We want to focus on ethnographic studies approaching dwellers attempting to render their habitats inhabitable, making emerge a wide variety of ecological relations between the mental and the environmental. This is the research arena we wish to address as environ|mental urbanities, a denomination hopefully guiding us to grasp the sometimes elusive or ungraspable aspects of both mental and environmental practices and experiences in urban arenas. Beyond the seemingly unmediated immersion of bodies in socio-material environments, environ|mental urbanities urge us to ethnographically inquire into the dynamic, shifting co-constitutive relations between subjective experiences, bodies, material environments, cultural practices, urban infrastructures, animals and other non-humans.
We invite contributions from anthropology, geography, sociology and adjacent disciplines which provide inspiring ethnographic case studies, tinkering and experimenting with methods and collaborative fieldwork and/or aim for situated concept work that allow to problematize ‘the environ|mental’ while simultaneously enriching our conceptualisation of ‘the urban’ beyond mere material or geographic locality and stage for cultural practices.
Timeline & process:
Please submit abstracts of no more than 200 words, plus your institutional affiliation(s) and a short biography (a few lines) to patrick.bieler@tum.de, milena.bister@hu-berlin.deand tomcriado@uoc.edu by April 29nd, 2024.
We will notify acceptance by May 21st, 2024.
Abstracts of the selected contributions will be proposed as a special issue to an international English-speaking multidisciplinary social sciences journal. We aim for Open Access publishing. All contributors will meet online to pitch and discuss their abstracts in June 2024. First drafts will be discussed in a workshop in January 2025 (either in person or online). Final manuscripts will be due in March 2025.
If you have any questions, please write the three of us.
We are very much looking forward to your contributions and to discuss thoughts and papers with you in the coming months ahead!
All best,
Patrick Bieler (TU Munich), Milena Bister (HU Berlin) & Tomás Criado (Open University of Catalonia)