Series

Environmental Communication, Power, and Culture

This book series will publish scholarly monographs and trade books that consider how communication and contemporary environmental matters shape each other in ways that reflect, challenge, negotiate, and transform specific conjunctures of contested life. Rather than solely thinking of communication as a set of skills, this series grounds its understanding of environmental communication in power and culture. That is, we want to create space for empirically-grounded and rigorously researched books that engage the ways communication enables and resists oppression and unequal hierarchies that stand as systemic barriers against an environmentally just world.

We invite books that focus on structural analyses of the relationships between organizational cultures of environmental oppression or privilege, including communication practices that shape, for example, hegemonic norms of governmental policy, corporations, trade associations, and political networks. We also are keenly interested in books that imagine counter-hegemonic resistance and that highlight cultural expressions of resilience in the face of marginalization—whether communicated within specific communities (of ethnicities, religions, abilities, sexualities, genders, ages, classes, geographies, or nationalities) and/or across various community boundaries. Books also may choose to focus on the contested, messy terrain between counter-hegemonic and hegemonic acts of communication.

In all, the series seeks books that aim to consider how what we call the “environment” cannot be understood without considering communication, power, and culture. We particularly are interested in rigorous analyses that grapple with: the ethics of environmental communication (i.e., crisis and/or care); regimes of value and structures of feeling; how scales, infrastructure, flows, and relationships limit or make possible the articulation or expression of environmental values and actions; and what ecological traditions and emergent discourses mobilize or do violence to the viability of communities to survive and thrive. Further, we encourage and welcome books that help us think more critically about the role of communication in organizing, negotiating, and disrupting the power dynamics that energize and enervate our intertwined ecological and cultural relations.

Books may focus on the wide range of modalities through which environmental communication occurs, including but not limited to:

a grassroots social movement (ex., the Just Transition Movement’s discourse in North American controversies or a local food justice nonprofit organization’s educational tours)
noncommercial art and design (ex., ecological themes of Black Futurism on urban murals or farmworker protest art)
media networks and circulation of commercial campaigns and practices (ex., North Face’s Walls Are Meant for Climbing campaign as it relates to consumption, whiteness, and inclusivity in the US or Apple computer pollution and labor in China)
public controversies (ex. the cultural politics and political economy of prisoners fighting forest fires or culturally-based arguments for and against fracking near schools)
organizations and organizing, or policy spheres (ex., global climate negotiation processes or how climate scientists engage publics in a specific region or value system).

SUBMISSION PROCESS

Proposals for the series should be submitted to: Naja Pulliam Collins, Editor, Environmental Studies, npulliamcollins@ucpress.edu.

While UC Press Editors prefer electronic queries, you may send a hard copy submission to: Naja Pulliam Collins, University of California Press, 1111 Franklin Street, Oakland, CA 94607, USA.

If you would like to have your hard copy submission returned to you after consideration, please state this in writing and include a self-addressed stamped envelope. Please do not send original art with your submission.