Call for Papers – Metahuman Futures Special Issue. ¿Can we create a liveable future? Facing the extinction challenge.

2022-06-20

As the partner journal of the Metahuman Futures Forum, we invite submissions for the 1st Metahuman Futures Forum and the associated JoPH Special Issue.

Reverso/Metabody Institute (organized by Jaime del Val) presents the Metahumanities / Metahuman Futures initiatives, events, and publications, which propose to tackle without palliatives the fact of the current 6th mass extinction, its associated environmental and civilizatory collapse potentially arriving over the next decades, and its roots in human overpopulation, technical “progress”, and sedentary way of living; likewise, the forum aims to open up a bold debate on alternative metahuman futures and on other ways of living towards a planetary regeneration, including proposals for radical mutations of the species quite different from, and perhaps diametrically opposed to those proposed by transhumanism.

The Metahuman Futures Forum launches a new double field of Studies: Trash-human and Extinction Studies & Metahuman and Planetary Health Studies. For a more complete description of these see here, and here on the Metahuman Alternative.

The 1st Metahuman Futures Forum will be hosted by the University of the Aegean—Evi Sampanikou—and held from 25 September to 2 October 2022 in Mytilini, Lesvos, Greece. The call for forum participation is still open, and the details can be found here.

For the special issue titled “¿Can we create a liveable future? Facing the extinction challenge,” we seek contributions that might address the mentioned fields of studies and, amongst others, the following questions:

  • How can we understand and address extinction and planetary health in alternative ways?
  • (Why) is every form of imperialism and colonialism implicitly leading to extinction?
  • Technological singularity or extinction singularity? What are we really running towards?
  • Can there ever be a sustainable digital-colonial culture?
  • How can we challenge the culture of immobility and our dependency on technological systems that create a trash-covered planet?
  • Shall we keep increasing dystopian control and human immunity or shall we care about the disruption of planetary health that underlies pandemics?
  • What are the alternative ways of thinking (and acting) about the climate crisis and the need for a radical renewal of our relation to the Earth?
  • The overpopulation problem: why is it such a taboo and how to face it?
  • Can there ever be a sustainable future with these sedentary and consumer ways of living?
  • 100 billion animals per year spend their lives in concentration camps before going to the slaughterhouse: what do we do with this Planetary Holocaust?
  • What metahuman alternatives may emerge onto-epistemologically and ethically?

For full consideration, please be aware of the following submission deadlines and the associated publication dates:

- 15 July 2022: Forum participation and presentation

- 6 January 2023: Special issue manuscripts

Please visit the submission portal for instructions. You must click on "Make a new submission" (and create a new account if you have not yet done so) and choose the section titled "Dossier: Metahuman Futures."

We are planning to publish the special issue in 2023. As always, we are open to submissions in different formats (full-length articles, commentaries, book reviews, and artistic works) and in non-English languages. Please contact us about your submission ideas.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at posthumanism@tplondon.com.

Sincerely,

Jaime de Val & Cagdas Dedeoglu