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Submission Deadline: 31st October 2023
Extinction presents one of our greatest global challenges: a challenge that requires new ways of thinking about as well as acting upon the world. Addressing extinction requires collaborative work: across species, across nations, across societies and cultures, and across disciplines. The main question that contributors in this SI are invited to ask is what extinction means – biologically, culturally, socially – in contemporary contexts of global crisis: the decline of species, the death of languages, and the seemingly inexorable deterioration of already vulnerable human societies and natural ecosystems. Further questions arise from this, both local and global in scope, going backwards and forwards in time. What is the future of life in a time of mass extinction? What is our place in, and what are our obligations to, a more-than-human world: one that we humans share with a multitude of other species whose lives are inextricably entangled with our own? What are the different meanings of extinction in different social and ecological contexts, and what stories and narratives, as well as everyday material practices, are needed to cope with the unprecedented scale of loss? Can extinction be forestalled or even reversed, and what are the consequences of such measures? What legacies does extinction leave us with, and what does it tell us about the temporal processes – generational change, the death-life continuum – that it catastrophically interrupts? The SI will have a particular focus on research articles which take an inter- or multidisciplinary approach. We particularly welcome co-authored submissions from postgraduate research students and their supervisors, as well as from early career researchers.
In this special collection, we welcome articles covering but not restricted to the following themes:
- Long histories of (mass) extinction, especially though not exclusively in the fields of palaeontology and evolutionary biology, and their relevance to the present moment.
- The politics of global conservation as well as local conservation projects.
- Language death and endangered societies/cultures.
- Cultural genocides, from the destruction of Carthage (149–146 BCE) to the European and Asian pogroms of recent times.
- Decolonial approaches to research in Extinction Studies
- The religious dimensions of past and present extinction scenarios.
- The philosophical possibilities of thinking of life beyond the human: the imagining of a planet without us.
Guest Editors:
University of Leeds, UK
University of Stavanger, Norway
University of Leeds, UK
University of Cologne, Germany
University of Leeds, UK
University of Leeds, UK
Keywords: Mass Extinction, Palaeontology, Evolutionary Biology, Conservation Biology, Conservation Politics, Language Extinction, Decolonial approaches, Religious influence, Multidisciplinary Research
Submission Guidelines/Instructions
Kindly refer to the Author Guidelines while preparing and submitting your manuscript. At the point of submission on scholarOne, please answer the question, “Are you submitting to a Special Issue?”
All articles submitted by deadline will automatically qualify for full APC waiver.