CFP: Hybrid Landscapes: Experiencing Things, Mapping Practices, Re-construing Ecologies of Entangled Environments

We kindly invite Authors to submit proposals to a special issue of The Polish Journal of Aesthetics - "Hybrid Landscapes: Experiencing Things, Mapping Practices, Re-construing Ecologies of Entangled Environments" Vol. 74 (1/2025), edited by Helena Elias (University of Lisbon), Jakub Petri (Jagiellonian University in Krakow), and Natalia Anna Michna (Jagiellonian University in Krakow).

Submission deadline: 31 December, 2024

In recent decades, the relationship between discourses and materiality has been at the center of theoretical and practice-based debates, permeating numerous artistic, humanities, and social sciences research endeavors. The notion of materiality is being reconfigured concerning a myriad of key subjects, encompassing fluxes (Deleuze and Guattari), unstable properties of things/objects and agencies (Latour, Ingold, Barad), such as the digital, organic, extracted, politicized, naturalized, artificialized, economized, liberalized, globalized, colonized, gendered, racialized, nationalized, and capitalized, to name a few. The term “agency” is understood within this framework to avoid an exclusive representation, whether fixed or fluid. Decentering Eurocentric human knowledge approaches may provide an opportunity to decolonize matter within the entanglements of discursive-material practices.
By envisioning such hybrid landscapes, embodied discourses, agencies, identities, and places can be perceived in diverse time-lapse choreographies as they slice, incorporate, reject, reposition, and transform themselves according to heterogeneity of realities. Indeed, ecologies are not restricted to fixed frames and borders. The concept of landscape, according to Bennett, conveys a vitality of multitudinous vibrations of matter, whether humans perceive it as alive or not, considering their temporal presence in the world. Thus, a landscape conveys a heterogeneity of realities that can foster diverse dynamics of their own accord. Accordingly, human and non-human actants, regencies, and dynamics are transformed into diverse cycles of temporalities that may overlap, coexist, and intersect, all compounding vibrant materiality. Concerning landscape studies, when one examines places, spaces, and relationships, it becomes a matter of reconfiguring the experience with things and the material agencies at play between what we might (re)nominate as humans, quasi-humans, and non-humans. These impermanent and situated configurations embrace agency, embody other forms of knowledge, and exist in transitoriness, emergence, and urgency, as nomadic subjects (Braidotti), vibrant matters (Bennett), while envisaging a more-than-human world.
Both the terms “Landscape” and “Hybrid” agglutinate such urgent thoughts needed to shift from human-centered positions as inscribed in Western and Eurocentric modes of knowledge. These can also be connected to other forms of knowledge, such as indigenous studies and indigenous traditional practices of thought, which have been incorporating agency concerning the relationship between nature and culture. Thus, “Hybrid Landscapes” addresses, transversely, artistic, human, and social sciences practices and research experiences that encompass questions regarding what/when/how a hybrid landscape might manifest, whether through narrative research, embodied practices, deep mapping, art-based reflexive practices, that contribute and unfold the existence and manifestations of agents’ experiences and mutual interconnections.
To address these subjects, we welcome submissions from scholars, artists, and professional practitioners with a reflexive approach, ranging from different fields of expertise, but not limited to:
- More-than-human urban landscapes: hybrid, intermittent, nomadic, impermanent, emergent
- Decolonized materiality: embodied discourses, agencies, identities, and place
- Urgent practitioners: artivism, citizenship, the commons, and dissensus
- Alternative geographies: layers, interactions, non-representational approaches
- Nomadic subjects: narratives, identities, and territories

- (Re)nominating the human: actants, craft-AI-ship, and (re)production.  

All Authors interested in contributing to this issue of The Polish Journal of Aesthetics are kindly requested to send full papers by submission page at the journal's website by December 31, 2024.  

We strongly urge all Authors to read the instructions (‘For Authors’) before the submission. 

Welcome to visit our website at: http://pjaesthetics.uj.edu.pl/

Please do not hesitate to contact us!

Kind regards, Helena Elias (University of Lisbon)

Jakub Petri (Jagiellonian University in Krakow)

Natalia Anna Michna (Jagiellonian University in Krakow)