Public Humanities is an international open-access, cross-disciplinary, peer-reviewed journal at the intersection of humanities scholarship and public life.

The journal invites submissions for the upcoming issue Delta Ecologies, which will be guest edited by Dr. Mohammad Rahmatullah, Dr. Ehatasham Ul Hoque Eiten, Dr. Khan Touseef Osman, Dr. Shipra Gupta, and Samiha Khan.

The deadline for submissions is 31 January 2027.

Description 

Delta Ecologies asks how delta worlds are shaped by water’s movement, land’s instability, infrastructural promises, and the public stories through which communities remember loss, claim responsibility, and imagine survival. This issue begins from the Bengal-Gangetic world--especially the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta, where river systems meet the Bay of Bengal--but it treats the delta not simply as a vulnerable climate zone. It understands the delta as a public world where environmental change becomes a matter of shared interpretation, memory, and responsibility. A storm, an embankment, or saline water is never only a physical condition; each enters public life through the ways communities narrate danger, question protection, remember loss, and claim the right to be heard.

The urgency of this focus is clear. Delta communities do not encounter climate change as an abstract planetary process; they encounter it through the gradual remaking of inhabitable life, as shifting rivers unsettle homes and livelihoods, saline water changes the terms of daily survival, and institutions translate lived loss into the public languages of risk, recovery, conservation, and development. These experiences are often translated into public language through terms such as resilience, adaptation, development, natural disaster, risk, vulnerability, and recovery. Such words can help mobilize protection, but they can also make unequal harm sound neutral. In coastal Bangladesh, for instance, salinity is lived not only as an environmental condition but as a crisis of drinking water, health, care work, and household survival; along eroding riverbanks, loss is measured not only in land but in the disappearance of homes, documents, burial places, and the public memory of place. Read through slow violence and ecolinguistics, these examples show how the language of “risk,” “recovery,” and “adaptation” can both reveal and conceal responsibility (Nixon 2011; Stibbe 2015; Ghosh 2016).

This themed issue invites scholars, practitioners, writers, artists, educators, journalists, and community-engaged researchers to ask how delta life becomes publicly knowable. We are interested in work that shows how humanities inquiry can move between textual interpretation, cultural memory, public language, and situated forms of knowledge to clarify the stakes of climate justice in riverine and coastal regions. Contributions may focus on literary texts, film and documentary, photography, oral narratives, folklore, community archives, media reporting, policy documents, textbooks, classroom practice, environmental campaigns, digital platforms, or activist and practitioner knowledge.

The issue develops four connected lines of inquiry: how delta infrastructures and institutions make risk publicly visible; how evidence, testimony, and memory shape what can be known about loss; how caste, class, gendered labour, and subaltern ecological knowledge reveal unequal exposure; and how language, pedagogy, and public reason can either naturalise vulnerability or create more accountable climate publics.

• Delta infrastructures and contested protection: how embankments, flood-control projects, polders, cyclone shelters, ports, roads, conservation zones, and development schemes shape public ideas of safety, risk, blame, and responsibility.

• River erosion, salinity, and the public memory of loss: how environmental change is remembered not only through vanished land, but also through altered water, failed crops, changing food practices, illness, migration decisions, and family accounts of when a place became difficult to inhabit. Literature, testimony, oral history, photography, local archives, and family narratives can record these forms of disappearance in ways that official documents or disaster reports often compress.

• Sundarbans and mangrove publics: how forests, tigers, fish, honey collection, borderland livelihoods, conservation discourse, and more-than-human relations complicate human-centred accounts of climate adaptation.

• Unequal delta lives: how gendered care work, caste and class exposure, rural labour, health, disability, migration, and informal livelihoods shape public climate narratives. The issue asks how people working outside secure employment often experience delta risk as lost income, debt, displacement, and limited access to recognition or protection.

• Delta media, language, and pedagogy: how journalism, warning systems, policy vocabulary, ecolinguistics, school curricula, and public-facing humanities can create more accountable ways of speaking about climate risk.

• Comparative delta perspectives: studies of other riverine or coastal deltas are welcome when they sharpen, question, or extend the issue's central concern with the Bengal-Gangetic world and the public life of delta knowledge.

The issue welcomes diverse perspectives and especially encourages submissions from early-career researchers, regionally based scholars, practitioners, and community-engaged researchers from underrepresented institutional contexts. Submissions will be assessed for direct relevance to Delta Ecologies, clarity of public humanities argument, concrete evidence or case study, accessible prose, originality, ethical engagement with vulnerable communities, and ability to speak to readers across and beyond the humanities. Conference participation in BNC 2026 or any other event does not guarantee publication: all submissions must be made independently through the Public Humanities online system and will undergo the journal's standard editorial and double-anonymous peer review.

References

Ghosh, A. (2016). The great derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable. University of Chicago Press.

Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.

Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories we live by. Routledge.

Submission Guidelines

Article submissions should be no more than 8,000 words, not including abstract, footnotes, and bibliography.

Submissions should be written in accessible language for a wide readership across and beyond the humanities: see How to Write for Public Humanities.

Authors should consult the journal’s Author Instructions prior to submission. 

All authors will be required to declare any funding and/or competing interests upon submission: see the journal’s Publishing Ethics guidelines for more information.  

Articles will be peer reviewed for both content and style.

Articles will appear digitally and open access in the journal. 

Contacts

The editor is happy to discuss potential articles: contact Dr. Mohammad Rahmatullah (rahmatullah.eng@diu.edu.bd).

Questions regarding peer review can be sent to the Public Humanities inbox at publichumanities@cambridge.org.

Submit an Article

All submissions should be made through the Public Humanities online peer review system.