Critical Environments: Nature, Science, and Politics
The Critical Environments series publishes books that explore the lives and ecologies that emerge from histories of capitalism, militarism, racism, colonialism and more. In invoking the term “critical” we mean to signal both attention to environments in critical condition and a mode of analysis that potentially up-ends mainstream narratives. We therefore seek to produce books that unsettle everyday assumptions about the environment through their attentiveness to the politics and practices that are both producing contemporary environmental conditions and which are attentive to the emergent natures, ecologies, and aftermaths that are populating and re-making everyday environments.
The series’ notion of “the environment” is capacious in that all manner of ecologies (industrial, agricultural, infrastructural, bodily, urban and more) are fair game. In this series we presume that nature is not a preformed backdrop, the character of which is revealed uncritically by scientific practice. Rather, science and nature are themselves approached as vibrant and contested elements of our environmental politics. As such Critical Environments books address the histories of these modern ecologies, their entanglements with landscapes and institutions, the politics of their production, the material consequences of their manifestations, and the emergent possibilities and tensions of living with and within profoundly altered ecologies.
The Critical Environments series publishes monographs that are both empirically rich and conceptually rigorous, with an emphasis on the specificity of historical and ethnographic analysis. We support critical research at the intersection of nature, science, and politics in fields and approaches from Geography, Gender/Queer Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Postcolonial Theory, American Studies, Environmental History, Critical Theories of Race, Science and Technology Studies and beyond. While we expect every book in this series to engage the relations among nature, science, and politics in a rigorous manner, we also expect each book to be accessibly written, with deep empirical grounding that gives it not just academic, but broadly intellectual interest.
Proposal Submission Procedures
A complete submission to the Critical Environments book series will include 1) a cover letter describing the project, its relevance to the series and the anticipated length and date of completion, 2) A prospectus with detailed chapter outline and a book proposal of no more than 4,000 words, 3) your CV, and 4) one or two sample chapters. Please refer to the UC Press website for general book proposal elements.
The Critical Environments series editors and advisory board will review submissions and may request additional materials. Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis. Please email submissions and any questions to both series editors.
Series Editors:
- Julie Guthman, University of California, Santa Cruz (jguthman@ucsc.edu)
- Rebecca Lave, Indiana University (rlave@indiana.edu)
Series Advisory Board:
- Samer Alatout, University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Abby Kinchy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
- Jake Kosek, University of California, Berkeley
- Becky Mansfield, The Ohio State University
- Juno Parreñas, The Ohio State University
- Scott Prudham, University of Toronto
- Paul Robbins, University of Wisconsin-Madison
In memoriam: Linda Nash, University of Washington
17 Results
The Nightcrawlers: A Story of Worms, Cows, and Cash in the Underground Bait Industry
by Joshua Steckley (Author)Jun 2025The Pathogens of Finance: How Capitalism Breeds Vector-Borne Disease
by Brent Z. Kaup (Author), Kelly F. Austin (Author)May 2025The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage
by Christy Spackman (Author)Dec 2023Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility
by Shannon Cram (Author)Sep 2023The Low-Carbon Contradiction: Energy Transition, Geopolitics, and the Infrastructural State in Cuba
by Gustav Cederlof (Author)Aug 2023- Open Access
Worlds of Gray and Green: Mineral Extraction as Ecological Practice
by Sebastián Ureta (Author), Patricio Flores (Author)May 2022Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era
by Natali Valdez (Author)Dec 2021Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture
by Adam M. Romero (Author)Nov 2021Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry
by Julie Guthman (Author)Aug 2019Unsettled Waters: Rights, Law, and Identity in the American West
by Eric P. Perramond (Author)Nov 2018Germ Wars: The Politics of Microbes and America's Landscape of Fear
by Melanie Armstrong (Author)Jan 2017Flame and Fortune in the American West: Urban Development, Environmental Change, and the Great Oakland Hills Fire
by Gregory L. Simon (Author)Oct 2016