We are in an age that demands we redefine what it means to be human—that we tell different stories about the human place in the world, reimagine what is possible for us as a species to build healthier, more sustainable relationships with place, built in and through care and reciprocity, and which recognize human enmeshment and interconnectivity.

We are being called upon to use our greatest gifts as a species—two of which are the gifts of language and storytelling—to speak moments of encounter and entanglement and to express the earth’s breath, aliveness, and agency through the art of language. While the desire to understand human relationships with other species and the world writ-large is on the rise, the English language has not kept pace.

As Gavin Van Horn writes about Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work, “an ethical revolution” in human relationships with the world “might depend on a language revolution.”

In the Lexicon for Animacy, co-edited by Dr. Brianna Burke and Zoë Fay-Stindt, we are calling for all kinds of language, both old and new, to talk about the animacy, agency, intelligence, alive-ness, thinking, consciousness, communication, and being-ness of other beings.

What language can restore our relationship with the multispecies multiverses of which we are part and parcel? What words could truthfully convey our already and ongoing entanglement and interconnectivity within and among other species?

Learn more about our call for submissions here.