Special Issue of Diyâr on “Human-Animal Encounters in the Middle East”

Over recent decades, the multidisciplinary field of human-animal studies has encouraged researchers to move beyond geographical, methodological, and disciplinary boundaries and to understand, explain and analyse human and non-human animals within shared social, cultural, economic, political, and ecological spaces. Despite a growing body of exciting research on human-animal encounters in other parts of the world, studies focusing on the relations between humans and non-humans in the Middle East have remained fragmentary. With a few exceptions, researchers have been slow to embrace the ‘animal turn’ and recognize the significance of human-animal interactions in the Middle East. This special issue of Diyâr – Journal of Turkish, Ottoman, and Middle Eastern Studies aims to address this gap by focusing on papers that consider human-animal relations in the Middle East from the past to the present day.

For our themed journal issue, we invite submissions that consider the interplay between human and non-human animals and provide a lens to analyse the Middle East in an innovative, creative, and not exclusively anthropocentric way. We welcome contributions from across disciplines such as (but not limited to) political science, history, sociology, anthropology, literary studies, religious studies, art history, psychology, ecology, bioscience/biomedical research, biology that draw upon diverse theoretical and methodological approaches.

Potential themes include, but are not limited to:
Human-animal interactions in historical contexts § Animal politics
Animal geographies
Animal migrations
Animal behaviour, cognition, emotions
Animal ethics, welfare
Capitalism, commodification, and animals § Tourism and animals Environment and animals
Imperialism, colonialism, and animals
Gender, sexuality and animals
Leisure, family, companionship and animals
Animals in arts, culture, and literature
Animals in sports
Animals in captivity, zoos and circuses
Animals in service; exploitation of animals
Animals in wars and conflicts; abuse, violence, and killing of animals § Use of animals for food and fur
Domestication, pet-keeping, breeding

Submission Details

The special issue on human-animal encounters in the Middle East is to be published in Spring 2021. The deadline for manuscripts to be considered for the issue is 30 October 2020. Manuscripts can be in German, English and French. A typical manuscript for this special issue should be (60,000 characters, including spaces and footnotes). Please send your abstract of 500 words to onur.inal@univie.ac.at by 31 December 2019.

For further details, please visit the journal’s Guidelines for Authors: https://www.diyar.nomos.de/index.php?id=7418&L=1

Timeline

Call for papers: 15 October 2019
Deadline for abstracts: 31 December 2019
Submission deadline: 30 October 2020
Review process manuscripts returned to authors: 31 January 2021 § Revision process final drafts: 31 March 2021

Editorial information  – 

Special Issue Editors: Onur İnal (onur.inal@univie.ac.at) and Yavuz Köse (yavuz.koese@univie.ac.at)