Resilience and American Literature are working together to create a joint special issue on Infrastructure.

CFP: “The Infrastructure of Emergency”

American Literatureand Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanitiesinvite submissions for a joint special issue entitled “The Infrastructure of Emergency,” co-edited by John Levi Barnard, Stephanie Foote, Jessica Hurley, and Jeffrey Insko. This joint special issue aims to draw together scholars of American literary and cultural studies with others working across the environmental humanities to trace the long histories and possible futures of infrastructure under conditions of planetary ecological emergency, with a particular focus on the infrastructures of empire and capital and the local and global environmental ramifications of their historical unfolding. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to: energy and resource extraction, delivery, and consumption; shipping, air traffic, roads, canals, railroads, highways, and the networks of commerce; agriculture, food production, and the rendering of animal capital; waste management, garbage, and recycling; the infrastructures of global health, epidemics, and epidemiology; infrastructures of urban spaces, including public transit and housing, water provision, sewage and sanitation, gentrification, dislocation, and neglect; information technology, communication networks, and “the cloud”; precarious infrastructures threatened by rising sea levels, hurricanes, wildfires, and heat waves; and projections of imperial power, the military-industrial complex, and the logistics of war. These are only a few. More broadly, we invite submissions that take an expansive view of the concept of infrastructure, its representations in literature and other media, its history and historical contexts, and its implications for environmental justice at local, regional, and planetary scales.

Submissions should specify that they are for the “Infrastructure” special issue. Editors may sort the essays between the two journals based on their focus and methodology, and in accordance with the larger design of the joint issue. 

Please submit your essay for this joint special issue to American Literatureor Resilienceusing the following online portals:

American Literature:https://www.editorialmanager.com/al/default.aspx

Resilience:  http://www.resiliencejournal.org/publishing-in-resilience/submission-form/

Deadline for essay submissions is March 1, 2020.Editors will read and provide feedback on 400-word abstracts if they are submitted by August 1, 2019. Send abstracts directly to John Levi Barnard: jlb@tragos.org.

Please feel free to email any of the editors with questions:

John Levi Barnard: jlb@tragos.org

Stephanie Foote: stephanie.foote@mail.wvu.edu

Jessica Hurley: hurleyj@uchicago.edu

Jeffrey Insko: insko@oakland.edu