Seedings: Call for Contributions II

Seedings is the section ofAnthropologicadedicated to the growth and planting of ideas stimulated by the recurring calls for contributions launched by our editorial team. For its second Seed series, Anthropologicais seeking emerging, spontaneous, creative, multimodal, timely and ethnography-based contributions on the following theme:

Sounding the Alarm

https://cas-sca.journals.uvic.ca/index.php/anthropologica/cfp

An alarm denotes a noise, a signal, an action that announces the presence of a danger or a threat or that serves to wake a person from sleep or, perhaps, from apathy. Alarms serve as an impulse for action and movement. Sounding the alarm can encourage people to speak up, take a stand and act. It can also force some to flee and find ways to survive, and others to show solidarity with them. Sounding the alarm generally does not leave people indifferent; it stimulates reflection as well as action and can invite people to care for others and to show empathy. Alarmism can provoke the emergence of new ways of thinking and being in the world. It can also prompt people to become activists and to revolt. What do alarms generate (or not), how do people react, organize and mobilize? Or conversely, do alarm messages constrain and paralyze? Sounding the alarm also evokes the contemporary moment of misinformation and alarmism. It thus draws our attention to the constant risk of alarmism and to the possibility of denunciation.

That is why alarm signals are numerous; they act as continuous “wake-up calls.” How do people react, how do they gather and organize? How do they cope with these signs of crisis? And how do factors related to race, gender, social class and age influence the way people react and cope with alarms[1]? To whom? And for what purpose? Furthermore, what are the strategies and communication platforms used to get the message across?

Sounding the alarm: examples abound. For example (and submissions need not be limited to these cases):

Climate crisis. Summer 2023 was officially declared the hottest on record. Millions of people around the world suffered extreme heat waves. In Canada, the 2023 fire season was the most destructive on record, “like no other year, by a staggering margin”[2], with more than 6,500 wildfires reported by early September. But Canada is not the only country showing these terrifying numbers. Unprecedented fires in the Northern Hemisphere have destroyed millions of hectares of boreal forest, notably in Russia, Greece, Portugal and Maui, Hawaii. Wildfires are now considered an annual calamitous event that governments, populations and survivors anticipate and end up fighting. Yet wildfires are clear evidence — an alarm bell — that the world is changing rapidly and radically.

Wars and violent conflicts. The deadly coordinated attacks in Israel by the Islamist militant group Hamas on October 7, 2023 led to a military response in the Gaza Strip. Millions of people gather in various cities around the world to support a ceasefire. Bridges and alliances between communities are built during these difficult times, others are shattered and impossible to reconcile. Regarding violence and wars in the world, reports[3]show that we are witnessing a historic increase in global conflicts, with deadly wars, particularly in Ukraine and in Ethiopia. These conflicts have repercussions around the world and the media relay the information into our hands as we scroll through our favorite app.

Health security. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that humans can be affected by large waves of invisible and harmful bodies that enter our lungs. Emergency devices and infrastructures were put in place to respond to this global-scale epidemic. Yet viruses still exist and their presence, as well as fear of their long-term effects, impact the lives of many people. COVID-19 changed the world. Yet it is not the only pandemic to have caused significant human losses: the Ebola virus that raged in West Africa between 2013 and 2016 is one example.

For this Seedings call for contributions, we are seeking innovative, ethnography-based contributions that shed light on the social, material and cultural dimensions of the theme “Sounding the Alarm,” from a number of approaches. We invite authors to reflect on actions that consist of sounding the alarm and on how people cope with and respond to warning signals. Our call invites ethnographic engagements with the action of sounding the bell, understood in a concrete and/or metaphorical sense. The ethnographic research on which submissions draw may be provisional, small-scale and emergent. We believe that anthropologists have much to offer in analysis, documentation, preservation and creative expression on how humans and non-humans sound the alarm and how they respond to it.

We encourage submissions shorter than full-length articles, ideally 4,000 to 5,000 words, although we may also accept submissions of 8,000 words. We encourage all forms of ethnography, including photo essays, graphic ethnography, ethnographic poetry and ethnographic fiction. Submissions will be subject to anonymous peer review. We encourage submissions from Black, Indigenous, and scholars of color. Anthropologicais a bilingual journal and we accept contributions in French or English.

We plan to publish this collection of articles in our Fall 2024 issue. The deadline for online submission on our websiteis March 1, 2024. Please feel free to consult the editorial team about your idea before submitting it.