About this call for submissions:
The Climate Minds Anthology issue of unpsychology magazine responds to the climate emergency and the psychological implications for everyday life of what may turn out to be the human crisis to end all human crises.
We invite activists, poets, artists and others to respond to the theme of Climate Minds.
We are looking for responses that are located in the ordinary worlds that most people think they live in, and in the extraordinary, imaginary, spiritual and ecological worlds that wrap round our inner worlds and are key to our psychological wellbeing.
We seek new stories about how human beings could be living their lives in times to come, and explorations of how the climate crisis is reflected in our psychology and in our cultural assumptions and behaviours.
Above all, we want to start a creative, artistic, poetic and everyday conversation that can be carried into our communities. We’ve threaded this issue through with a questioning dialogue asking: what is?, what might be? and what can be done?
In asking people to respond creatively and imaginatively to the theme of Climate Minds, we do not wish to promote or highlight a particular worldview or approach. There are, however, a couple of things that we hold in our (climate) minds.
First, we are aware that conversations about climate change/ crisis/ emergency are strangely difficult, even now when there is almost complete acceptance that human activity has and is affecting the climate systems of the Earth — and hence, will affect the future lives of human and non-human lifeforms on this planet.
Second, we have faith that there are voices, stories and ideas that could make thinking and talking about this most sticky and intractable of issues, if not easier, then more imaginative and creative. And that these ideas and stories will be helpful to us (as humans) in working out how we are to live into whatever future is being created by and for us
And so, we are looking, above all, for contributions that respond artistically, poetically, poignantly, ecologically and imaginatively to these two thoughts — and to the three questions: what is? what might be? and what can be done?
(Please don’t submit your work if it doesn’t respond to the theme of Climate Minds; we will invite and welcome more general ‘unpsychological’ contributions at other times.)
How to submit:
- If you’ve got a piece of work that responds to the Climate Minds theme, create it in your Medium account and then send a link to your piece to submissions@unpsychology.org. We will then review it and get back to you to let you know if we’d like to use it.
- It can be any form of creative work that Medium supports — writing, artwork, embedded video and so on. Familiarise yourself with Medium if you’d like to create a piece that combines these forms!
- If we accept your piece, we will add you as a writer to unpsychology and then you can submit your piece for editing to us through the Medium submissions process (you can’t do this until we’ve added you as a writer!).
- Once the editing process has been completed. We’ll then decide when to publish your piece. We will want to manage a regular stream of articles and contributions so timing will be important!
A final note on submitting: we won’t be able to publish everything that people submit, and we may invite submissions from authors and artists we think are adding something to the Climate Minds conversation. We want a diversity of voices, but any publication process is, to some extent, subjective. It won’t necessarily be a reflection on the quality of your work — just a reflection of what fits in the eyes of the two editors! And if we like the idea, we’ll work with you to make your piece work on unpsychology on Medium.