We invite you to submit abstracts for the upcoming special issue of Svetovi / Words titled “Fragile Environments and Emergent Vulnerabilities in the Age of Capitalocene” (tentative title) (eds. Nežka Struc & Sandi Abram).
In this issue we seek to thematize and explore intersections as well as disentanglement between environmental fragility and vulnerabilities that emerge in the lives of (more-than-)human beings. In the era of Capitalocene (Moore 2017; 2018) when contemporary climate change ebbs and flows across the Earth as heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, severe storms, floods, and air pollution and crises become part of everyday lives (Fassin 2012, Podjed 2024) and constant urgency (Schwell 2023), the once reassuring narrative about the world, as Domínguez Rubio (2025) writes, is all but gone: “ontological security” is giving way to “a sense of ontological fragility, […] a fragility that is felt as the inescapable condition of life on this planet”. One condition shared, albeit unequally, across plural words.
If this horizon of planetary fragilities might index global “capitalogenic flows” (Lawson 2025), where ceaseless accumulation of capital depends on the production of “systemic harm to socio-ecological infrastructure” (Wojnarowski 2025: 3) in particular contexts, then vulnerability names the conditions through which those harms are inscribed in bodies, landscapes and multispecies “lifeworlds” (Ingold 2000) - as feelings, affects and lived experiences. What remains, in many places, are debilitated bodies and damaged environments, where “debility” (Levine 2025, Mohamed 2023, Puar 2017) – injury and exclusion produced by economic and political forces – disrupts the category of disability as not something that is inscribed into lives, but created by violent social arrangements. It describes the ongoing conditions of exposure, and damaged environments in which (more-than-)human beings must continue to live.
Proposed timeline:
- 6 March 2026: deadline for abstracts
- 1 August 2026: manuscript submission deadline
- October 2026: peer reviews
- July 2027: publication
For submission please visit our registration page: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/X6k3tWBQR4 .
