CALL FOR PAPERS
Territories in Transition: Ecology and Digital in the Twin-Transition
Edited by Giacomo Cuoco and Giacomo Gilmozzi
After gaining an increasingly central role both in public debate and in research and academic production, the ecological issue and digital development have progressively intertwined in recent years. On the one hand, the recognition of the impact of the production and development model on the Earth system, and on the other, the possibilities opened up by new technologies to monitor, mitigate, or solve environmental imbalances, have certainly contributed to thinking of the two processes as movements to synchronize toward common goals.
The need for a twin-transition has been recognized, not least, by the European Union: the objectives of Next Generation Europe indeed reflect this conceptual framework – subsequently applied within the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (PNRR) – whose intent is to produce a “double transition” capable of articulating sustainable and ethical environmental-technological development. Nonetheless, the nature of the connection, its components, theoretical implications, possibilities, and limits of such an alliance still need to be explored.
In fact, beneath the apparent univocity of the concept of twin-transition, there lies a tension between different theoretical positions and the consequent political, ethical, and economic operations, which – far from neutral – directly affect territories and social relations. In a debate too often saturated by the technocratic and techno-solutionist approach, monopolized by neoliberal principles, critical thinking is called to intervene by highlighting conflicts and tensions, thus opening the political horizon to other ways of imagining, thinking, and designing ecological-digital transitions at different levels of territoriality or, to use a concept dear to Bernard Stiegler, of locality.
This issue therefore aims to investigate the current twin-transition paradigm adopted by the European Union and the possible alternative ways to combine ecological and digital transitions, with particular attention to the territorial issue, i.e., the role and responsibilities of territories and their inhabitants and the achievable choices they must make. If, inevitably, the operations of the twin-transition must "touch the ground" on various territorial scales, how can they reshape internal and reciprocal relationships between countries/different forms of sociality? How do they directly affect the inhabitants of these territories (understood broadly, from individuals to communities, private businesses, and public institutions)?
To respond to this call for papers, you are invited to submit your contributions concerning at least one of the following themes:
- History of twin-transition: genealogy of a concept, theoretical issues, and political-institutional developments;
- How might the twin-transition accentuate or reduce local and global social, economic, and ethical inequalities?
- Fundamental principles and differences between the approach of climate justice and the perspectives of sustainable development;
- What transformations of human ways of life and new processes of subjectivation are produced by the intersection of digital and ecology?
- What relationships are configured between the living and the non-living, and how is the responsibility of the living framed within this paradigm?
- Ethics and politics of transition models: which territorial governance models can ensure a fair and inclusive transition?
- Ethics and politics of the digital: critical investigation of the present (status quo) and new normative horizons (rule of law);
- Environmental and social impact of digital infrastructure and supply chains.
- Case studies and examples of twin-transition at the micro-/meso-local scale (neighborhoods, cities, territories) or beyond;
- How can the development of a double transition "touch the ground" and reshape the inside and outside of urban and non-urban territories?
General Information:
To respond to this call for papers, you are invited to submit an abstract of up to 1500 characters by April 5, 2025, to the email addresses: giacomo.cuoco@uniroma3.it and giacomo.gilmozzi@iri.centrepompidou.fr
If accepted, the article – with a maximum length of 30,000 characters (spaces included) – must be submitted by May 25, 2025. Contributions must adhere to the journal’s editorial guidelines (ITA/ENG) and will undergo a double-blind peer review. The outcome of the evaluation process will be communicated by July 15, 2025. The publication of the issue is expected for November 2025.
The document, strictly in *Word format, must include the author's name, surname, possible institutional affiliation, and an email address.
Accepted languages: Italian, English, and French. Articles in English are highly appreciated.
For more information, write to:
giacomo.cuoco@uniroma3.it
giacomo.gilmozzi@iri.centrepompidou.fr
babelprint@uniroma3.it
Call for Papers: B@belonline: Volume 13 (2026)
“Appetito, Corpo, Animale, Tempo: Declinazioni fenomenologiche”
Guest editor: Valeria Bizzari
Deadline abstracts: 1 Febbraio 2026
Deadline articoli: 15 Aprile 2026
There is a time that precedes any quantifications, a rhythm that does not yet belong to consciousness but pulsates in the flesh, in the breath, in hunger. It is the animal time of the living body: that of appetite and sleep, of vulnerability and desire, of life that is felt and exposed.
This issue of B@belonline stems from the conference “Drive, body, animal, time: phenomenological declinations,” held at Roma Tre University in September 2025, and aims to continue the reflection on what precedes the self in life, what moves on the border between human and animal, between presence and exposure, between drive and reason.
In this original zone of experience, phenomenology encounters its most fragile threshold: understanding the body not as a thing, but as a mode of time; animality not as something other than humanity, but as its shared condition. The contemporary phenomenological horizon is in fact paying a growing attention to animality as a border between passivity and action, between instinct and consciousness, between biological time and lived time. In this context, the body and appetite emerge as original figures of a pre-reflective temporality, which questions the traditional distinction between human and non-human, between reason and desire.
If the subject is not at all a pure, completely transcendental self, because it is immersed in a world of life that welcomes and rejects it, shapes it and opens it to the other, the task of phenomenology will therefore be to investigate and describe not only the fundamental structures that support this subjectivity (primarily, body and time) but also those liminal areas that challenge the rigor of the Husserlian method: instincts, desires, appetites, and our connection with the foreign, the animal, the stranger.
It is a matter of conceiving drive as a primary form of intentionality, sensitivity as temporal openness, animality as a form of embodied existence. Is it possible to outline a phenomenology of animality? And, in light of the interdisciplinary developments of phenomenology (which are intertwined with ecological, anthropological, and psychopathological research), does it make sense to extend the field of analysis to different types of consciousness?
The stranger, as Waldenfels also argues, is an essential part of ourselves, just as animals seem to share with humans a sort of instinctual intentionality that allows us to think of various levels of stratification of consciousness, and therefore of an ‘expanded’ subjectivity, or at least a continuity between the ‘human’ world and the animal world.
The journal B@belonline therefore invites original contributions for a monographic issue whose aim is to explore the embodied and temporal dimensions of experience, analyzing the connection between animal life, bodily sensitivity, desire, and temporality.
We welcome texts that explore, from a phenomenological or phenomenological-hermeneutic perspective, the following themes (among others):
—Lived temporality, rhythm, and embodiment;
—Animality, vulnerability, and otherness;
—Drive, hunger, desire as phenomenological structures based on classical authors (Husserl, Scheler, Kolnai, Heidegger, Bollnow, Levinas, Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Patočka, Fink, Dufrenne, Henry, Maldiney, Richir, Waldenfels, etc.) and in dialogue with contemporary research;
—Body and otherness: intersubjectivity, interaffectivity, the other-than-self;
—Phenomenology and interdisciplinary developments (ecophenomenology, phenomenological psychopathology, philosophical anthropology);
—Animality as “the limit of the human”: reflections in dialogue with Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, Henry, Barbaras, and others.
General Information:
To respond to this call for papers, you are invited to submit an abstract of up to 1500 characters by February 1, 2026, to the email address: valeria.bizzari@kuleuven.be
If accepted, the article – with a maximum length of 30,000 characters (spaces included) – must be submitted by April 15, 2026. Contributions must adhere to the journal’s editorial guidelines (ITA/ENG) and will undergo a double-blind peer review.
The document, strictly in *Word format, must include the author's name, surname, possible institutional affiliation, and an email address.
Accepted languages: Italian, English, and French. Articles in English are highly appreciated.
For more information, write to: babelprint@uniroma3.it; valeria.bizzari@kuleuven.be