We are looking to grow our pool or peer reviewers for an upcoming special issue titled Affective Encounters: Storying in South African Ecological Communication Edited by Professor Mehita Iqani and Dr Meghan Judge in Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture. The articles have been submitted and are currently going out for peer review. We mostly have reviewers but thought to extend a call through this network to broaden our reach and see if there are any overlaps with the wonderful researchers here. For this special issue, we are specifically looking for scholars engaged with affective encounters and the oceanic, decolonial environmental work, hauntology, artistic method/practice as reparative justice and politics of care. If you would like to review one of the works please contact me with your research area and I can forward an abstract of one of the submitted articles along with some more information on the review process.

For an outline of the special issue please see the abstract here:

As ecological concerns rise globally in the Anthropocene, experiences differ across local contexts. This special issue draws attention to how “situated knowledges”(Haraway, 1988) can advance theorizing the relation of ecology and communication. A local focus on ecological communication offers insight into Anthropocenic cultural politics of emotions (Ahmed, 2013). South Africa, both highly unequal and biodiverse, offers key attentional deviances (J. L. Clark, 2020) from hegemonic narratives of the Anthropocene and case studies in possibilities of repair for socioeconomic and interspecies relations (Stengers, 2010).

This collection focuses on how, in South Africa, social and ecological justices are entangled, and multi-species storying (Haraway, 2016) produces complex publics. It addresses affect as a radical opening toward the ecological (Massumi, 2015) produced in storying that both tackles inequality and decenters human narrative. Affective storying expands potentials for ecological communications by attending to intersections of social and ecological justices that are not merely driven by grief and horror (T. Clark, 2020) or spectacle (Grebowicz, 2014; Lester, 2016), but that offer opportunities for the relational (Barad, 2007). Alongside affect, the special issue considers how storying can become a form of encounter (Tsing, 2015): an emotionally charged opening for new, locally emergent, and politicised ecological and communicative ontologies.

The South African cases assembled in this proposed special issue explore various aspects of the affective and storying possibilities attendant to ecological communication. We argue that as theorized from our location in the south, affective ecological communication can expand beyond a presentation of evidence and impact towards listening and attunement: a shift from effect to affect in Anthropocenic storying.

Contact: meghan.judge@wits.ac.za