Critical Environments: Nature, Science, and Politics

The Critical Environments series publishes manuscripts that explore how capitalism, militarism, racism, colonialism and more have made and re-made human and extra-human lives and ecologies. Our notion of “the environment” is capacious: all manner of ecologies (industrial, agricultural, recreational, infrastructural, bodily, urban and more) are fair game. 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 seek to produce books that unsettle everyday assumptions about the environment through their attentiveness to the politics and practices that have produced both historical and contemporary environmental conditions, the material consequences of their manifestations, the emergent possibilities and tensions of living with and within profoundly altered ecologies, and the knowledges and ideas through which all of the above are refracted. We are particularly interested in books that explicitly engage the politics of knowledge and scientific practices in both creating and making sense of environmental change.

Books in the Critical Environments series are both empirically rich and conceptually rigorous, with an emphasis on the specificity of historical and ethnographic analysis. Most of our books thus draw from the fields of Geography, Anthropology, Sociology, Environmental History, Science and Technology Studies, and other qualitative and humanistic social sciences. While we expect every book in this series to address the relations among nature, science, and politics in a rigorous manner, we also favor books that are accessibly written and engaging, with deep empirical grounding that gives them 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) a CV, and 4) two sample chapters, one of which should be the introduction. Please refer to the UC Press website for general book proposal elements. 

The Critical Environments series editors will review submissions and may request additional materials to determine series fit. Ultimate publication decisions rest with the University of California Press staff and editorial board.  Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis. Please email submissions and any questions to both series editors.