Call for Papers

Confluențe. Texts and Contexts Reloaded

 

 Posthuman Horizons: Human / Nonhuman Relations in Literature, Media and Culture

For issue 2026

 “The boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached.”

(Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto)

 

As technological transformation, ecological crisis, and multispecies perspectives reshape our understanding of the world, the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman are increasingly called into question. Literature, media, and cultural texts have become important sites for imagining and negotiating the complex relations between humans, animals, machines, environments, and material objects.

The editorial board of Confluențe – Annals of the University of Oradea, Modern Literature Fascicle invites submissions for a thematic issue titled Posthuman Horizons: Human / Nonhuman Relations in Literature, Media and Culture.

In recent decades, posthumanist thought has profoundly reshaped debates in the humanities by challenging the assumption that the human occupies a central and privileged position within systems of meaning, culture, and knowledge. Rather than treating the human as an autonomous and stable category, posthumanist approaches examine how subjectivity, agency, and identity emerge through dynamic relations with the nonhuman world.

Scholars working within posthumanist, new materialist, and ecological frameworks—including Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, N. Katherine Hayles, Cary Wolfe, Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, Timothy Morton, and Karen Barad—have drawn attention to the limitations of anthropocentric thinking and proposed new conceptual models for understanding life, agency, and relationality in a more-than-human world.

Within this intellectual context, literature, media, and cultural production offer powerful spaces for imagining alternative forms of coexistence between humans and nonhumans. Narratives of hybrid identities, technological embodiment, ecological interdependence, and multispecies relations challenge inherited hierarchies and invite us to reconsider what it means to be human in an age increasingly shaped by technological mediation and planetary crisis.

 

This issue invites contributors to reflect on questions such as:

  • How do literary and cultural narratives challenge anthropocentric assumptions and foreground entanglements between humans and nonhumans?
  • In what ways do texts imagine new forms of agency distributed across animals, machines, environments, and material objects?
  • How do representations of technological embodiment, artificial intelligence, or ecological crisis reshape our understanding of subjectivity and ethics?
  • Can literature and cultural media offer new imaginative frameworks for thinking about coexistence in a more-than-human world?

By bringing together perspectives from literary studies, media studies, cultural theory, and related disciplines, this issue seeks to explore how cultural texts reimagine the place of the human within complex ecological, technological, and material networks.

 

Contributions may focus on but are not limited to

Posthuman Theory and Philosophy

  • posthumanism and literary theory
  • new materialism and object-oriented ontology
  • posthuman subjectivity and agency
  • posthuman ethics and relational ontologies

Ecological and Multispecies Perspectives

  • human–animal relations in literature and culture
  • ecocriticism and environmental humanities
  • multispecies storytelling
  • ecological crisis and literary imagination

Technology, Media, and the Digital

  • artificial intelligence and narrative
  • cyborg identities and technological embodiment
  • digital subjectivity and virtual bodies
  • media ecologies and technological environments

Genres and Cultural Imaginaries

  • science fiction and speculative fiction
  • dystopian and post-apocalyptic imaginaries
  • hybrid bodies and posthuman identities
  • representations of biotechnology and bioengineering

Contributions may focus on literatures written in or related to the Anglophone, Francophone, or German-speaking worlds, as well as comparative and interdisciplinary approaches. The articles may be written in English, French, and German.

 

Submission Guidelines

  • Articles should be 5,000–7,000 words, including references.
  • Manuscripts must be original, unpublished, and not under consideration elsewhere.
  • Submissions undergo double-blind peer review.
  • The journal is open access and does not charge publication fees.

 

Important Dates

Deadline for article submission: 1 July

Peer review: August – October

Revised articles due: 10 November

Publication: December issue

The submission proposals and full articles should be emailed to

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 

Suggested Bibliography:

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana University Press, 2010.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181, 1991.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, 1993.

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press, 2010.