CALL FOR PAPERS

Bodies and Biodiversity

(Oxford Intersections)

Oxford Intersections are large, peer-reviewed, digital-only works centered around a broad, multi-faceted, and interdisciplinary topic – Cultures of Waste in this case. Intersections will showcase original, cutting-edge research on the topic from multiple different perspectives, providing a new space for authors to submit work that draws data, methods, or concepts from more than one field.

Cultures of Waste examines waste as an urgent environmental and human health crisis, a material and symbolic concept, and  a linguistic signifier. For our section on Bodies  and Biodiversity, we are particularly interested in work that explores how waste reshapes relationships between humans, nonhumans, and environments.

As anthropogenic matters and orders have come to prevail across the planet, bodies at multiple scales and the relations that sustain them have been profoundly reshaped through disruptive socio-ecological transformations. We conceptualize this transformative force as waste/wasting: a set of material, political, and relational processes through which certain bodies are rendered useless, pollutable, or disposable, thereby producing waste as detached and devalued beings in material-discursive sense.

In such a fraught world, waste across different forms and scales both embodies and disembodies earthly beings. It permeates bodies, alters ways of being and relating, and leads to death at organismic, population, and species levels. The logic of abandonment that underpins this reorganization of the world creates both human and other-than-human waste along classed, gendered, racialized, heteronormative, ableist, and  speciesist  lines. These dynamics contribute to the erosion of biocultural diversity across species, while simultaneously demanding a rethinking of multiplicity and plurality of bodies and relationalities beyond dominant biodiversity paradigms. At the same time, when situated within multispecies and ecological contexts, waste can also emerge as a site of resistance and regeneration, enabling multispecies coexistence even within ruined worlds.

Against this backdrop, we invite interdisciplinary contributions that critically explore the complex relationships between waste, bodies, and biodiversity. We particularly welcome work that focus on less-attended forms and scales of bodies and waste/wasting, as well as environments across diverse geographical, political, and ecological contexts.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Bodies, boundaries  and  waste:  How  does  waste  entangle  bodies  across  scales, reconfiguring boundaries, divides, and barriers?
• Corporeal technologies of waste: How do configurations of waste and bodies operate as strategies for reproducing extractive and colonial capitalist systems? How do multispecies beings sense, navigate, and respond bodily to damaged worlds?
• Impact of waste on biodiversity: How do waste and its management influence biodiversity and produce toxic multispecies relationships?
• Wound, death, and extinction: How is colonial capitalism embodied through disability, altered life–death dynamics, and the loss of natureculture? How is it haunted by wasted beings whose suffering, mourning, and extinction are in/sensible to humans?
• De-hygienizing bodies, species, and biodiversity: How might we rethink bodies, species, and biodiversity beyond notions of bounded, self-contained beings  and human-nonhuman binary, for example, by learning from multispecies practices of differentiating others and sustaining diverse worlds?
• Sociality of waste: How can waste, decay, contagion, and excess give rise to sites of resistance and generative conditions for alternative encounters, ecologies, and socialities?

Submission Guidelines:

• Manuscripts should  be  original  and  not  previously  published  or  under  consideration elsewher
• If accepted, articles should run between 6,000-10,000 words and will be rigorously peer- reviewed before publication.
• To be considered, submit abstracts of no more than 500 words with CVs to Section Editors’ email addr

Section Editors 

• Olga Cielemecka – olga.ciele mecka@u ef.f i  

• Hyena Kim – h n kim@dae gu .ac.kr

Key Dates:

•  Abstract Submission Deadline: 28 February, 2026
•  Notification of Acceptance: 13 March, 2026
•  Final Manuscript Due: 15 May, 2026