Call for Abstracts: Intellect Handbook of Cinema and the Anthropocene
We are pleased to announce a forthcoming edited volume, Intellect Handbook of Cinema and the Anthropocene. The volume will bring together original scholarship that examines the relationship between cinema and the Anthropocene from a variety of perspectives. It is intended as a resource for scholars interested in film, media, and environmental studies.
Chapter proposals are now invited for consideration. Please see the below call for full details on the themes of the collection, proposal guidelines, and submission deadlines. Please also consult Intellect’s guidelines for reference on the kind of contributions we are seeking, available here: https://www.intellectbooks.com/intellect-handbooks
Deadline for submission of abstracts is 15 November 2025. Invited contributors will submit full chapters by 30 June 2026.
Editors: Luca Barattoni (Clemson University), Massimiliano L. Delfino (Northwestern University)
In 2024, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) almost unanimously rejected the proposal to declare an Anthropocene epoch. Professor Jan Zalasiewicz of Leicester University lamented the ‘missed opportunity to recognize and endorse a clear and simple reality, that our planet left its natural functioning state, sharply and irrevocably, in the mid-20th century’. Nonetheless, the IUGS report acknowledged that the Anthropocene concept ‘will continue to be widely used…by social scientists, politicians and economists, as well as by the public at large. It will remain an invaluable descriptor’ of human–environment interactions. This controversy itself underscores a profound shift: the notion that the ‘physical world as previously conceived’ has ended challenges Darwinian uniformist assumptions and demands a rethinking of dualities such as nature/culture, alive/dead, human/animal, and organic/inorganic. In this new reality, the ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ collapse into unsettling assemblages, as humans increasingly appear as hybrids of flesh and machine whose bodily extensions (from prosthetics to digital avatars) both liberate new expressive potentials and entangle us in the neoliberal ‘entrepreneurship of the self’. Cinema, as both archive and speculative laboratory, offers a privileged space to visualize these entanglements and to dramatize the promises and perils of machinic agency in a world where human intervention has folded the past into the future and altered the collective horizon of expectations.
Cinema engages the Anthropocene on multiple levels. As an industry, filmmaking itself demands enormous energy. At the same time, cinema can reveal environmental realities and imaginaries. Documentaries and sci-fi films routinely use cinematic tools (time-lapse photography, satellite footage, CGI montages) to represent climate transformation. For example, projects like Chasing Ice (2012) employ time-lapse sequences to render visible the slow melting of glaciers that would otherwise elude our perception. In these ways, film both helps to construct a ‘climate-change imaginary’ and exposes how our visual cultures are intertwined with global networks of energy and waste.
We invite proposals for an edited volume – The Intellect Handbook of Cinema and the Anthropocene – that examines the Anthropocene through the lens of film studies and media theory. Recent scholarship urges rethinking the human–planet relationship: Dipesh Chakrabarty, for example, argues that we must simultaneously adopt a human-centered ‘global’ perspective and a decentered ‘planetary’ perspective to frame the Anthropocene. In this spirit, we seek contributions grounded in the latest theoretical currents (posthumanism, ecocriticism, new materialism, deep time, Gaia theory, biopolitics, postcolonial climate critique, etc.) that illuminate how cinema engages with Earth’s changing environment.
In accordance with Intellect Handbook guidelines, requiring ‘comprehensive overviews and in-depth analyses of established theories, emerging debates, and contemporary developments across a wide range of academic disciplines’, we are especially interested in work that emphasizes conceptual and philosophical insights (e.g. Latour, Haraway, Barad, Chakrabarty, Bennett, Braidotti, Alaimo, Weik von Mossner, etc.) rather than film case studies alone. The volume will explore the different ways in which film can enact new ways of seeing and feeling our entanglement with nonhuman life. Drawing on recent ecocritical and affect-theoretical scholarship, which portrays cinema as a site for ‘arts of noticing’ nonhuman vulnerability and agency, this handbook aims to map key debates and open new directions at the nexus of film and the Anthropocene.
Core Themes
Contributions may address (but are not limited to) the following core themes:
-Posthuman/Multispecies Perspectives: Theorizing cinema beyond the human subject. Drawing on Haraway, Braidotti, Bennett, Kagan, and others, this theme interrogates how filmic texts depict humans as co-constituted with nonhuman agents (animals, plants, machines, atmospheres) and breaks down human/non-human binaries.
-Ecocritical and New Materialist Approaches: Engaging new materialism and ecocritique in film analysis. How do Barad’s agential realism, Coole & Frost’s materialisms, Alaimo’s trans-corporeality, etc. reconfigure cinematic narratives? We welcome analyses that treat matter (water, earth, technology, filmic images) as vibrant and agentive, challenging inert ‘nature’ models. Topics include affective ecologies, the role of nonhuman objects, experimental forms that collapse nature/culture divides as well as early film found footage reinterpreted as post-extinction testimonies.
– Intersectional and Feminist Perspectives: Feminist, queer, antiracist and decolonial approaches to cinema and the Anthropocene. For example, ecofeminist analyses might critique the gendered and colonial legacies of environmental exploitation. Contributors might examine how films encode masculinist visions of technoscience versus more relational modes of human. This section invites proposals that interrogate gendered dimensions of environmental crisis, including how race, class, disability, and nonhuman difference intersect in cinematic worlds.
-Temporalities and Deep Time: Examining cinematic representations of time in the Anthropocene. This includes ‘deep time’ and geological temporality as conceptualized by Chakrabarty and others. Contributions might consider how films use nonlinear or long-duration formats, montage of past/future, or other devices to evoke planetary history or futures. Scholarship on collapsed or multiple time scales (e.g.Tsing’s ‘arts of noticing’) can be applied to film.
– Gaia Theory and Earth Systems: Investigating cinema’s relation to Earth as a living system. Inspired by Lovelock/Margulis and Latour’s political turn on Gaia, how do films reflect or contest the idea of Earth’s self-regulating feedback loops? Lovelock famously described the Earth as ‘more like a living organism than an inanimate machine’. Chapters might analyze ecological visuals (the ‘planetary sublime’), earth-bound narratives, or critiques of technology vs. organism paradigms.
– Biopolitics, Geontopolitics, and Climate Justice: Addressing power, governance, and inequality in Anthropocene cinema. Inspired by Foucault and thinkers like Povinelli, we consider how biopolitical regimes and their counterparts (so-called ‘geontopolitics’ or ‘necropolitics’) appear on screen. For example, films may depict surveillance/regulation of life, catastrophe and rescue, climate refugees or sacrificial victims. We especially encourage contributions with postcolonial and climate-justice insights: Chakrabarty notes that climate change is ‘mediated by the global inequities we already have’, so colonial histories and uneven vulnerabilities are crucial. Discussions might draw on writers such as Chakrabarty, Yusoff, Spivak, Mbembe, or Povinelli.
– Cinematic Realism, Genre and Representation: Exploring shifts in film aesthetics and genre under the Anthropocene. How do documentary, science-fiction, disaster and speculative genres respond to ecological concerns? For instance, ‘cli-fi’ and eco-disaster films grapple with planetary crisis, while so-called ecocinema imagines more-than-human empathy. Chapters might examine how realism is unsettled (e.g. CGI nature, VR, multisensory aesthetics) or how narrative conventions (e.g. utopian/dystopian tropes) encode climate consciousness. Emphasis should remain on theoretical framing (ecocriticism, posthumanism, etc.), not mere film summaries.
-AI, Machinic Vision, and the Digital Anthropocene: Investigating artificial intelligence, computation, and machine perception as they intersect film and ecology. The ‘digital Anthropocene’ raises new environmental issues (data center energy use, e-waste) and aesthetic questions (algorithmic vision, CGI ecologies, virtual nature). Recent studies estimate that training one large AI model can emit tens of thousands of kilograms of CO
-We welcome essays on how AI and machine learning – from camera automation to deepfake environments – pose both ecological threats and opportunities for cinema. How do machine ‘ways of seeing’ challenge human-centric cinematography? How might cinema address the hidden materiality of digital media? This section bridges traditional Anthropocene concerns with emerging tech and its critique.
Submission Details
Please submit an abstract of ~500 words (not exceeding 600 words) outlining your proposed chapter and its key argument, along with a brief author bio (max. 150 words) to the editors.
Abstract Deadline: 15 November 2025. Selected authors will be invited to submit full chapters (~7.000–8.000 words) by 30 June 2026.
Style: Manuscripts should be in US English, Intellect Harvard style (see https://www.intellectbooks.com/asset/1748/house-style-guide-6th-ed.pdf), with consistent citations.
Contact: Send proposals or inquiries jointly to the volume editors: Luca Barattoni [lbaratt@clemson.edu] and Massimiliano Delfino [m.delfino@northwestern.edu]. Include ‘Intellect Handbook’ in the email subject.
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