CFP: Lexicon for Animacy (A Critical/Creative collection)
We are in an age that demands we redefine what it means to be human, that we tell different stories about the human place in the world, reimagine what is possible for us as a species – and many humans feel this need acutely. There is a growing desire to address human entanglement in the academy in the Posthuman turn, in critical animal studies, multispecies kinship studies, and the rise of two-eyed seeing in the sciences and social sciences. So, too, in culture writ-large, there is a growing desire to build healthier, more sustainable relationships with place, built in and through care and reciprocity, and which recognize human enmeshment and interconnectivity. We are being called upon to use our greatest gifts as a species – two of which are the gifts of language and storytelling – to meet this new age and to alter the damaging cultural currents that have brought it into being. One of our responsibilities, then, as human beings, is to speak moments of encounter and entanglement and to express the earth’s breath, aliveness, and agency through the art of language.
While the desire to understand human relationships with other species and the world writ-large is on the rise, growing and evolving, the English language has not kept pace in encapsulating these new ways of understanding. Those of us who work in Multispecies Kinship Studies or who work with Indigenous communities know, and experience on an every-day basis, that the English language is a fundamental barrier in breaking ideologies of anthropocentrism, speciesism, and the capital-colonialist structures that ensure them. As Stacy Alaimo notes in her essay in Keywords to Environmental Studies, the concept “animal” continues to comprise all animals other than human (and, crucially, groups of humans who have been and continue to be systematically oppressed, poor, or people of color)[1]; the dichotomy is hard to break, and purposefully so – for it structures and reinforces ideas of human superiority, embedded in colonial structures. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about colonization, “among the many examples of linguistic imperialism, perhaps none is more pernicious than the replacement of the language of nature as subject with the language of nature as object.”[2] We run into these ideological barriers in English in nearly every way. For example, non-human is a term that begins with negation and relegates other beings to “resource” status; other-than-human is distinctly othering; extrahuman[3] encapsulates those conceptually not considered living in mainstream ideologies (like Earth Beings[4]), but also works within the dichotomy of the human separated from everything else. Pronouns also pose a significant problem in conversations about extra-human others: placing a pronoun on a being loads them with all of the baggage inherent in cultural values of gender. So what language does allow for respect, for relationality, for reciprocity with our multispecies kin? As we move through the continued violences of the Anthropocene and reach towards more just worlds, our language needs to widen, make space for material realities, acknowledge entanglements, expand and hold “co-becomings.”
This project is a reaching towards; it seeks to build bridges between multivalent, multispecies languages and our current spoken ones. As Gavin Van Horn writes about Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work: “an ethical revolution” in human relationships with the world “might depend on a language revolution.”[5] In this volume, Van Horn’s “might” becomes a “must” – climate change, the age of the sixth mass extinction, and the Anthropocene – as concepts and as realities – collectively mandate that humanity re-envision our planetary place. We need all kinds of language, both old and new, to talk about the animacy, agency, intelligence, alive-ness, thinking, consciousness, communication, and being-ness of other beings. So, too, we need language for the very concepts that all other beings possess and wield agency, aliveness, and consciousness, with intention, as well as words that more accurately label, explore, and understand intermeshment, entanglement, and interconnectivity – the reality that all humans co-become with and co-create the world around them. What language can restore our relationship with the multispecies multiverses of which we are part and parcel? Or, perhaps more accurately, what words could truthfully convey our already and ongoing entanglement and interconnectivity within and among other species? What language do we need to dream a “poetics of the possible,” as Black feminist love evangelist Alexis Pauline Gumbs[6] conjures, that may help us articulate and reach towards decolonized, kincentric futures?
Further, how can we widen English to express animacy and enmeshment from within a colonizer’s language? As language artists, Mojave poet Natalie Diaz argues, it is our job—our joy—to make language capacious enough from which to summon a kincentric future. She argues, “There’s so many of our words that English just can’t hold.”[7] This volume is an effort to make English hold realities outside of its ideological boundaries. We view this project as contributing to the decolonizing work so many writers, artists, and theorists – both Indigenous and otherwise – call for Western societies to undertake at this moment. English, as a colonizer language, has a long history of adopting the words of other peoples that are “useful” or which fit neatly inside of its internal logics. This Lexicon is a collection of words and concepts that push at the structures that ideologically shape English, and thus settler-colonial worldviews; it seeks words/concepts that rupture boundaries, illuminate weak spots in colonizing ideologies, accurately express lived reality, or that open new understandings.
In this volume, we seek two kinds of entries capacious enough to hold the animacy of our living planet.
- Coined concept/words that explore, define, deploy, label animacy, broadly writ.
For example: Enrique Salmón’s “kincentric ecology,”[8] Robin Wall Kimmerer’s pronoun,“ki,”[9] Donna Harraway’s “becoming with,”[10] Báyò Akómólafé’s “nounism.”[11]
- Already existing words/concepts from other languages that attempt to reach into this space in beautiful, profound, or illuminating ways.
We specifically welcome words or phrases that offer other lenses through which to express animacy and human enmeshment beyond a settler-colonial viewpoint or language.
We are interested in a chorus of diverse language artists, including poets, linguists, scholars, musicians, artists, activists, teachers, organizers, and more.
Please submit 250 word proposals by December 1st.
- Send proposals to: Brianna Burke and Zoë Fay-Stindt at lexiconforanimacy@gmail.com.
- In your proposals, consider how your word or phrase troubles the colonial framework and its language, or how it refreshes old words or frameworks. Please include a pronunciation transcription (if needed).
- Please include a brief biography (max. 100 words).
- Full submissions will be due around March 15th, 2026 (1,500-3,000 words); notification of submission deadlines, procedures, and style guides will be sent with acceptance emails.
Keywords: multispecies kinship, animacy, science(s), environmental humanities, queer and Black ecologies, Environmental Justice, disability and care frameworks, Indigenous and postcolonial perspectives, rights and justice frameworks.
Brianna Burke, PhD
Faculty Fellow in Native and Indigenous Studies
Visiting Associate Professor of Environmental Studies
Hamilton College
Zoë Fay-Stindt, MFA
Poet, teacher, editor
Independent Scholar
[1] Stacy Alaimo, “Animal,” in Keywords for Environmental Studies, eds. Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason, David Naguib Pellow (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 9-13.
[2] Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Nature Needs a New Pronoun,” yes! Magazine, 2015.
[3] Raj Patel and Jason Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).
[4] Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics.’” Cultural Anthropology 25.2 (2010): 334–70.
[5] Gavin Van Horn, Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations. Vol. 5: Practice. (Center for Humans and Nature Press, 2021): 1–11.
[6] Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Dub: Finding Ceremony. (Duke University Press, 2020): ix – xiii.
[7] Natalie Diaz. (Presentation, Tin House Summer Workshop, Portland, OR, 2024).
[8] Enrique Salmón, “Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship.” Ecological Applications, vol. 10, no. 5 (Oct., 2000), pp. 1327-1332.
[9] Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Nature Needs a New Pronoun,” yes! Magazine, 2015.
[10] Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 244.
[11] Báyò Akómoláfé. “A New Theory of the Self with Báyò Akómoláfé and Indy Johar.” Interview, Othering & Belonging Institute, January 19, 2023.
