Call for Submissions: Special Issue – Reconfiguring Intimacies: Extraction, Land and Bodies
Extractive Industries and Society
Special Issue Editors: Rebecca Hall, Allison Goebel, Marc Epprecht, Lesego Loate
For inquiries, or to submit an abstract, please email Rebecca at: rh116@queensu.ca
Reconfiguring Intimacies: Extraction, Land and Bodies emerges out of a community-university research inquiry into community experiences with diamond mining in northern Canada and coal mining in South Africa. While transnational in scope, our analysis emphasizes the intimate nature of experiences of extraction, the ways in which extraction writes itself upon our bodies and caring labours, and the lands upon which we rely. We invite contributions that centre the intimate – including the labours of social reproduction and care, relations to land, and intimate violence – as a site of extraction reconfiguration and contestation, and contributions that consider imaginaries of non-extractive livelihoods and relationships.
The proposed special issue emerges out of the community-university research collaboration, Futures of Care (SSHRC Insight Grant), an inquiry into community experiences with and responses to diamond mining in northern Canada and coal mining in South Africa. In approach, this project – and, correspondingly, the proposed Special Issue – is informed by the editors’ collaboration with Dedats’eetsaa: The Tlicho Research and Training Institute (Northwest Territories, Canada), Hotii Ts’eeda: The NWT SPOR Support Unit, and The Society, Work & Politics Institute (University of Witwatersrand, South Africa). Conceptually, this special issue is informed by feminist and decolonizing scholarship on extraction (Stanley 2015, Forrest and Loate 2018, Marcatelli 2021, Pereira and Tsikata 2021, Lahiri-Dutt 2022, Hecht 2023, Jobin 2024).
The Special Issue will contribute to analyses of the relationship between extraction, social reproduction and care (Luxton 1980, Beckett and Keeling 2019, Hall 2021, Perez and De La Puente 2022); extraction and gender-based and sexual violence (Altamirano-Jimenez 2021, Cayli 2021); extraction and the formation of gendered and sexual subjectivities (Scott 2010), including masculinist constructions of the (ostensibly, post-extractive) “tourist gaze” (Enloe 2014), and post/non-extractive futures. We will centre Indigenous, black South African and decolonizing ontologies of the land, and encourage contributions that consider relational approaches to land, and grounded analyses of “the intimate”.
All submissions are subject to the writing guidelines of the journal.
Timeline
October 9, 2026: Prospective contributors send abstracts to: rh116@queensu.ca
November 26, 2026: Contributors share rough drafts of papers in advance of an informal peer-review workshop
December 3, 2026: Virtual writing and peer review workshop
January 31, 2027: Full drafts due for review by Special Issue editors