** Spring/Summer 2025 Call for Papers ** Unruly Ecologies
Reconfiguring Climate Knowledge through Refusal, Resistance, and (Dis)Rupture
The Custom House at Greenock, Scotland by Robert Salmon (Courtesy of the Met OpenAccess)
Efforts to claim, know, and govern environments and climates are integral to projects of domination, past and present. Yet these are always incomplete processes, or “nervous landscapes” stalled in cycles of revision by the defiant and the unruly (King 2019, 98). From movements for indigenous sovereignty and anti-colonial place-making, to relational epistemologies that animate a “world in which many worlds fit” (Zapatista Army of National Liberation, n.d.), to elastic ecologies that defy calculation and control, this issue of Weather Matters orients towards moments and movements that resist hegemonic discourses of the environment and climate. How does attuning to interruptions and refusals help locate alternative possibilities for knowing and caring for our eco-worlds? How do they reveal contradictions and vulnerabilities within dominant social, political, and ecological paradigms?
We invite works that explore moments of unruliness, rupture, and resistance as they relate to climate and human-environment relations. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
How do “extreme” climate events (e.g. heat, tropical storms, wildfires, droughts) challenge, disrupt, or reshape dominant social, political, and economic paradigms?
How do landscapes/ecologies/non-human actors resist and/or frustrate projects of environmental governance (e.g.enclosures, canals/dams), extraction (e.g. mining, large-scale agriculture), and knowledge production (e.g. map-making and surveillance)?
What challenges and possibilities arise in writing from and within climate pluralities, e.g. coexistent climate worlds, relationalities, and imaginaries?
How do histories and ethnographies of collective movements of refusal/resistance render alternative stakes and narratives of climate change?
What tools/devices help mediate and produce knowledge about human-environment relations? What do their malfunctions – failures of mediation and failures of knowing – reveal about norms of expectation, prediction, and safety?
How to submit
We invite contributions from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, geography, the environmental humanities, and other social sciences. We are keen to highlight the research and writing of graduate students as well as postgraduate and early career researchers. We especially welcome contributions from Queer, BIPOC, and other underrepresented scholars.
The deadline for submissions is Monday, March 17, 2025. Perspectives should be a maximum of 1500 words (not including works cited) and we encourage contributions in a range of formats and media. Please submit at least one image that can be used as a thumbnail. For further instructions, see https://www.weathermatters.net/submission-instructions.
Please share submissions with the Weather Matters editorial team at contact.weathermatters@gmail.com