What, when & where
Tropical Imaginaries & Climate Crisis
eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics
deadline 31 May 2021
Heat waves and wave-inundated islands, prolonged droughts and rainforest fires, tropical storms and monsoon deluges – although climate change is global, it is not experienced everywhere the same. Climate change has pronounced effects in the Tropics.
Global sea level rise is predicted to be higher in the tropics, especially the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Global warming increases intensities in El Niño and La Niña oceanic-atmospheric events which cause droughts, hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones across vast areas of the tropics and subtropics. While rainforests, tropical peat swamps and oceans are carbon dioxide sinks, global warming means sinks reach saturation. Rainforests and coral reefs are Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystems developed over thousands of years; deforestation and fires add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, while the phenomena of ocean warming, sea level rise and acidification bleach and kill coral reefs.[i] The tropics has become a critical zone of cascading tipping points, the site where the full scale and scope of climate change and its associated challenges and deathly consequences are becoming materially manifest.
This year marks the long-awaited United Nations Climate Change conference. The agenda includes the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Following the Paris Agreement and the Kyoto Protocol, the conference aims to commit nations to a revitalized effort to urgently reduce anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions in order to limit global warming at 1.5C.
While acknowledging the importance of the UN Climate Change global agenda, this Special Issue draws attention to the tropical regions of the world: regions that are undergoing rapid development, yet suffer serious poverty; are rich in biodiversity, and threatened by environmental destruction; are home to many of the world’s rainforest and maritime Indigenous peoples, but endure legacies of colonialism. We advocate that climate science requires climate imagination to bring science systems into relation with the human, cultural and social. In short, this Special Issue contributes to calls to humanise climate change.
To perceive the vast intricacies involved in climate change phenomena requires imagination; a poetics of thought. Tropical imagination invites papers informed by Indigenous knowing, ethnography, phenomenology, symbiosis and co-emergence, more-than-human worlds, worlding, patchy Anthropocene, Plantationocene, feral ecologies,[ii] rhizomatics, material poetics, biological poetics, archipelagic imaginaries, queer ecologies, ecogothic, ecocriticism, ecopoetry, ecofeminism, ecosophy, and tropical climate change storying.
The Special Issue invites a wide range of articles and creative works from researchers who engage with the tropical regions of the world. These include: tropical Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Indian Ocean Islands, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, the tropical north of Australia, Papua and the Pacific Ocean Islands, Hawai’i and the American South.
Deadline & how to apply
Submissions (full paper) close 31 May 2021
Research article submissions should be about 6000 words
Literary, creative works and photographic essays about 4000 words
Include a 200-word Abstract + 5 Keywords
Provide a 100-word biographical note for each author (on separate sheet)
Follow APA (edition 7) for in-text citations and reference list
Contributions should be submitted as a Microsoft Word file (.doc .docx)
Submissions must conform to the eTropic Style Sheet & Layout (see StyleSheet)
All images must be used with permission and referenced
Submissions should be uploaded to eTropic online journal portal
Suitable papers will be double-blind peer reviewed
Authors are requested to browse eTropic articles to make sure they are familiar with the journal’s multidisciplinary scope and style
For enquiries, or for pitching your ideas or abstracts, email etropic@jcu.edu.au
Publication date: September 2021
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