PUBLIC: Art | Culture | Ideas
PUBLIC
- URL: https://publicjournal.ca/submit
- Call For Paper Type: Regular
- H2 Index: 0
- Submission Date: 2025-06-01
Film Literature & Writing Philosophy Visual Arts Bioethics Soil Sciences
Call for Submissions:
PUBLIC 73: (Re)Mediating Soils
Guest Editors:
Katherine Lawless (University of Calgary)
David W. Janzen (University of Lethbridge)
Sheri Osden Nault (Western University)
DEADLINE: June 1st, 2025, by 11:59pm (EST)
We invite contributions to the 73rd issue of PUBLIC on the theme of “(re)mediating soils.” Traditionally, to remediate is to decontaminate, to restore a soil to its “natural” state and level of productivity, often in service of human consumption. However, remediation in its expanded sense can also mean to remedy, redress, or repair. In these terms, the social often eclipses the technical. Hence, to remediate soils is also to re-socialize them, restoring their relational and worldbuilding capacities. Accordingly, by reframing soil as a relational medium—where social and material processes coalesce—this forward-thinking issue explores the social, cultural, political, economic, and historical dimensions of soil care, health, and repair.
Heeding Krzywoszynska and Marchesi’s (2020) call for a “relational materiality approach to the study of soils across the disciplines,” we solicit original, transdisciplinary research, research-creation, and creative works that bridge critical inquiry and practice and explore soil as a dynamic agent in productive “dialogue” with its surroundings. Submissions addressing any aspect of soil (re)mediation from qualitative, quantitative, theoretical, and conceptual perspectives are welcome. We particularly encourage theoretically and methodologically innovative works from across the disciplines.
PUBLIC: Art | Culture | Ideas (est. 1988) is a biannual interdisciplinary journal that combines peer-reviewed scholarship with contemporary art and creative writing in a magazine-style book. Issue 73 will be part scholarly and creative anthology and part exhibition catalogue for our related multi-sited, travelling exhibition (Re)mediating Soils (2026–2028).
Potential topics include (but are not limited to):
- Reconceptualizing soils and soil health
- Diverse soil care practices
- Soils as media: relational, digital, and cultural ecologies
- Diverse ways of knowing soils—Traditional, Indigenous, Local
- Soil remediation as both technical and cultural process
- Soils as sites of social-ecological repair
- Social dimensions of soil health
- Soil ethics and relational values
- Political economies and ecologies of soil remediation
- Multi-scalar dimensions of soil
- Soil ethnography, epistolary, and experimental prose
- Digital (re)mediation and datafication of soils
We accept:
- Academic articles (6,000–7,000 words)
- Essays and photo essays (2,000–3,000 words)
- Persona, Critical, or Process-Based Reflections (2,000 words max.)
- Interviews (1,000 words max.)
- Poetry (3 poems, or a suite of 5 pages max.)
- Photography (3 photos max.)
- Visual art (3 artworks max.)
Interested authors should submit a working title and abstract (250 words max.), five keywords, and a short bio (150 words max.).
Interested visual artists and photographers should submit an artist statement (250 words max.), images or a link to media, and a short bio (150 words max.).
Interested poets should submit a poet statement (250 words max.) and a short bio (150 words max.).
Please submit all relevant materials using the online form at: publicjournal.ca/submit.
General inquiries: Write to Zach Pearl, Managing Editor at public@yorku.ca
Guest Editor Bios:
Katherine Lawless is Assistant Professor of Transdisciplinary Environmental Communication in the Department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary, cross-appointed with the Department of Geography. She conducts research and teaches in soil humanities, environmental studies, and place-based and participatory methodologies. She is the lead researcher on the collaborative, transdisciplinary project Soil as a Relational Medium, which was awarded an NFRF Exploration Grant and a SSHRC Insight Grant.
David Janzen is Assistant Professor of Digital Culture in the New Media Department at the University of Lethbridge. He writes and teaches about land, environment, and crisis. His creative work has been recognized by the EVENT Creative Non-Fiction Prize, the CV2 Young Buck Poetry Prize, the Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award and received an Honourable Mention from the National Magazine Awards. His recent creative outputs include What the River Knows, a collaborative audiographic installation at TAP Centre for Creativity, and two chapbooks: Nature: Nurture (Baseline Press, London) and Slipstream (Anstruther Press, Toronto). He is co-principal investigator on Soil as a Relational Medium.
Sheri Osden Nault is an artist, community worker, and Assistant Professor of Studio Art in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University. Their work spans mediums including sculpture, performance, installation, and more; integrating cultural, social, and experimental creative processes. Through this, they consider embodied connections between human and non-human beings, land-based relationships, and kinship sensibilities as an Indigenous futurist framework. Methodologically, they prioritize tactile ways of knowing and learning from more-than-human kin. Their research engages anti-colonial, queer, Indigenous feminist, and ecological theory and praxis.
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