1. admin

   01/12/2025 at 08:05

   Review by Eduardo Marone
   The verdict, in short.
   The Editorial is conceptually rich, although it can be better structured. It provides a clear picture of the special issue’s goals and thematic focus. It successfully situates cultural science at the centre of understanding the Anthropocene, thus proposing concrete research paths. The seven “gateways” provide a diverse and compelling framework for contributions, encouraging interdisciplinary engagement. However, the examples seem too biased toward Global North issues, in contradiction to the Indigenous and local knowledge systems that the Editorial says it promotes (more about inclusivity is also recommended).
   The Editorial is well-organised and intellectually engaging, but could benefit from revisions to improve content, clarity, accessibility, and transparency, addressing some gaps indicated below. Focusing on the indicated points will strengthen its impact and ensure it reaches a broad interdisciplinary audience.
   The review that follows was organised into two sections. The first section addresses formal issues that can be improved, while the second focuses on intellectual content that needs attention, reformulation or clarification.
   1. Language Readiness, Grammar, and Clarity
   It must be noted that, as a non-native English speaker, I used Microsoft Word and the Grammarly plugin to check for language consistency and quality and improve the review.
   A Flesch-Kincaid reading score of 15.2 corresponds to an advanced post-graduate reading level, typically for those aged 20 and older. This level of difficulty is associated with complex, advanced texts such as academic papers and professional literature.
   The writing is generally polished, with mixed sentence structures and precise vocabulary. The use of rhetorical expressions and metaphors adds depth, but they must be handled with care to ensure accessibility for different readers, as the same metaphor could be ‘read’ otherwise by people with diverse backgrounds. The complexity is also reflected in the Flesch-Kincaid reading score, indicating the need to look for ways to increase accessibility to a broader spectrum of readers. Some sentences are complex and may benefit from simplification or splitting for clarity. For example, “The wager of this special issue is simple to state and complex to pursue: culture is not a spectator to planetary change; it is one of its operating systems” is rhetorically powerful but conceptually ambiguous. Consider breaking this into two sentences for highlighting.
   Occasionally, metaphors could lead to ambiguity. Where possible, use direct language or provide brief explanations. It is a similar problem with synonyms, which can unconsciously alter the meaning of a phrase across different audiences.
   Acronyms such as “STS” should be defined on first use to ensure clarity for all readers. In this case, STS has many meanings, but two of them could apply: Science and Technology Studies or Science, Technology, and Society. That must be clarified.
   The Editorial could benefit from a summary or roadmap at the beginning that outlines its structure and main arguments, guiding readers through the text.
   2 Intellectual Readiness
   The Editorial’s conclusion (“The Human Condition for the Anthropocene: Being more-than-human” is not a call to abandon…“) could be repositioned as the opening statement, as editorials typically begin with the motivations and vision behind the issue rather than ending with them. Following that move, the Editorial would also benefit from a brief introductory note clarifying the use and meaning of the term Anthropocene, especially since it appears in the title. This introductory note would help orient readers unfamiliar with the term or with a different definition in mind and address potential debates about its formalisation.
   Throughout the text, it may be worth adding brief definitions or context for specialised terms, not only for the term Anthropocene (e.g., “systemist sensibility”, “biosphere”, “technosphere”, etc.) to enhance accessibility. The coexistence of different definitions for the same words/concepts across disciplinary fields, although entirely acceptable, makes it relevant to explain what meaning those terms have in the context of the Editorial. With so many concepts throughout the text, using a few relevant citations might address this caveat, but this must be weighed against the Journal’s policy/style.
   The Editorial does not clarify whether the journal invites critical or adversarial perspectives on the normative premises of Anthropocene discourse itself, or Systemism, among other concepts. By not explicitly including this debate, the Editorial risks being seen as implicitly endorsing a hegemonic Anthropocene frame or ontology, which, in turn, could undermine a fair and broad debate, if this is the target. On the other hand, it is not entirely clear whether the Editorial promotes a ‘space’ for confronting ideas without other than academic constraints, aiming to push for high-level, heated debates, or to bring together contributors from different backgrounds but with similar systemist sensibilities to promote these ideas under distributed agency premises. Both approaches could be equally valid, but the Editorial is somehow ambiguous, and transparency is highly valued.
   The Editorial adopts a systemist perspective, which is acknowledged to have its critics. It would strengthen the piece to either justify this bias or include a brief discussion of alternative viewpoints and criticisms. This bias needs to be better justified, or other perspectives must be mentioned. The emphasis on methodological pluralism is worthy, and such diversity must be considered even if the systemist perspective, for instance, is not carried by some contributors. Again, the width of the call needs to be more clearly defined. Although the Editorial encourages methodological pluralism, the underlying ontological commitments (systemism, more-than-human entanglement, Anthropocene problem, cultural causality) impose boundaries on what counts as legitimate. Contributors working from other fields may feel implicitly excluded or constrained.
   The Editorial clearly articulates the tension between “the human condition” and “the more-than-human”, framing it as a productive place of inquiry rather than a binary opposition. It states that “it leans into the tension”, but the outcome mostly harmonises rather than critically confronts the status of human agency, the role of responsibility and accountability, the sense of ‘begin’, the ethical frameworks, and the meaning of intentionality. The text suggests compatibility between humanist and more-than-human frames, but does not address the deep philosophical conflicts that could lead to dead ends (not that the Editorial must enter into the details, but it must alert readers to them).
   The examples provided for each gateway are concrete and illustrative, helping readers grasp the scope of potential contributions. However, the rationale for selecting the seven gateways should be made explicit. A sentence or two explaining the criteria or guiding principles behind these choices would enhance transparency and coherence. This rationale is significant because the examples show a bias toward the Global North.
   The editorial attempts to integrate Earth System Science, Indigenous knowledge, STS, design research, legal theory, ecological economics, media studies, AI studies, and related fields into a transdisciplinary context. However, this overly broad interdisciplinarity, although laudable, risks being read by contributors as epistemic overreach and restricting the success of the Special Issue. The main scope may be perceived as unrealistic, leading to the impression that the issue is trying to do too much or impose too many demands on contributors. The Editorial creates very high expectations.
   The idea of AI as a cultural co-author, a provocative inclusion, could be seen as anthropomorphising AI or as prematurely ascribing agency to actual LLMs. It could be convenient to avoid the risks of appearing tech-solutionist or overly fascination-driven by the potentialities of LLMs. It is currently an intense debate around that issue and, if the Editorial intend to be fair in that regard, the controversies need to be mentioned.
   The Editorial claims the issue will combine “ethical reflection” with conceptual and empirical work, but it offers no indication of the ethical frameworks to be used. It is not mandatory to define the ethical frameworks; still, some epistemic and other frameworks were defined. This imbalance needs to be explained or solved.

   Reply
2. admin

   01/12/2025 at 08:08

   Beyond the Human, With the Human: Cultural Science for the Anthropocene
   Editorial for the special issue “The Human Condition for the Anthropocene: Being more-than-human”
   Third version of revision generated with ChatGPT 5.1 (author’s instance) on 13th and 26th Nov. 2025
   Authoring: Martin@ai Bohle
   For processing see:
   • https://chatgpt.com/share/6919bda6-cb28-800f-877d-de8ea904983f
   • https://chatgpt.com/share/6919cb76-6664-800f-81ec-0d314781275f
   • https://chatgpt.com/share/6926bd69-d478-800f-aefe-01559f6c8ffd

   “The Human Condition for the Anthropocene: Being more-than-human” is not a call to abandon the human; it is a proposition to re-situate the human within the living, built, and conceptual systems that make habitation possible. It asks how cultures equip people and communities to live with others—human and more-than-human—under conditions of planetary-scale anthropogenic change.
   In this editorial, we use Anthropocene as a shorthand for a socio-ecological condition in which human activities, infrastructures, and imaginaries have become significant co-drivers of Earth’s dynamics. Whether or not the term is eventually formalised as a geological epoch, it names a problematic that is already shaping politics, law, science, and everyday life. We use it pragmatically, recognising that its meanings are contested and that some authors prefer alternative framings—Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene, and others—or may criticise, revise, or refuse the term altogether.
   The wager of this special issue is simple to state and demanding to pursue. Culture is not a spectator to planetary change; it is one of its operating systems. Culture is also one of the organising logics and infrastructures through which such change is produced, perceived, resisted, and redirected. Cultural formations stabilise habits, values, and institutions, but they also shape how societies register shifting baselines, tipping points, and ruptures, in both cumulative and sudden trajectories of change.
   For this reason, cultural science is central rather than peripheral to Anthropocene inquiries. We treat culture as a constitutive medium of more-than-human life: the practices, symbols, institutions, and technical ensembles through which humans cohabit with rivers and microbes, cities and soils, data centres and dunes. Cultural techniques—from kinship to code, from aqueducts to algorithms—mediate the entanglements of the biosphere (living systems), the technosphere (engineered and logistical infrastructures), the anthroposphere (human-made social institutions and activities), and the conceptual worlds in which people imagine and negotiate their place. Cultural Science as a journal offers a venue where these entanglements can be examined with empirical finesse, conceptual depth, and ethical reflection.
   The title of the call pairs two phrases that often travel on separate tracks: the human condition and the more-than-human. This issue leans into that tension, not to dissolve the human into posthuman abstraction nor to re-centre the human in familiar anthropocentrism, but to examine how specific cultural formations make humans capable—or incapable—of living with other beings and systems. This includes questions of responsibility, accountability, and intentionality: who can act, who is held to account, and under which ethical frameworks, when decisions reconfigure soils, seas, cities, or data infrastructures?
   We anchor the special issue in what we call a systemist sensibility. Societies, technologies, and ecosystems are treated as open systems composed of interrelated subsystems with emergent properties. Such an orientation enables two moves. First, it reframes culture as causal: as the schema through which agents perceive options, coordinate action, and stabilise values across time. Second, it invites comparative inquiry: how do ostensibly different sites—an estuary, an urban heat island, a platform economy, a coastal favela, or a river delta under dam construction—exhibit related dynamics of feedback, threshold, and norm formation?
   Systemism is one among several possible ontological stances. It is adopted here as a pragmatic framework for tracing relations across domains, not as a gatekeeping doctrine. The special issue is open to work drawing on relational, decolonial, Indigenous, posthumanist, and other approaches, including contributions that interrogate or reconfigure systemist framings or Anthropocene discourse itself. Methodological pluralism is assumed: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods are all appropriate where there is a clear fit between question and approach, clarity of inference, and openness about limitations and commitments.
   Alongside epistemic frameworks, the issue foregrounds ethical reflection. No single ethical theory is prescribed. Instead, contributions are expected to make their normative commitments explicit, whether they draw on geoethics, environmental justice, feminist and decolonial ethics, Indigenous relational ethics, or other traditions that address responsibility in more-than-human worlds. Of equal interest are the normative repertoires that emerge in situated practices—from customary law to activist design, from community protocols to experimental governance—which may not map neatly onto established theories.

   Seven indicative gateways
   To widen the door beyond abstract nouns, we sketch seven exemplary “gateways”. They are indicative rather than exhaustive and overlap in practice. Each foregrounds domains where cultural practices and Earth-system processes are tightly coupled: water, urban climate, digital infrastructures, food systems, extractive and logistic complexes, plural knowledges, and planetary metrics. Work grounded in Majority World contexts and in Indigenous, Black, and other communities whose experiences are often marginalised in Global North scholarship is central to this agenda.
   1. Waters with standing.
   Rivers, aquifers, deltas, and lakes increasingly appear as legal persons, sacred kin, or infrastructural assets. From Andean glacier-fed catchments and Himalayan headwaters to Aotearoa river settlements and deltaic cities in West Africa or South-East Asia, ontological framings of waters reconfigure extraction, accountability, and care. Basin governance, rights-of-nature jurisprudence, Indigenous water sovereignties, and the semiotics and poetics of water are exemplary terrains.
   2. Urban heat as natureculture.
   Heat is not only thermodynamics; it is patterned by shade, surface, species, housing, and social power. Informal settlements, high-rise districts, peri-urban agro-forests, and climate-controlled enclaves experience and narrate heat differently. Cultural designs—tree canopies, reflective materials, courtyard morphologies, vernacular architectures, and care practices—mitigate exposure and redistribute risk. Mixed-methods approaches that combine satellite data, ethnography, policy analysis, and design research are particularly generative here.
   3. AI in contested cultural co-authorship.
   Generative models and other machine-learning systems curate memory, recommend futures, and mediate meaning. They are sometimes described as cultural co-authors; they are also the focus of intense critique regarding bias, opacity, labour exploitation, and environmental cost. When, if ever, do such systems function as participants in cultural evolution rather than as tools? What are the risks of anthropomorphising them, and how do different publics contest claims about machine agency in creative, scientific, or civic domains?
   4. Agro-techno-biospheres.
   Soils, seeds, microbes, platforms, and markets co-produce cuisines, health, and landscapes. From seed sovereignty movements and Indigenous agro-forestry to plantation systems, industrialised supply chains, and digital agriculture, cultural norms and property regimes pattern microbial and vegetal life. Studies of fermentation cultures, agro-ecological design, land struggles, and food-system imaginaries in both Global North and Global South settings develop this line of inquiry.
   5. Blue and brown technospheres.
   Ports, canals, mines, dams, data centres, and logistics corridors stitch together planetary metabolisms. Taken together, they exemplify what Earth System scientists call the technosphere: the web of built systems that move energy, matter, people, and information around the planet. These matter-moving complexes are grounded in specific histories of empire, extraction, and development. Cultural and legal logics that justify their externalities, as well as counter-cultures that resist or redesign them—from environmental justice struggles in sacrifice zones to experiments in reparative infrastructure—are of particular interest, including at new extractive frontiers such as deep-sea or forest mining.
   6. Plural knowledges, plural worlds.
   Indigenous and local knowledge systems, diasporic and subaltern traditions, quilombola and other community-based forms of territorial care, and urban commons enact alternatives to extractive orders: fire stewardship, kin-centric fisheries, communal land trusts, community-based monitoring. How do these traditions negotiate with state law, corporate actors, and scientific agencies? Co-authored pieces, dialogic formats, and reflexive accounts of collaboration and conflict can illuminate asymmetries of power and recognition.
   7. Planetary metrics and imaginaries.
   From planetary boundaries and climate dashboards to speculative art, ritual, and popular media, representational tools organise attention and action. Which images persuade publics? Which numbers travel across domains and which remain provincial? How do different communities visualise risk, responsibility, and possibility? Studies of visualisation, narrative, pedagogy, and public reasoning all speak to this gateway.
   Why now?
   Three developments render this work urgent.
   First, planetary coupling is no longer only a metaphor. From urban heat to riverine floods, from zoonoses to supply-chain shocks, cultural techniques and infrastructures have become co-drivers of Earth dynamics. Understanding—and changing—those couplings requires granular accounts of culture in action, attentive to power, place, and history.
   Second, technological mediation has intensified. Machine-learning systems, digital platforms, and sensing networks now shape attention, memory, and coordination at scale. Their cultural logics—optimisation, prediction, personalisation, extraction—do not float above the world; they redistribute power and risk within it. Empirical studies and critical interrogations of these logics are both needed.
   Third, pluralism has become actionable. The proliferation of legal experiments (such as rights of nature), design interventions (such as sponge cities and climate-sensitive architectures), and civic forms (such as citizens’ assemblies and Indigenous-led councils) demonstrates that alternatives are not mere thought experiments. They are already here, if unevenly, and they demand analysis that is empirically careful and normatively explicit.
   Design of the issue
   The special issue is designed as a forum rather than a silo. Cross-referencing among accepted pieces and, where appropriate, short “responses” will stage productive disagreements as resources for learning. Review will be collegial and exacting, with an emphasis on constructive critique, methodological transparency, and accessibility across fields. No single contribution is expected to address all the domains sketched above; situated work that speaks clearly to at least one of the gateways—or proposes a neighbouring one—is sufficient.
   The issue speaks to scholars in cultural studies, media studies, environmental humanities, science and technology studies (STS), legal theory, and design research who engage more-than-human questions. It is equally entangled with social scientists and economists working on institutions, commons, platform governance, and infrastructural transitions, and with Earth and environmental scientists concerned with the cultural mediation of Earth-system dynamics, including urban climate, hydrology, and land-use change. Conversations extend to Indigenous scholars and community researchers, practitioners, artists, and policymakers whose situated expertise can refract and challenge academic frames, as well as to data scientists and digital humanists developing methods that translate across domains and scales.
   Interdisciplinary co-authorship, negative results, replication studies, and reflective accounts of failed interventions are treated as materials that help a community learn. Where compatible with community standards and ethical constraints, the issue values the sharing of data, code, field notes, or design artefacts that enable reuse and dialogue.
   In sum, this special issue regards culture as a causal force in the making and unmaking of cohabited worlds. It examines how cultural practices, institutions, and artefacts configure more-than-human relations under Anthropocene conditions—through law or layout, ritual or representation, code or canopy. Cultural Science offers a venue where empirical finesse, conceptual depth, and ethical reflection can move together, including in disagreement, to explore what it may mean to live beyond the human, with the human.

   Reply
3. admin

   01/12/2025 at 08:11

   Additional analysis of 3rd Version (26 Nov. 2025)

   Background: The reviewer suggested following prompt:
   You have received the review of the Editorial you produced and, following the suggestions, critics and requests of the reviewer (file name 1) you produced a new text (file name 2, v3). What the reviewer asks is a clean file with your justifications on how you assessed his requests at the new version, those accepted totally or partially and those you decided not to follow. The process (v1 and v2 that led to v3) was well documented and need not further explanation. Only a clean file answering on how and why ai.Martin accepted or rejected the reviewer’s comments only on version 3.

   As operated previously: new thread in ChatCPT
   Prompt:
   Role: You are an academic scholar. Your expertise is in Earth sciences and anthropology. You continue a task undertaken previously.
   Background: You have been contacted by the editor of the Cultural Science Journal. The journal published a call for a special issue that generated little interest. You wrote an editorial for the call to raise the interest. The editorial had been reviewed. Subsequently, the editorial has been revised. The revision process has been described, explaining ‘how’ and ‘why’. Now the reviewer requests further explanation on how and why the initial comments were accepted or rejected.
   Attached are two files:
   1) The reviewer’s initial comments; file: Editorial_Review_V.2
   2) The revised editorial; file: Revised Editorial_V.3
   Task: a) Analyse the revised editorial in view of the reviewer’s initial comments. b) List the comments that were fully accepted and explain why. c) List the comments that were partially accepted and explain why. d) List the comments that were rejected and explain why. e) Provide a confidential comment for the editor about the review process.

   Link: https://chatgpt.com/share/6926bd69-d478-800f-aefe-01559f6c8ffd
   Response:
   (a) Analysis of the revised editorial in view of the reviewer’s comments
   Overall, the third revision responds substantively and in good faith to the reviewer’s major concerns about conceptual clarity, inclusivity, transparency of theoretical commitments, and ethical/methodological framing.
   The revised editorial:
   • Clarifies core concepts and framings (Anthropocene, systemism, more-than-human, technosphere/biosphere/anthroposphere) and makes the systemist stance explicitly pragmatic and non-hegemonic.
   • Strengthens inclusivity and global scope, especially via the “Seven indicative gateways” with explicit reference to Majority World, Indigenous, Black and other marginalised communities, and Global South contexts.
   • Spells out ethical and methodological expectations, naming several ethical traditions and insisting on explicit normative positioning, while also foregrounding methodological pluralism and openness to critical perspectives.
   • Improves structural signposting, with clear section headings (“Seven indicative gateways”, “Why now?”, “Design of the issue”) and a more programmatic opening that states the wager and purpose of the issue.
   At the same time, some of the reviewer’s wishes regarding strong simplification of language and more explicit acknowledgement of interdisciplinary frictions/overreach are only partially implemented, presumably because the editors wish to preserve a high-level conceptual register appropriate to the journal and special issue.
   Below I group the reviewer’s points and classify them as fully accepted, partially accepted, or rejected, with brief justifications.
   ________________________________________
   (b) Comments fully accepted (with explanation)
   1. Clarify central concepts (Anthropocene, systemism, more-than-human)
   • Reviewer’s request: Provide more precise definitions of Anthropocene, systemism, and more-than-human, given contested usages across disciplines.
   • Editorial response:
   o Anthropocene is defined as a “socio-ecological condition in which human activities, infrastructures, and imaginaries have become significant co-drivers of Earth’s dynamics”, with explicit acknowledgement that its formal geological status is unsettled and that alternative framings (Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene, etc.) co-exist, including refusal of the term.
   o Systemism is recast as a “systemist sensibility”: societies, technologies and ecosystems are described as open systems with interrelated subsystems and emergent properties, which allows the editorial to frame culture as causal and invite comparative inquiry across heterogeneous sites.
   o More-than-human is operationalised rather than left as a slogan: culture is described as a constitutive medium of more-than-human life, that is, practices, symbols, institutions and technical ensembles through which humans cohabit with rivers, microbes, cities, soils, data centres, dunes, etc.
   • Why this is “fully accepted”: The revision does exactly what the reviewer asked: it defines the core terms, locates them within existing debates, and gives them a clear operational role in the special issue.
   ________________________________________
   2. Define acronyms and specialised terms (STS, technosphere, biosphere, anthroposphere, systemist sensibility)
   • Reviewer’s request: Define acronyms (e.g. STS) and specialised terms to enhance accessibility.
   • Editorial response:
   o STS is now spelled out as “science and technology studies (STS)”.
   o Technosphere, biosphere and anthroposphere are defined in situ (respectively as engineered/logistical infrastructures, living systems, and human-made social institutions and activities).
   o “Systemist sensibility” is unpacked via an explicit description of open systems and emergent properties, rather than being left as a purely philosophical label.
   • Why “fully accepted”: All the terms singled out by the reviewer now receive short operational definitions.
   ________________________________________
   3. Justify the systemist perspective and signal openness to critiques
   • Reviewer’s request: Acknowledge that systemism has critics; justify the choice and explicitly invite critical or adversarial perspectives, to avoid a hegemonic frame.
   • Editorial response:
   o Systemism is explicitly described as “one among several possible ontological stances”, adopted pragmatically rather than dogmatically and explicitly “not as a gatekeeping doctrine”.
   o The issue is declared open to relational, decolonial, Indigenous, posthumanist and other approaches, including contributions that “interrogate or reconfigure systemist framings or Anthropocene discourse itself”.
   • Why “fully accepted”: The revision not only justifies the choice but also institutionalises plurality and critique as part of the design of the issue. This directly answers the concern about hegemonic framing.
   ________________________________________
   4. Contextualise AI and avoid tech-solutionism
   • Reviewer’s request: Situate AI as “cultural co-author” within current debates and controversies; avoid an uncritical or solutionist tone.
   • Editorial response:
   o The “AI in contested cultural co-authorship” gateway foregrounds that generative models curate memory and mediate meaning, while simultaneously being the object of intense critique regarding bias, opacity, labour exploitation, and environmental cost.
   o The gateway poses critical questions about when, if ever, such systems function as participants in cultural evolution, warns against anthropomorphism, and emphasises how different publics contest claims about machine agency in creative, scientific, or civic domains.
   • Why “fully accepted”: The revised text integrates precisely the controversies (agency, material footprint, labour, bias) that the reviewer wanted acknowledged and frames AI as a contested site of cultural practice rather than a ready-made solution.
   ________________________________________
   5. Clarify ethical frameworks and normative expectations
   • Reviewer’s request: Make more explicit which ethical frameworks are relevant and how ethical reflection is to be understood in the issue.
   • Editorial response:
   o A dedicated paragraph on ethical reflection now asks contributors to make their normative commitments explicit. It lists geoethics, environmental justice, feminist and decolonial ethics, Indigenous relational ethics and other traditions that address responsibility in more-than-human worlds.
   o The editorial also recognises “normative repertoires” that emerge in situated practices (customary law, activist design, community protocols, experimental governance) and treats these as equally important to formal theories.
   • Why “fully accepted”: The revised text names concrete ethical traditions, specifies expectations for normative transparency, and broadens the ethical horizon beyond academic doctrines.
   ________________________________________
   6. Balance Global North bias and promote Indigenous/Global South perspectives
   • Reviewer’s request: Address the bias toward Global North examples; strengthen engagement with Indigenous and local knowledge systems and Global South contexts.
   • Editorial response:
   o The “Seven indicative gateways” section explicitly states that “work grounded in Majority World contexts and in Indigenous, Black, and other communities whose experiences are often marginalised in Global North scholarship is central to this agenda.”
   o Examples now include Andean glacier-fed catchments, Himalayan headwaters, Aotearoa settlements, deltaic cities in West Africa and South-East Asia, Indigenous water sovereignties, seed sovereignty movements, Indigenous agro-forestry, quilombola and other community-based forms of care, and urban commons.
   • Why “fully accepted”: The revision systematically embeds Majority World and Indigenous cases across multiple gateways, and states this as a central, not peripheral, concern.
   ________________________________________
   7. Clarify selection criteria and status of the seven gateways
   • Reviewer’s request: Make explicit the rationale for selecting the seven gateways and their role.
   • Editorial response:
   o The gateways are now explicitly described as “indicative rather than exhaustive” and overlapping in practice.
   o The rationale is stated: each gateway foregrounds domains where cultural practices and Earth-system processes are tightly coupled (water, urban climate, digital infrastructures, food systems, extractive/logistic complexes, plural knowledges, planetary metrics).
   • Why “fully accepted”: This short but clear explanation provides exactly the transparency the reviewer requested.
   ________________________________________
   8. Enhance transparency about theoretical commitments and critical openness
   • Reviewer’s request: Clearly state theoretical commitments, selection criteria, and openness to critical perspectives.
   • Editorial response:
   o The editorial clearly names systemism as the principal orientation while simultaneously foregrounding methodological pluralism.
   o It explicitly invites contributions that re-frame, criticise or refuse both systemism and Anthropocene discourse.
   • Why “fully accepted”: The theoretical stance and its contestability are now built into the architecture of the issue.
   ________________________________________
   (c) Comments partially accepted (with explanation)
   1. Add a roadmap at the beginning
   • Reviewer’s request: Provide an early roadmap to guide readers through the editorial’s structure and main arguments.
   • Editorial response:
   o The text now has clear sectional structuring: a conceptual opening, the “Seven indicative gateways”, “Why now?”, and “Design of the issue”. The introduction states the key wager (“culture is not a spectator to planetary change; it is one of its operating systems”) and situates the role of cultural science.
   • Why only partial:
   o There is no explicit “roadmap paragraph” that announces, in meta-form, how the editorial will proceed (“first we do X, then Y”) as the reviewer suggested.
   o Instead, the editors rely on headings and narrative flow to provide orientation. Given the genre and length, this is reasonable, but it falls short of the more literal roadmap the reviewer envisioned.
   ________________________________________
   2. Simplify language and reduce sentence complexity
   • Reviewer’s request: Split complex sentences, simplify rhetorically dense formulations to improve accessibility for a wider, interdisciplinary audience.
   • Editorial response:
   o Some density has been managed through structural devices rather than aggressive simplification: short subsections for each gateway, clearer topic sentences, and more frequent paragraph breaks.
   o Definitions inserted for key terms also contribute to clarity.
   • Why only partial:
   o The prose remains sophisticated, with long, multi-clause sentences and abstract formulations. This is consistent with the journal’s positioning and the ambitions of the special issue, but it means the reviewer’s desire for substantial simplification is only partially met.
   o The editors appear to have balanced accessibility against the need to speak to an expert, conceptually literate readership.
   ________________________________________
   3. Acknowledge interdisciplinary challenges and risks of overreach
   • Reviewer’s request: Explicitly recognise potential frictions between disciplines and the risk that the broad interdisciplinarity might be perceived as overreaching.
   • Editorial response:
   o The “Design of the issue” section describes the special issue as a “forum rather than a silo” and explicitly stages “productive disagreements as resources for learning”. It also states that “no single contribution is expected to address all the domains sketched above”, thereby moderating expectations and reducing the sense of overreach.
   • Why only partial:
   o The text implicitly acknowledges disciplinary friction by emphasising disagreement and pluralism, but it does not explicitly thematise the structural difficulties of bridging fields (e.g. in terms of epistemic authority, vocabulary, review standards).
   o The response is pragmatic (design choices that mitigate overreach) rather than reflective on the nature of interdisciplinary tension itself, which is what the reviewer hinted at.
   ________________________________________
   4. Reorganise introduction and conclusion (move motivational elements forward)
   • Reviewer’s request: Bring the motivational thrust of the conclusion to the beginning, as editorials are expected to start from the vision and motivation.
   • Editorial response:
   o The revised opening is now decidedly programmatic: it defines what the special issue is and is not, states the wager that culture is an operating system of planetary change, and positions cultural science at the centre of Anthropocene inquiries.
   o The closing paragraph recapitulates this vision in a compact way.
   • Why partial rather than full:
   o Without the earlier version, we can infer but not prove that specific sentences have migrated from conclusion to introduction.
   o What is clear is that both beginning and end now carry motivational weight; however, the conclusion remains relatively modest in length and tone, rather than ending on a strongly rhetorical call, which may or may not fully match the reviewer’s preference.
   ________________________________________
   (d) Comments effectively rejected (with explanation)
   There are no comments that are flatly contradicted, but there are two areas where the editors seem to have consciously limited how far they would go in the direction the reviewer suggested:
   1. Extensive simplification / “plain language” rewriting
   • Reviewer’s intent: A stronger push toward shorter, simpler sentences and less dense rhetoric.
   • Editorial stance: The revision improves clarity through structure, definitions, and examples, but it does not adopt a markedly simpler register. The text remains pitched at a high conceptual level consistent with the journal’s remit.
   • Why this can be treated as “rejected in part”:
   o The editors appear to have judged that a fully “plain language” editorial would undercut the conceptual ambitions of the issue and its position within cultural/STS and environmental humanities scholarship.
   o In other words, they accept the spirit of “accessibility” but not the full extent of simplification implied in the review.
   2. Making interdisciplinarity’s difficulties a central theme
   • Reviewer’s intent: A more explicit acknowledgement that aiming across many disciplines risks overreach and that this should be thematised as such.
   • Editorial stance: The design section emphasises collegial but exacting review, staged disagreements, and realistic expectations for any single contribution.
   • Why this is only indirectly addressed:
   o Rather than foregrounding “limits” or “difficulties” discursively, the editorial enacts realism through design choices. The editors seem to prefer an enabling tone (“forum”, “productive disagreements”) to a cautionary one.
   o In that sense, the explicit framing of interdisciplinarity as a problem is largely set aside, even though practical mitigation measures are built in.

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4. admin

   01/12/2025 at 08:21

   The author, as requested, also submitted a file with detailed justifications for the fully or partially accepted suggestions and for the couple he decided not to follow. After a systematic evaluation of my comments and a core review of the updated manuscript, I can confirm that the review process was conducted with consistency, transparency, and scholarly care.
   The updated editorial reflects substantial improvements in conceptual clarity, inclusiveness, theoretical transparency, and ethical framework. The author satisfactorily addressed the reviewer’s requests, in whole or in part, and justified each decision clearly and with sound reasoning. The responses demonstrate a strong commitment to scholarly integrity while balancing cultural diversity, disciplinary conventions, and the special issue’s overall objectives.
   Two points the author decided not to follow. It was a stylistic choice: instead of using a less compact language, the author preferred to keep it denser, in line with the CSJ intellectual tone. The other point was an editorial choice: deciding not to expose the existing disciplinary frictions when applying interdisciplinary approaches. This approach can be seen as a way to show a constructive rather than a cautionary tone. These two issues take no bite out of the final text, in any case.
   This letter confirms that the editorial has met the expectations established during the review process. The evaluation reflects strong consistency between the reviewer’s critique and the author’s response, supporting the acceptance of the revised editorial in its current form.

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