CEPT Essay Prize 2026 — Call for Abstracts

The word terrain has its roots in the latin terra meaning land, earth, ground, or soil. It opens itself up to a broad contemporary understanding in terms of form, which may be hard, soft, fluid, even gaseous. The power of terrain lies in its substance or materiality. While lending itself to territory, it becomes a boundary constituted by humans but at the same time constitutes them. It is of a scale which subsumes the human and even outlives it. Scholars argue that in times of a climate crisis, understanding terrain in its multiplicity which gives it an opacity and resilience, would establish its primacy over human-made territory. It also renders itself to becoming a significant component in shaping the uniqueness of peoples and their struggle for justice in this global capitalist economy. 

Terrain is all around us — beneath our feet, within sightlines, in the spaces we pass through every day. Never fixed, never fully revealed, always in relation, always in motion, terrain remains a space to dwell with, to watch, to imagine, and to let linger. It is to see how human and non-human forces meet and negotiate, how control and contingency coexist, and what seems stable is never fixed.

As a concept, terrain consequently shifts the scales in favour of a discourse against anthropocentrism, for a ​‘multispecies becoming-with’ and worlding. It urges for a less fragmented, more equal world that is on the path to justice. Instituting terrain at the core of discussion in art, architecture, design, technology, social sciences, and other fields, will invoke a politics of multiplicity, of the material, of the collective, of the elements. CEPT Essay Prize 2026 invites young writers to reflect on the ways to bring an embodied engagement with our planet and offer it the respect it commands in-itself in a non-Eurocentric, indigenous, and situated manner.

Last date for submission of abstracts and required documents: 30 April 2026.