Date:
Email: tom.jobst@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
Due November 15, 2025.
In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, the once socialist countries of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe – but also central Asia, Africa and Latin America – have undergone a rapid series of political, economic, and cultural reconfigurations and realignments with neoliberal forms of capitalism. This has developed in parallel with a reversal to national and religious paradigms that had preceded the formation of socialist states, even if under the banner of democracy.
This same period, the end of the 1980s and the onset of the 1990s, saw the formation of queer theory. Forged in the USA, queer theory, and ‘queer’ as term, remain an Anglophone product – despite the term’s supposed etymological roots in Indo-European ‘athwart’, which implies an oblique angle on a normative line, hinting at forms and figures that refuse easy alignments. At the time of this call in 2025, and despite the many and cyclical proclamations of its death, queer theory remains the umbrella field of inquiry for gender variance and sexual diversity, but also one that extends beyond gender and sexuality. Queer as a term, and queer theory as its discursive and academic manifestation, have become the standard conceptual lens through which to inquire into broader processes and mechanisms of othering, including various more-than-human and environmental issues.
In parallel to this trajectory, decolonial discourses have been uncovering possible forms of gender and sexual variance that would have preceded European colonial projects and everything that came in their wake, including the very construction of ‘sexuality’ in the 19th century. Indigeneity, often in conjunction with ecological concerns, is increasingly seen as an antidote to global, colonial, and intrinsically capitalist histories, as well as a source of inspiration for doing things differently on a planet that is undergoing multiple crises. And yet, indigeneity has limited reach as a means of countering historical domination of reproductive cis heteropatriarchy across the globe, indigenous and colonial alike.
Within these contemporary grand narratives, postsocialist countries remain awkwardly positioned. Their specificities and experiences are rendered unrepresentative, and as a result remain obscured. Still predominantly associated with Europe, yet peripheral to the continent in terms of global structures of power, postsocialist contexts are squeezed between emancipatory projects that come in the form of highly culturally specific modes of being and acting queer – projects arguably forged ‘elsewhere’ – and a plethora of homegrown, if globally paradigmatic, conservative projects that insist on the essential importance of ethnicity, religion and nationhood, with the cis heteronormative ‘traditional’ family unit at the centre of its future-oriented reproductive logic. This is further complicated by the fact that the Soviet Union alone covered a vast ground straddling Europe and Asia, touching on issues of colonialism, race, and indigeneity from positions that remain substantially different to those of Western European empires and their colonies.
With this in mind, we ask: How are queerness, postsocialism, and environments entangled – when the term ‘environment’ is used broadly to include human-made environments, more-than-human ecologies, and the multiplicity of entanglements between the two? How does the very notion of queerness produce disalignments in relation to the predominantly cis heteropatriarchal environmental practices? And how are the processes of potential queer disalignment materially entangled both with built and more-than-human environments?
The disalignments of this book’s title aim to draw attention to two issues. First, the queering of environments is inseparable from their material forms and manifestations, and the very diagrams involved in this process (alignment, non-alignment, disalignment) should be seen as a tool for redefining all spatial and temporal positioning. Second, as editors born of the disappeared country of Yugoslavia we are keen to tease out resonances with the history of the Non-Aligned Movement – even if it was, like the practices of socialism in its member countries, far from a call to queer utopia. How can this geopolitical non-alignment be read alongside queer disalignments during socialism? And what could be its (im)possible queer resonances in postsocialist countries today? Furthermore, how can the emancipatory, yet universalising and therefore implicitly colonial mode of queering, queer theory, and queer activism be understood in contexts that didn’t give rise to it and carry few counter-narratives? And is it possible to conceptualise relations between queering and environments in postsocialist societies that wouldn’t be reliant on gender and sexuality as their primary categories of social organisation?
This proposed volume calls for book chapters that trace various environmental manifestations of queer disalignments in the context of postsocialist countries, and trouble the current grand narratives of queer theory. Proposed chapters can be diachronic, but should ultimately focus on the contemporary, i.e. postsocialist period; they can be architectural and urban in focus or wedded to landscapes and more-than-human ecologies that surpass the city and its built environments; and they should be material as much as they are spatial.
Please send proposed chapter abstracts (300-500 words) together with short biographical notes (150-200 words) tom.jobst@leedsbeckett.ac.uk and andrija.filipovic@fmk.edu.rs by 15th November 2025. All authors will receive responses by 1st December, after which further details will be circulated to chapter authors whose proposals have been accepted. The book proposal will be placed with a highly established academic publisher.
Marko Jobst is Senior Lecturer at Leeds School of Architecture. He holds a Diploma in Architecture from Belgrade University and MArch, MSc and PhD in architectural history and theory from The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is the author of A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground (2017) and co-editor of Architectural Affects After Deleuze and Guattari with Prof Hélène Frichot (2021), Queering Architecture: Methods, Practices, Spaces, Pedagogies with Prof Naomi Stead (2023), and Instituting Worlds: Architecture and Islands with Prof Catharina Gabrielsson (2024). His research interests include the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, affect and queer theories, and performative modes of writing.
Andrija Filipović is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Art & Media Theory at the Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade, Serbia. They are the author of (in Serbian) Ars ahumana: Anthropocene ontographies in 21st century art and culture (2022), Conditio ahumana: Immanence and the ahuman in the Anthropocene (2019). Their articles appeared in Sexualities, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Homosexuality, Contemporary Social Science, and a number of edited volumes such as Plastics, Environment, Culture and the Politics of Waste (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), Sound Affects: A User’s Guide (Bloomsbury, 2023), and The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect (Routledge, 2022). Their research interests include environmental humanities, queer studies and philosophy.
