Call for Articles: Performing Ethos

Performing Ethos: ‘Performing Ecos’ (special themed issue of Performing Ethos).

Guest editors: Bronwyn Preece (Independent Artist/Scholar), Jess Allen (University of Manchester) and Stephen Bottoms (University of Manchester)

Global climate change is catalysing an examination of ecological ethics. Humanity’s continuing failure to respond meaningfully to the impending environmental crisis has been characterized by philosopher Stephen M. Gardiner as a ‘perfect moral storm’. How are these ethical imperatives currently being addressed through, or as, performance? This edition aims to examine critically how ecological ethics and ethos may be supporting and challenging the current range of practices.  ‘Performing Ecos’ will be among the first journal to specifically unpack and foreground the ethics that now underpin performance and/as ecology. The journal will be published in Autumn 2015, and seeks to collate an international response to the following questions:

• How are contemporary performance practices being critically challenged by an ecological ethos? How does ‘ecology’ challenge how performance theorists think about ‘ethics’?
• What are the ethics of framing climate change and other geophysical processes in terms of performance? (e.g. Kershaw’s article in Performance Research, volume 1 issue 4)
• Are the ‘ethics’ of ecological performance being conceived and scribed with the same multivocality that they espouse (i.e. incorporation and/or appropriation of indigenous voices)?
• Is ecological performance cultivating, reinforcing or challenging a gendered aesthetic?
• How do the aesthetics of ecological performance differ across practices (ecocritical, site-specific, activist) and across continents?

Contributions in a diversity of presentation formats, from formal papers to artists’ pages are invited. Articles should be between 5000-7000 words. (Artist Pages do not need to conform to this designation). Accompanying photographs are encouraged. ‘Performing Ecos’ will include book reviews.

Please send a 300-500 word abstract by 15 August 2014 to Bronwyn Preece: improvise@bronwynpreece.com. Please include a 100-word biographical statement with your submission. Selected submissions will be due by 31 October 2014, and final drafts will be selected at the end of May 2015. Performing Ethos uses the Harvard citation style. Submissions must comply with the Intellect Journal Style Guide: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/MediaManager/File/style%20guide(journals)-1.pdf

Additionally, this special issue will include a centre-spread, which will include a 100-word reflective response from contributors to the same question: what is YOUR ethic of performance and/as ecology?

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