Call for Papers

Seedings: Call for Paper II

 

Seedings is Anthropologica’s section dedicated to growing and planting ideas stimulated by recurrent calls for papers launched by our editorial team. For our second Seed series, Anthropologica is looking for emerging, spontaneous, creative, multimodal, timely, and ethnographically grounded submissions on the following topic:

 

Sounding the alarm

An alarm refers to a noise, a signal, an action that announces the presence of danger and threats or that serves to wake a person up, from slumber or, perhaps, apathy. Alarms act as impetus of action and movement. Sounding the alarm may encourage people to speak up and take position as well as take action. It may also force some to escape and find ways to survive and others to act with solidarity with them. Sounding the alarm does not usually leave indifferent, it stimulates reflection as well as actions and may invite people to care and be empathetic. Alarming may provoke the emergence of new ways of thinking and being in the world. It may also incite people to become activists and to revolt. What do alarms generate (or do not), how do people react, get organized and mobilized? Or on the contrary, do alarm messages coerce and paralyze? Sounding the alarm also evokes the contemporary moment of misinformation and alarmism. Thus, it calls our attention to the ever-present worry of scaremongering as well as the potentiality of whistle blowing.

As such, alarm sounds abound; they act as continuous “wake up calls.” How do people respond: how do they get together and organize? What are the ways in which they cope with these signs of crisis? And how do racial, gender, class and age factors impact how people react and cope with alarms?[1] Sounding the alarm also brings us to ask: Who or what launches the messages of threat? To Whom? And for what purpose? Also, which communication strategies and platforms are used to spread the word?

Sounding the alarm: examples abound. For instance (and submissions should not be limited to these cases):

Climate crisis. Summer 2023 has now been officially reported as the hottest on record. Millions of people in the world suffered from the extreme heat waves. In Canada, the 2023 wildfire season was the most destructive on record, “like no other year, by a stupendous margin”[2] with more than 6,500 wildfires reported by the beginning of September. But Canada is not the only country with these terrifying figures. Unparalleled wildfires in the northern hemisphere destroyed millions of acres of boreal forests, including in Russia, Greece, Portugal and Maui, Hawaii. Wildfires are now expected as a calamitous annual event government, people, survivors are anticipating and eventually fighting. Yet, wildfires are clear evidence—a clear alarm bell— that the world is changing quickly and dramatically.

Wars and violent conflicts. The coordinated deadly attacks in Israel led by the Islamist militant group Hamas on October 7, 2023, led to a military riposte in the Gaza Strip. Millions of people gather in various cities of the world in support of the ceasefire. Bridges and alliances between communities are built during those difficult times, others are annihilated and impossible to reconcile. When considering violence and wars in the world, reports[3] show that we are witnessing a historic rise in global conflict, with deadly wars, more particularly in Ukraine and Ethiopia. Those conflicts create ripple effects everywhere in the world; and media relay the information in our hands as we scroll our favourite app.

Health security. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that humans can be affected by large waves of invisible and harmful bodies entering our lungs. Apparatus and infrastructures of emergencies were put in place to respond to this world scale epidemic. Yet, viruses are still out there and the presence and fear of long-term effects impact the life of many. COVID-19 has changed the world. Yet, it is not the only pandemic that caused major life and lost: the Ebola virus in West Africa which erupted in 2013-2016 is one case in point.

For this Seedings Call for Papers, we seek innovative, ethnographically grounded contributions that provide insights from any number of approaches into the social, material, and cultural dimensions of the topic “Sounding the alarm.” We invite authors to reflect on the actions of sounding the alarms, and on how people cope and react to warning signals. Our call invites ethnographic engagements with the action of sounding the alarm, understood in a concrete and/or metaphorical sense. The ethnographic research on which submissions are based can be provisional, small-scale, and emergent. We think that anthropologists have much to offer by way of analysis, documentation, curation, and creative expression of how humans and non-humans raise the alarm, and how they cope with it.  

We encourage submissions that are of shorter length than full length articles, ideally 4,000 to 5,000 words, although we will consider up to 8,000-word submissions as well. We encourage all forms of ethnography, including photo essays, graphic-ethnography, ethnographic poetry, and ethnographic fiction.  Submissions will undergo anonymous peer-review. We encourage contributions from Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour scholars. Anthropologica is a bilingual journal and we welcome submissions in French or English.

We aim to publish this set of papers in our Fall 2024 issue. The firm deadline for online submission on our website is March 1, 2024. Feel free to query the editorial team with your idea before submitting.

 

 

[1] For instance, is climate anxiety an overwhelming white phenomenon?: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-climate-anxiety/?fbclid=IwAR3sduEU1aryuRmHm65G2scFnf71DmL80i3lQZmFEZqSp29uvBxUKeMijYY.

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/09/canada-wildfire-record-climate-crisis.

[3] As reported by the Washington Post, see: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/06/29/conflict-war-deaths-global-peace-rise-casualty/.