Violent Environments
Call for Submissions
The acceleration of diverse and converging crises—climate disaster and apartheid, environmental racism and resurgent ecofascism, ecocide and land grabbing—reinforce that environmental violence has become an unmistakable feature of contemporary life. Edge Effects seeks submissions that ask how violence is enacted through, for, and on environmental spaces, including land, water, and air.
Over the past decade, conversations across disciplines and social movements have transformed conventional scalar and spatial understandings of violence and brought its relationship to the environment to the forefront. Environmental violence is both sudden and prolonged; acute and cumulative; hypervisible and invisibilized; direct and structural; material and epistemic. From the use of force to coerce conservation and suppress environmental activism, to the perpetuation of environmental harm through state-sponsored extraction and pollution, to the weaponization and militarization of nature, this series will explore the environment as a medium of violence, as a means of violence, as the stakes of violence, and as the product of violence.
We encourage authors to refuse disciplinary bordering, challenge traditional conceptions of violence and environments, and imagine collective futures. With attention to the uneven exposure to environmental violence that persists through the legacies of racial capitalism, colonization and imperialism, and heteropatriarchy, we encourage submissions that historicize and interrogate interlocking systems of oppression. We recognize, too, the role that narratives of violence can play in othering oppressed groups, and invite submissions that foreground how humans and other beings have engaged in struggle against violence and victimization through grassroots resistance, alternative worldmaking, and prefigurative politics.
We welcome submissions that may include but are not limited to:
- Borders/borderlands/bordering
- Environmental colonialism and extractive imperialism
- Prison and abolition ecologies
- Toxic legacies of militarism and war
- Weaponization of nature and coercive conservation
- Chemical and radiological violence
- Climate apartheid and ethnocide
- Ontological and epistemic violence—and alternative world-making and ways of knowing
- Labor and the dangers of environmental work—waste work, agricultural work, struggles for protections
- Infrastructure and built environments e.g., hostile architecture, hydroelectric dams, irrigation
- Missing and Murdered Indigneous Women (MMIW) and oil and gas “man camps”
- Securitization and the environment
Additional details:
Anyone is welcome to submit to this series. As always, we aim to highlight the research and writing of graduate students, postdocs, and early career scholars from a variety of disciplines, as well as work by practitioners and activists who work beyond academia’s walls. We especially welcome submissions by people of color, Black and Indigenous people, people with disabilities, and those with underrepresented genders, including trans men, women (both cis and trans), nonbinary, and two-spirit individuals.
How to Submit
- Due date for submissions: Sunday, March 5, 2023
- Accepted pieces are eligible for a $250 honorarium. If you have questions or would like more information about this, please feel free to reach out to us at edgeeffects@nelson.wisc.edu.
- If you submit a previously unpublished essay (~1000 to ~2000 words), please send both a complete first draft of your piece and a brief pitch to the Edge Effects team at edgeeffects@nelson.wisc.edu. See our submissions page for pitch guidelines.
- If you submit an oral history or a creative piece—visual art, poetry, video, photo/comic/graphic essay, a hybrid or multimodal exhibit, etc—please send both your piece and a brief pitch to the Edge Effects team at edgeeffects@nelson.wisc.edu. See our submissions page for pitch guidelines.
- If your creative piece has been previously exhibited or published elsewhere, please let us know where and when in your pitch.
- We encourage those who are interested in submitting creative work to get in touch with us before submission to make sure that our website can accommodate your format.
- Before publication, anyone contributing a creative piece will be asked to write a brief introduction to their work; editors will be happy to work with you on this introduction, and the pitch will give us a good place to begin.
- Please note that Edge Effects publishes for interdisciplinary and public audiences. Accepted pieces will move through our editorial process with this in mind.
- If you have any questions about how or what to submit, feel free to reach out to us. We look forward to reading, viewing, and listening to your work!
