Traci and I have been quite pleased with the response thus far to our call for authors. We’re excited to hear from academics and authors (not that the two are mutually exclusive) from around the world. Being the qualitative researcher that I am, I have noticed similar questions appearing in our in-boxes. We’re happy to engage with these questions in more detail, but here is an attempt at answering some of these questions.
Q: Will this be a purely academic volume?
A: There are many ways of knowing the world. Academia has focused on the textual encounter. Yet we know that the more-than-human encounters the world in a diversity of ways. Given this, we would encourage submissions not only from across disciplines, but from different ways of knowing.
Submitted proposals will be evaluated on how well they engage with the theme rather than how “academic” they appear.
Q: I’m not an academic. Can I submit something?
A: Certainly. We will be evaluating proposals on how well they relate to the topic rather than your own academic training.
Q: I’ve published something previously on this very topic. Are you including previously published works?
A: All things being equal, we would prefer to include work that has not been published elsewhere. With that in mind, we are not opposed to publishing pieces if they are a good fit for the theme. In short, this depends on the quality and quantity of proposals we receive.
Please make sure you have permission from the original publisher to have the work published elsewhere. Let us know this is the case.
Q: I work outside the field of animal studies and find your call a bit cryptic. I understand you’re interested in cross disciplinary proposals. Can you re-state the theme for me in a way that I might understand?
A: We are interested in chapter proposals that investigate the relationship between animals (humans included) and place. Specificity matters, and the places that we encounter animals often changes the way that we relate to them and they relate to us.
In my own work, some birders often travel hours to appropriate places (known as birding “hotspots”) see migratory songbirds. Once there, they get up early in the morning and spend more time to find and observe these migratory birds. Concurrently, there are bird rescuers who are getting up early in the morning to collect the same species of distressed migratory birds in Toronto’s downtown core. Yet, birders do not visit the downtown core. With this observation in mind, I could then begin to ask questions about the quality and human assumptions made about theses spaces where migratory birds and humans interact.
This is just one possible entry into the topic. Key for us is not just a description of where we meet, but of the implications of these meetings (non exhaustive list: political, philosophical, cultural, scientific) for human animals and more-than-human animals.
Q: Do you have a publisher?
A: While we have not secured a publisher, we will be proposing that the book be published as a part of the Critical Animal Studies Book Series. Part of this process involves finalizing our list of contributing authors, hence the call before the accepted proposal.
Please be aware that we have alternative plans and contacts with the animal studies field to assist us once we finalize the shape that the book will take. Traci and I will stay in communication with selected contributors with developments. But more generally, if you’re wondering what direction we’re headed, we would look for a publisher that has publishing interests in animal studies, animal geography or, more generally, cultural studies.
