Stream Convenor: Nick Mdika Tembo, University of Malawi, ntembo@unima.ac.mw
Call for Papers
How do African communities articulate lived experiences amid intensifying climate change, ecological degradation, and environmental precarity? As climatic disruptions increasingly reshape the contours of everyday life—affecting mobility, economic practices, spiritual engagements, and socio-political formations—narrative emerges as a critical modality through which individuals and collectives interpret crisis, assert agency, and envision alternative futures. This thematic stream seeks to investigate how ecological anxieties and environmental uncertainties are mediated, contested, and politicised through narrative forms across Sub-Saharan Africa. What stories are told of natural disasters, crop failure, urban pollution, or vanishing landscapes—and whose voices are amplified in these stories? Which narratives gain legitimacy, receive institutional recognition or funding, and inform policy, and which are marginalised, silenced, or rendered unintelligible?
Concurrently, dominant representations propagated by states, non-governmental organisations, and international institutions often frame African ecologies through reductive tropes of vulnerability, fragility, and disaster. Such discourses raise critical questions regarding voice, power, and epistemic authority: who is authorised to narrate ecological crisis—and toward what political, economic, or ideological ends?
We invite papers that interrogate the intersections of narrative, power, and ecology within African contexts, broadly conceived. Contributions may engage with diverse narrative practices, including but not limited to oral traditions, literature, visual and performing arts, digital media, policy discourse, and quotidian storytelling. We are especially interested in scholarship that explores themes such as:
· Subterranean ecologies, extractivism, and resource conflict in the Global South
· Climate change, drought, and water scarcity
· Migration, displacement, and ecological grief
· Urban ecologies and environmental justice
· Mediated ecologies: visual cultures, humanitarian discourses, and the politics of representation
· Resistance, resilience, and world-making in the Anthropocene
· Competing narratives of ecological crisis
