How can scholars working in the humanities and social sciences pursue research that yields coherent and generalizable bodies of knowledge when their objects of inquiry are increasingly recognized as moving targets lacking stable, essential features? This Special Issue of Metamodern Theory and Praxis seeks to advance discourses on process social ontologies in an effort to show how a processual turn may provide scholars with novel tools for meaningful and insightful work on the other side of deconstruction.
In Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (2021), Jason Storm introduces a process social ontology inspired by philosophical work in the natural sciences (Nicholson and Dupré, Hacking, Khalidi) to sketch an antidisciplinary vision for academic work in the human sciences. In the previous century, process philosophers and theologians inspired by the speculative cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead—such as John B. Cobb, Jr. and David Ray Griffin—likewise critiqued the shortcomings of the siloed disciplines of the modern academy and advanced a vision of “Constructive Postmodernism” which likewise aimed to provide a philosophical framework for constructive and generalizable scholarship.
The editors are pleased to invite submissions of original research articles and reviews from scholars who are developing and deploying processual ontologies in the human and natural sciences. We particularly welcome articles which build upon, critique, or employ Storm’s process social ontology as well as articles which put emerging metamodern discourses (van den Akker and Vermeulen, Dember, Dempsey, Freinacht) in constructive conversation with process thought.
Further topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Exploring African, Indigenous, Islamic, Dharmic, and East Asian process ontologies
- Employing a process social ontology to do antidisciplinary analysis of a contested topic in the humanities and/or social sciences
- Engaging canonical process thinkers (Whitehead, Bergson, Deleuze, etc.) to bolster the metaphysical foundations of process ontologies or to chart their limits
- Developing a processual epistemology which helps clarify the methodological application of process social ontologies
- Putting processual thought in the natural and human sciences into conversation and charting their distinctions and convergences
- Deploying a process ontological analysis of specific dimensions of the polycrisis or of the conditions for fostering ecological civilization
This Special Issue aims to provide occasion to further explore and expand the emancipatory potential of processual modes of thought and analysis, drawing connections between previously disparate discourses and utilizing these new tools of knowledge creation to overcome the limitations of both modern and postmodern research paradigms and, in doing so, to advance understanding of the major issues of our age.
Please use this form to submit your manuscript for consideration. Submissions will first be reviewed by the Guest Editor for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review.
Deadline for manuscript submissions: October 1, 2026
Jared Morningstar
Guest Editor
References
Becker, John, and Wm. Andrew Schwartz. “Process Thought, Education, and the Environmental Crisis: A Tribute to John B. Cobb, Jr.” Buddhist-Christian Studies 42 (2022): 53-67. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/bcs.2022.0002.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York, NY: Random House, 1944 [1911].
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism!: Understanding Today’s Culture of Ironesty, Felt Experience, and Empathic Reflexivity. Boise, ID: Exact Rush, 2024.
Dempsey, Brendan Graham. Metamodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics. Baxter, MN: Arc Press, 2023.
Freinacht, Hanzi. The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One. Lund, Sweden: Metamoderna, 2017.
Griffin, David Ray, John B. Cobb, Marcus P. Ford, Pete A. Y. Gunter, and Peter Ochs. Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne. SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993.
Hacking, Ian. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Khalidi, Muhammad Ali. Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Keller, Catherine, and Anne Daniell, eds. Process and Difference: Between Cosmological and Poststructuralist Postmodernisms. SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought. NY: State University of New York Press, 2012.
Nicholson, Daniel J., and John Dupré. Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Storm, Jason Ānanda Josephson. Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2021.
Van den Akker, Robin, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen. Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Corrected edition. Edited by D.R. Griffin and D. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press, 1978 [1929].
