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Lefebvre for Activists
Activist Ecologies
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Open Call for Contributions (written and visual)
Activist Ecologies
From the Right to the City to
the Right to the Planet
This call for contributions invites scholars, activists, artists, and communities organised around environmental struggles to examine and reflect on current articulations of care within environmental activisms. Through texts and visuals, the planned book will highlight the scope and horizons of mobilisations that rise from, and/or point to, care-full more-than-human relations outside of politics-as-usual.
With evermore extreme geological and biospheric phenomena, distressed economies, globally reawakening authoritarianisms, and far-right orientations—not to mention the definitive betrayal of the alleged humanist foundations of modern societies: the West’s complicity in genocide in Palestina—activism in general, and environmental activism in particular, operate in a shifting landscape. We observe, for example, that anti-racist and anti-colonial movements have gained ground in recent years, but this is true for identitarian and right-wing movements, too. While environmental mobilisations have become better organised and more visible, sustainability buzzwords have also been appropriated by conservative, including far-right, groups for sheer political calculus (e.g. before elections) and “not-in-my-backyard” sort of protests (Hager, 2015; Hauck, 2015).
At the intersection of practice, ethics, affect, and knowledge, “care” does not only describe a range of practices involved in reproducing the conditions for more-than-human coexistence (Bhattacharya, 2017; de la Bellacasa, 2017). It is also power-laden, with governments variously instrumentalising the term to prescribe who and what is eligible or deserving of it (Rodgers/O’Neill, 2012). Especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, while the academic and activist interest in practices of care has exponentially grown (Hall, 2020; Fraser, 2016), care has become ever more difficult or impossible to deliver due to austerity measures, conflicts, and wars.
These critical developments lie at the heart of our call for contributions, which seeks to encourage examinations of grassroots resistance that doesn’t compromise with top-down environmental politics and activates situated knowledge to advance more-than-human care practices.
APPROACH
Following French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre's concept of “concrete” utopias, or the possibilities to change the social relations of which everyday life provides plenty of examples and inceptions (1974 and 2014; also see Holloway, 2010; Gibson-Graham, 1996), activism can be conceptualised as concrete utopia made explicit. Thereby, activism itself is ecologically embedded, relying on the daily practices and more-than-urban settings in which it flourishes. Such an understanding implies that emancipatory processes are simultaneously locally specific and part of broader ecologies, facilitated by more-than-human actants (Barad, 2007), translocal solidarities and decentralised but coordinated practices (Butler, 2015; Tsing, 2015).
Local mobilisations—against, e.g., land grabs, privatisation, and environmentally damaging projects—unfold through multilayered and locally specific multispecies relatings between human inhabitants, flora, fauna, geology, geography, climate events, etc. We encourage contributors to explore this unfolding by engaging with Lefebvre’s idea that space is “produced” through spatial practices in the “physical field” of embodiment, representations in the “mental field” of dominant ideologies—but also of imagination—and relationships in the “social field” of negotiation, struggle, and transformation. Through this lens, we ask:
- How do the spatial conditions on site, from climate and topology to demographics and built environment, inspire, support, or hinder a movement?
- When and in how far do discourses about environment and care coalesce in environmental struggles? Are perspective shifts required?
- Which alliances, connections and translocal solidarities can environmental activism effect and be affected by? How can we take the more-than-human co-actants of environmental struggles into better account?
SUBMISSION FORMATS
We welcome contributions from authors, activists, artists, and communities that resist extractivist and developmentalist projects from the majority and minority worlds. Diverse forms of contributions are welcome, including but not limited to:
- Papers offering insights, novel strategies and (self-)critical analyses
- Visual contributions including but not limited to photo essays, artistic work, collages and illustrations, diagrams, timelines, poetry and word-based works, etc.
DEADLINES
15 February 2026: Submission of abstract (max 250 words) and a short bios (150 words).
For visual contributions, please also include up to 3 images (samples/drawings/photos, etc.)
1 April 2026: Notification of acceptance
15 July 2026: Submission of full contributions (min 4000, max 6000 words) to editors
September 2026: Hybrid workshop in Berlin
November 2026: Submission of full contributions to publisher
Spring 2027: Book publication and launch events
WORKSHOP(S)
We plan to host at least one workshop during which all contributors will present their activism, approaches and challenges. The hybrid workshop will be organised in cooperation with Spore Initiative in Berlin. Travel funding for a limited number of contributors is available. Accommodation will be self-organised.
CONTACT & SUBMISSION
Please direct your questions and submissions to: kollektivquotidien@gmail.com
PUBLICATION PLAN
Activist Ecologies extends a fruitful editorial collaboration on the book Lefebvre for Activists, published by ADOCS in 2020. The publishing house has offered a book contract for the new edited volume.
We look forward to your ideas and contributions!