CFP: Feeling Contemporary War: How Global Regimes of Sensing and Emotion Facilitate and Resist Military Power
Thao Phan
Feeling Contemporary War:
How Global Regimes of Sensing and Emotion Facilitate and Resist Military Power
Editors: Drs. Alex Adams & Amy Gaeta
Contemporary warfare is aided, disrupted, and mediated by ever-developing digital technologies, semi-autonomous and autonomous weapons and equipment, deepfake AI propaganda, mediation through social media, and much more. These shifts suggest that contemporary warfare is in some sense a ‘new’ modality of conflict, or at least that it has new and distinctive characteristics that are in urgent need of analysis and critique. Before we can understand contemporary war, we contend, two interpretive gestures are necessary: firstly, to more fully sense war and apprehend the multiple ways that war becomes embodied; secondly, we must account for war’s multivocality and expand the ‘we’ of who gets to speak about their embodied experience of war. This book investigates the multiform ways in which war is sensed and felt from multiple underrepresented perspectives that diverge from the hegemonic norm, and by doing so, strives to arrive at an expanded vision of the sensorial complexity of contemporary armed conflict. If we are willing to critically reflect on the regimes of sensing and emotions we each differently inhabit, we contend, these insights can enrich and deepen our understandings of war, state power, and—crucially—the ways that they may be resisted. In particular, we ask:
- How do the current apparatuses of warfare and state power function to produce, transmit, and circulate affects within and across frontlines?
- Through what factors and within which limits do feelings become ‘legitimate’ political information recognized by the state or other entities (e.g., activists, anti-state actors, publics) engaged in discourse around martial power?
- How are sensorial apprehensions of warfare connected to actions and materialities, such as solidarity, boycotts, or violence (whether active participation or indirect/figurative investments)?
The editors invite scholars of all disciplinary and professional backgrounds to submit a 350-500 word abstract for consideration. Final papers will be expected to fall within the range of 6000-8000 words. We welcome papers that explore any aspect of the topic, but are especially interested in the following:
Infrastructures, Contexts, and Mobilizations
- Incarceration, policing, borders, psychiatric institutions, detention
- Protests, movements, resistance, riots, and activism
- Supply chains, capital flows, trade infrastructure, war economies
- Transnational solidarities, coalitional labour, mutual aid
- Digital infrastructure, algorithms, platform moderation, online censorship
- Surveillance, snitching, community watch
- Architecture, real estate, city planning (especially in the context of settlement)
- Climate disaster, extraction, weaponization of natural resources
- Structures of desire, sexual norms and ‘deviances,’ and sexual communities
Materialities, Texts, and Images
- Video games, films, literary texts, music
- Pornographic and violent content; recordings of unsimulated sex & violence
- Social media, apps, podcasts, memes, generative AI content
- Witness accounts (memoir, testimony, documentation)
- Material culture (fashion, toys, collecting)
- Content regarding food, leisure, lifestyle, exercise
- Domesticated military technologies (e.g., GPS, drones, consumer robotics)
Feelings, Emotions, and Embodiments
- Ennui, boredom, numbness, saturation
- Avoidance, distance, trying not to feel war
- Doom, fatalism, hopelessness, dread
- Pleasure, comfort, excitement
- Humour, laughter
- Empowerment, hope
- Anxiety, paranoia
- Confusion, overwhelm
Each proposal must:
- Be between 350-500 words.
- Include a 150-200 word author bio.
- Include a brief sample bibliography, which should aim to give the editors a clear sense of the author’s citational practice, materials, and intellectual context (not included in word count).
- Be sent to sensingwaredi...@gmail.com by July 19th, 2025.
Schedule
Please submit all proposals no later than July 19th, 2025. Authors can expect a response no later than September 1st, 2025. The subsequent schedule is to be determined with the publisher, although we anticipate that full-length submissions will be due Spring 2026 with peer review and appropriate revisions to follow; final publication is anticipated in early 2027. We are willing to accommodate extensions where necessary, but inclusion in the final manuscript requires a commitment to meeting this schedule.
Dr. Amy Gaeta (she/they)
Research Associate
Center for Drones and Culture
Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence
The University of Cambridge
amygaeta.com