Special Issue: Climate Adaptation Adaptation (OUP)
Special Issue: Climate Adaptation Adaptation (OUP)
Deadline for papers: 30 January 2028
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(early papers accepted for continuous publication)
Ed. Robert Geal and Deborah Cartmell
This special issue of Adaptation recognises the growing body of work on climate change, such as recent work published in this journal including Michael Fuchs, ‘Extinct, archived, revived, erased: mourning and media in The Hunter’ (2026), Robert Geal, ‘Towards an Ecocritical Adaptation Studies’ (2024) and Kyle Meikle, ‘Is Adaptation Studies Sustainable?
Papers are invited on topics on synergies between the study of adaptation and climate change, focussing on topics such as the relationship between fictional, documentary and mediated depictions of climate events (for example, disaster films and documentary coverage) or adaptations regarding:
- resilience and environmental futures
- meteorological events
- extreme weather
- conservation
- ecophobia
- ecocriticism
- ecofeminism
- environmental ethics
- pollution
- humans, animals and plants
The multiple meanings of the term ‘adaptation’ offer a productive point of intersection between adaptation studies and climate change research. Developing and/or critiquing Gary Bortolotti and Linda Hutcheon’s influential argument that “Stories, in a manner parallel to genes, replicate; the adaptations of both evolve with changing Environments” (2007: 444), recent ecocritical adaptation studies have begun interrogating the relationships between cultural and biological adaptation. As the climate crisis accelerates, our societies are faced with the pressing need to mitigate as well as attempt to slow down its negative effects, meaning that climate adaptation is another form of ‘adaptation’ encompassing biological, social and cultural survival. Climate adaptation therefore concerns the ways individuals, communities, and ecosystems respond to environmental change, and the ways these responses are imagined, mediated, narrated and contested through culture. This special issue explores the connections, tensions, and commonalities between these understandings of adaptation. It asks how cultural adaptations shape understandings of environmental change, and how climate adaptation raises new questions for adaptation studies.
