There are books that shape debates and there a books that shift debates … And then there are books that have the potential to shift worlds – or, at the very least, to transform worldviews. In the past quarter of a century, a few books, such as Phillippe Descola›s Beyond Nature and Culture, Anna Tsing‹s The Mushroom at the End of the World, Gurminder Bhambra›s Connected Sociologies, Lewis Gordon‹s recent Fear of Black Consciousness, or Linda Tuhiwai Smith›s Decolonizing Methodologies, certainly count as contributions with the power to transform. Among those, Eduardo Kohn‹s How Forests Think, published in 2013, has been among the most influential, given the broad and critical discussions it elicited, the frequency with which it has been cited and translated, and the lives and minds it has affected. Marking the tenth year since its original publication therefore presents an opportune moment to reflect on the work the book has done (and maybe not done).
Kohn›s effort to provide a path toward an anthropology beyond the human bridged an engagement with Indigenous communities—in his case the Runa living in Ecuador‹s rain forests—and non-Western cosmologies with Peircean philosophy. Kohn thereby provided a generative path for academic scholarship to move into the many human and more-than-human worlds beyond itself while opening boundaries around disciplinary discourses.
This special issue invites contributors who would address the spirit of Kohn›s provocative book evaluatively, generatively, and critically. Articles of various kinds are welcome. They may, for example, address how How Forests Thinkhas transformed discourses or what it would mean to think with Kohn beyond Kohn or place Kohn‹s intellectual frameworks into their genealogical context or put the text›s ideas in critical-generative conversation with other thinkers and scholarly traditions or with otherwise worlds. In an academic discourse where talk of ›impact‹ and ›outcome‹ has been all the rage for the past decade, we also encourage contributions that reconceptualize what ›impact‹ and ›outcome‹ mean when thought with How Forest Think.
This special issue honors the gift of Kohn‹s How Forests Thinkby exploring the paths it opened, the inheritances with which it opened them, and by moving beyond it.
Deadlines
Submission of Abstracts: September 1, 2022
Submission of Article Manuscripts: November 15, 2022
Projected Publication Date of Full Issue: Fall 2023
Please send inquiries and abstract/manuscript submissions to both the journal AND the editor at pgasubmissions(at)gmail.com and alexander.stingl(at)nuigalway.ie.
Further information: https://www.pdcnet.org/pga/Calls-for-Submissions