as Non-Western Approaches in Environmental Humanities (ed. Jarzębowska, Ross, Skonieczny, 2025) contribute to this dialogue by juxtaposing perspectives from Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, asking how environmental thought might evolve once Western modernity is no longer treated as its epistemic center.
This edited volume seeks to extend and deepen these conversations by bringing together contributions that critically examine environmental imaginaries, heritage practices, and climate narratives from postcolonial, decolonial, and semi-peripheral perspectives, with a particular emphasis on the Global South.
Scope and Topics
We invite original contributions that explore the intersections of decolonial critique, environmental imagination, and heritage practices. While the volume places particular emphasis on South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, and semi-peripheral regions of Europe, comparative and theoretically innovative approaches are especially welcome.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
- Postcolonial and decolonial approaches to the environmental humanities
- Cultural, spiritual, and religious responses to climate change in the Global South
- Colonial legacies and epistemic asymmetries in heritage, conservation, and sustainability discourse
- Orientalization and Western appropriations of Asian philosophies, religions, and spiritualities
- Environmental imaginaries in literature, film, and visual arts from postcolonial contexts
- Intersections of religion, ecology, and material heritage (e.g. temple architecture, ritual space, olfactory heritage)
- Environmental mobility, migration, displacement, and climate-induced precarity
- Indigenous epistemologies and situated ecological knowledges
- Feminist, queer, disability-informed, and subaltern ecologies
- Comparative ecologies of postcolonial and semi-peripheral modernities
- Climate fiction, speculative imaginaries, and narrative strategies of resistance
Submission Guidelines and Timeline
Extended abstracts (700–800 words, in English)
📅 Deadline: February 28, 2026
Authors will be notified of acceptance by March 15, 2026.
Full chapters (approx. 6,000–8,000 words)
📅 Deadline: September 30, 2026
The volume is planned for publiation with Brill in 2027 as part of the Culture – Environment – Society. Humanities and beyond series.
Please submit abstracts together with a short biographical note (approx. 100 words) to:
📧 p.piszczatowski@uw.edu.pl
📧 nkhetrapal@jgu.edu.in
