Call for Papers: Thinking with Things: Narrative, Culture, and Material Politics (with strong interest from Routledge, New York)
Even though questions of matter and materiality have long informed humanistic thought, recent years have witnessed a renewed and intensified engagement with “materiality” across the humanities and social sciences. This resurgence responds to a range of contemporary challenges—environmental instability, planetary disruption, digital overdetermination, infrastructural fragility, and the erosion of anthropocentric exceptionalism—all of which have reshaped how we understand what it means to be human in a more-than-human world. While materialist, new materialist, and posthuman paradigms have expanded the grammar of critical discourse, much existing scholarship remains focused on conceptual elaboration, often treating literary and cultural texts as secondary illustrations of theoretical claims. Such an approach risks reinstating the familiar Cartesian divide between mind and matter, idea and experience, theory and praxis. What remains underexplored is how material thinking itself operates within narrative practices—how conceptual structures are articulated through storytelling, and how narratives are shaped, constrained, and transformed by the presence and agency of things.
As Jane Bennett suggests, materiality is never passive; it possesses “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, and to produce effects.” Taking this insight seriously, Thinking with Things: Narrative, Culture, and Material Politics seeks to reposition narrative as a site where matter is not merely represented but actively participates in the production of meaning, ethics, and power. The volume brings together contributions that explore how material entities—objects, infrastructures, ecological conditions, nonhuman agents, technological assemblages, and everyday artefacts—intervene in and generate narrative processes. Rather than approaching materiality as a neutral medium, the collection understands it as a dynamic force that mediates relations and constitutes the very conditions of meaning-making. In doing so, the project aims to move beyond human-centered epistemologies and purely representational frameworks, demonstrating how material forces reshape ontological assumptions, challenge inherited political models, and reconfigure ethical frameworks.
By foregrounding the active role of things in cultural and political life, the volume fosters a cross-disciplinary dialogue across literary studies, philosophy, cultural theory, media studies, anthropology, geography, and science and technology studies. It is particularly interested in how things, understood as “material-semiotic” agents in the sense articulated by Donna Haraway, enable new modes of conceptual and narrative practice that move beyond the dualisms of mind and matter, theory and praxis, while remaining attentive to textual specificity. The volume also seeks to examine how objects—from everyday artefacts to large-scale infrastructures—mediate temporality, responsibility, and relations of power; how narratives respond to ecological disruption and planetary instability; and how literary and cultural texts reimagine the human by tracing the co-constitution of human and nonhuman actors within complex material assemblages.
We invite contributions that engage with themes such as materiality and narrative form; objects and material culture; literature, cinema, and visual culture; affect and embodiment; ecological and planetary imaginaries; everyday life and capitalist circulation; ethics and material relations; transmedia storytelling; human/nonhuman interfaces; urban space and spatial materialities; temporality, ruin, and breakdown; archives and material traces; digital media and technological assemblages; and object-oriented ontology, among others. Submissions that combine theoretical rigor with close attention to texts, media, or cultural practices are especially welcome.
Submissions are invited from scholars who have completed the doctoral degree or are at an advanced stage of doctoral research with an established record of scholarly engagement. Abstracts of approximately 300 words, along with a brief bio (100–150 words), should be sent to thinkingthings.project@gmail.com by May 30, 2026. Accepted chapters will be expected to be in the range of 6000–8000 words; the full submission timeline will be communicated after the selection of abstracts.
This is a selective, peer-reviewed edited volume currently under development. Contributors will be chosen on the basis of originality, conceptual rigor, and relevance to the thematic concerns of the collection. The volume is co-edited by Ratul Nandi (Department of English, Siliguri College, University of North Bengal, India) and Anik Sarkar (Department of English, Uttar Banga Maheshwari College, University of North Bengal, India).
Some areas that the chapters can explore, but not limited to:
- Things and Narrative Form
- Things and Objects of Material Culture
- Things and Literary Texts
- Things and Cinema and visual culture
- Things and Affect
- Things, materiality and Psychoanalysis
- Things and Ecological and Planetary imaginaries
- Things, Objects and Everyday Life
- Things and Capitalist Circulations
- Things and Questions of Ethics
- Things and Transmedia Storytelling
- Things and the Human / Nonhuman Interface
- Things and Critical Theory
- Things and Polity and definition of the Political
- Things and Temporality
- Things and Graphic Narratives / Comics
- Things and Ruin, Breakdown, and Failure
- Things and the question of Archive
- Things and Digital Media
- Things and in-betweenness
- Things and Object-Oriented Ontology
Contact Information
Editors
Ratul Nandi, PhD
Department of English
Siliguri College, University of North Bengal, India
Anik Sarkar, PhD
Department of English
Uttar Banga Maheshwari College, University of North Bengal, India
Contact Email
thinkingthings.project@gmail.com
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