When the first volume, Fifty Shades of the Humanities: Environmental, Digital, Medical, and Posthuman Voices, was published in 2023 as part of Cappadocia University Press’s Environmental Humanities Series, it was well received as a pioneering guide that filled an important gap in the Turkish literature with its comprehensive scope. As a continuation of the first volume, Fifty More Shades of the Humanities: Environmental, Digital, Medical, and Posthuman Traces adds new “traces” to the existing “voices,” once again revealing the multilayered structure of the humanities and aiming to complete the missing colors in the reader’s palette.
As with the first volume, this work brings together researchers from a wide range of academic institutions across Türkiye. Through this collection, we aim to share the most recent approaches and debates in the humanities with our readers, while introducing them to these approaches and encouraging them to conduct more in-depth research. Over the two years since the publication of the first volume, we have observed that the humanities have expanded further by incorporating new fields and areas of interaction within our rapidly digitalizing world, while disciplinary boundaries have become less rigid and the permeability between these fields has increased in a positive sense. This development is, in itself, evidence of how accurately the scope of this comprehensive work was originally identified.
Throughout each chapter of this volume, readers will witness not only the evolution of the humanities themselves but also the ways in which they transform and are transformed by the fields with which they interact. Inspired by the interactive, rhizomatic structure of the environmental humanities, in which roots, stems, and branches intertwine and each element nourishes the others, we invite our readers to draw nourishment from the roots of this resource, develop their own stems and branches, and spread across the earth. We invite you to reach the points urgently awaiting solutions, reflect together on the global ecological crises we are experiencing today and our role in them, first understand the roots of these problems, and then take responsibility and develop rational solutions to address them.
Fatma Aykanat
Series Editor, Environmental Humanities Series
Fifty More Shades of the Humanities emerges as a second step that deepens, expands, and multiplies the horizons opened by Fifty Shades of the Humanities: Environmental, Digital, Medical, and Posthuman Voices, published in 2023. Building upon the conceptual foundation established by the first volume, this book does not merely observe the transformation of the humanities today; it offers a powerful map that speaks from within this transformation and reconsiders it at both theoretical and aesthetic levels.
The fifty new concepts explored through environmental, digital, medical, and posthuman traces move beyond the boundaries of anthropocentric ways of thinking and reposition humans within processes of becoming-with other living beings, materials, technologies, and processes. Extending from the Anthropocene to biosemiotics, from ecotheatre to epigenetics, and from queer ecology to geontology, this broad spectrum demonstrates that the humanities can no longer be considered solely within individual disciplines. Instead, they emerge as an entangled, intersectional, and polyphonic field.
This volume is not merely a reference work that defines concepts; it is also a dynamic collection of texts that invites readers to think, question, and reconsider their own positions. For academics, students, and all readers interested in the field, it serves both as a guide and as a companion that encourages the generation of new questions. Fifty More Shades of the Humanities, firmly continuing the path opened by the first volume, makes an even stronger claim to becoming a lasting reference in the field of environmental and posthuman humanities in Türkiye.
Sinan Akıllı
Series Editor, Environmental Humanities Series
