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.