Call for Papers Ethnographies of Vertical and Volumetric Worlds

Edited by Ángela Castillo (angelita.castillo@gmail.com) and Steven Schwartz (sds1@bu.edu)

Deadline for Short Abstracts: 5 July 2025 | Deadline for Articles: 15 September 2025

Submission of Abstracts: By July 5, 2025

Submission of Full Papers: By September 15, 2025

Publication of the Issue: Spring 2026

Anthropological Forum, a peer-reviewed journal indexed in Scopus (CiteScore: 3.6; Q1 in CiteScore Best Quartile), is currently welcoming short format submissions (5.000 to 8.000 words) for its upcoming special issue, "Ethnographies of Vertical and Volumetric Worlds," edited by Ángela Castillo and Steven Schwartz.

Vertical and volumetric worlds have become salient features of contemporary life. New extractive frontiers, from lithium mining to the tropical timber trade, and renewed attempts to lay claim over the seabed, airspace, and the underground have invited critical attention to these realms as sites of capitalist capture, environmental struggle, infrastructure development, and political articulation. Analogously, the climate crisis, and the ensuing calls for low-carbon technologies, urban resilience, and more-than-human ethics, have also underscored the place of vertical and volumetric formations in both perpetuating long-standing forms of racialized violence and settler-colonial power, as well as carrying the potential for planetary remediation, communal forms of self-assertion, and positive environmental futures. A slate of recent works in critical geography, anthropology, and adjacent fields have sparked critical dialogues on the three-dimensional character of places. These interventions have invited social scientists to reimagine space and its co-constitutive forms of life in terms of downward and upward vertical axes, as well as in terms of volumes that could be mobile, porous, portable, and ephemeral. This special issue explores what it means for anthropological accounts of social and political life to engage with vertical and volumetric formations. It seeks ethnographic contributions that examine how the emergence, persistence, and unmaking of vertical and volumetric worlds shape subjectivities, bodies, materialities, environmental relations, political-economic regimes, and more-than-human life.

We welcome submissions that address questions such as:

• How are vertical and volumetric worlds constituted through sensorial, epistemic, legal, and political regimes, or through modes of experimentation and sense-making that challenge surface-bound notions of territory?
  
• What kinds of three-dimensional relations, sensibilities, and ethics are emerging in this moment of climatic and ecological instability?
  
• How do vertical and volumetric formations matter in the everyday lives of diverse interlocutors, and how might ethnography apprehend these dimensions—whether through aesthetic and tactile analysis, attention to abstraction and affective atmospheres, or speculative methods?

Instructions for Authors

Authors interested in contributing to this special issue are invited to consult the journal’s Instructions for Authors and submit an abstract (maximum 150 words, including a tentative title) to the editors via email by July 5, 2025. Notification of abstract acceptance will be sent by July 10, 2025. Full papers will be due by September 15, 2025.