Call for papers: Gender and the climate catastrophe

One of the most circulated terms of our time, yet, not nearly circulated enough, is climate crisis (or environmental crisis). The term is often connected to the environmental disasters such as typhoons and floods in East Africa and Asia, hurricanes in the Caribbean and the United states, droughts in South Africa and the Middle East, the melting of permafrost and ice sheets in Siberia and Greenland, wild fires in Australia and America, marine plastic prolusion and garbage dumps, water and soil contamination and more. The concept “crisis” carries with it an ominous warning, a witnessing to the degradation of a planet that is not doing well, already voiced, among others, buy ecofeminists (Plumwood 2002). Crisis as a concept also embodies a recognition of the suffering of those who are already living the environmental catastrophe, in the flesh, human and non-human, suffering from the devastating effects of climate change. Their bodies, kins, homes, lives, worlds are marked by this contemporary condition which is not anymore the stuff of science fictions but a lived reality, for some more than others. The concept of crisis could also be understood in relation to its Greek etymology ‘krisis’, meaning ‘decision’, which shifts the emphasis from the disasters (which then become the symptoms of a crisis) to the lack of effective and ethical decision making, radical change in action, and a responsiveness to the environment as the real crisis at hand (Warren and Clayton (2021). A crisis that is escalating in the post-truth era filled with denial, disconnection and hesitation. Whether the crisis is in the material reconfigurations in which human and non-human are exposed and hurt, or whether the crisis is in how humans make decision about climate change, the question is how can we move forward while being accountable to the intersectionality of climate catastrophe that has brought us here, affecting us differently and marking potential futures on this planet and its inhabitants?

This special issue invites contributions on the topic of “gender and climate catastrophe” that take their point of departure from a non-anthropocentric, critical race and anti-capitalist scholarship, feminist and anti-patriarchal, crip-queer and non-chrononormative modes of thinking, in theorizing climate change beyond technoscapes. In other words, one can argue that the environmental catastrophe is not something new per se (through the scale of it and the force of it are). Thinking with indigenous histories of settler colonialism, or rapid deforestation and industrialization as examples, one comes face to face with the entangled destructive force of racial capitalism and heteronormative patriarchy, extracting the maximum profit by way of exploiting the human and nonhuman across times and geographical locations. The stake is not that we are in a new era, but that the climate catastrophe already begun generations before us and we, ever so blindly, still follow in their footsteps in the name of progress. Even worse, not only the effects of environmental issues are distributed unevenly along the lines of gender, race, class, but also the assumingly objective sustainable solutions such as conservation/protection policies are shown to create un-liveable conditions for the already marginalized groups especially in the Global South (Pelser 2021, Tuana 2019). At the same time, massive environmental threats such as wars and military capitalism, consumerism and modern slavery, fossil fuel and energy crisis, and digital waste pollution to just name a few, are left mostly untouched in the Global North (as well as the Global South).

While the past, present, and the future looks bleak, grass root activism such as Fridays For Future network of climate strikers launched by Greta Thunberg, the Waorani people fighting

for the Amazons against oil extraction, the Anishinaabe Indigenous clean water advocates from Wikwemikong First Nation Manitoulin Island, in Ontario, Canada, or the Persatuan Tindakan Alam Sekitar Kuala Langat (Kuala Langat Environmental Action Group) in Malaysia who protests against the import of plastic waste, or the Sámi community in Sweden fighting for the well-being of their lands, provide examples of resistance, resilience, care, and response-able co-habitation. We welcome contributions that contribute to such artistic/activist modes of re-articulation of relations between human, nature, animals as well as the marginalized other and the politics and ethics embedded in it. Aside from thinking with eco-art and eco-activism, we welcome analytical, empirical, theoretical and methodological contributions from within ecofeminism, indigenous studies, decolonial theories, environmental humanities, feminist posthumanities, feminist animal studies, and feminist STS, gender studies and more. We especially welcome non-western, queer, non-binary and trans, queercrip, and indigenous perspectives and voices to challenge the often implicitly white and western parameters of what is considered a feminist environmental theorization.

The suggested themes are including but not limited to:

• Environmental justice
• Ecological/disaster vulnerability
• Climate resistance and (posthuman) resilience
• Ecofascism masculinities
• Super-rich masculinities
• Environmental care and common survival
• Green colonialism, Environmental racism
• Environmental apartheid, Eco-apartheid, climate apartheid
• Capitalist extractivism
• Marxist and psychoanalyst approaches to climate crisis
• Climate crises represented in culture, art, and media
• Degrowth and gender
• Ecologies of life/ecologies of death, environmental grief
• Sustainable development, energy crisis, circular economy
• Climate change denial
• Climate sciences and technologies
• Gender, climate catastrophe and environmental crisis
• Land-based knowledges and eco-histories,
• Gender, body, embodiment and climate change
• Eco-Health
• Innovative piloting testing zones for strong sustainable identities/praxes
• Environmental solidarity
• Feminist and environmental activism and organization
• Gender, consumerism and environmental impact
• Gender and climate in cultural institutions

 

Contributions in English, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are accepted.

• Deadline for abstracts (max. 500 words + author bio of ca. 100 words): 1st of October 2023
• Notifications by: 10th of October 2023
• Deadline for articles: 1^st of February 2023
• Envisaged publication date: 15^th of August 2023

Abstracts should be submitted via our webpage. You can submit both your author bio and your abstract here – and later (if necessary), the entire article. We accept submissions in English, Danish and Norwegian, please refer to the author guidelines for details.

The journal welcomes contributions in the form of research articles, essays, artwork, opinion pieces, book reviews, and further comments thereon in keeping with editorial policy (see Submission).

Special issue editors: Tara Mehrabi (Karlstad University, Sweden), Signe Uldbjerg Mortensen (KØN – Gender Museum Denmark).

Guest editors: Martin Hultman and Jakob Rosendal

 

References:

Pelser, André J. "Protected Areas as a Catalyst for Environmental Sustainability, Social Justice, and Human Development: Lessons from South Africa." In Environment, Climate, and Social Justice: Perspectives and Practices from the Global South, pp. 207-225. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore, 2022.

Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, 2002.

Tuana, Nancy. "Climate apartheid: The forgetting of race in the Anthropocene." Critical Philosophy of Race 7, no. 1 (2019): 1-31.

Warren, Charles, and Dan Clayton. "Climate change, COP26 and the crucible of crisis: editorial introduction to the special issue." Scottish Geographical Journal 136, no. 1-4 (2020): 1-4.