Anti-Racism and Anti-Colonialism
Climate justice and environmental justice cannot coexist with white supremacy in any of its forms. Edge Effects stands in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, the Land Back movement, the Stop AAPI Hate movement, the anti-war student protests, and all those who are working to build more just worlds. We welcome contributions elucidating relationships between these movements and environmental justice.
Authorship
The Edge Effects editorial board seeks to highlight the voices of people whose perspectives are too often excluded or tokenized within the environmental humanities, environmental studies, and academia more broadly. We especially welcome contributions by people of color, Black and Indigenous people, and those with underrepresented genders, including trans men, women (both cis and trans), and nonbinary, gender fluid, and two-spirit individuals. We maintain our longstanding interest in publishing graduate students, early career scholars, contingent faculty, those who do research at the intersections of the sciences, the arts, and humanities, and who work outside university walls.
Although we strive to publish a diverse array of interdisciplinary voices, we know that “diversity and inclusion” are not enough. We acknowledge that the academic fields in which we’re situated as graduate students are complicit in the historical and ongoing violences of settler colonialism, cis-heterosexism, imperialism, ableism, and racism. We commit to learning more about the ways our editorial praxis, our board, and our publication can be transformed by decolonial, queer feminist, and anti-racist practices.
Translation
Since its inception in 2014, Edge Effects has made it our mission to live and thrive on the edges between worlds, cultures, habitats, and intellectual traditions. At the edges, recognition, respect, and understanding emerge through and across differences.
Today, public discourse in the United States and across the Global North and South is increasingly shaped by nationalist retrenchment, anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, and censorship. As divisions deepen and public universities come under attack, our commitment to the edge has become more important. It is at the edge that new forms of thinking, collaboration, and imagination emerge.
Prioritizing translation is not merely an editorial decision; in today’s political context, it is a political and ethical practice.
We believe the environmental humanities do not belong to a single language or a single nation. This field is shaped by the struggles and possibilities shared by all humans and more-than-humans. Without doubt, collective imaginations of our past, present, and future require translations.
Prioritizing translation is not merely an editorial decision; in today’s political context, it is a political and ethical practice. Translation is presence, community, solidarity, and resistance. Translating is a practice of primary necessity, a political circumstance that expands the field of what can be named, thought, and imagined. For this reason, Edge Effects editors Nicolás Rueda and Tomás Pino began translating Edge Effects’ archives into Spanish in 2025. Their leadership, along with the labor and care of volunteers, has made possible our new, monthly series: Translation Tuesday.
Part of Edge Effects’s mission is to open the gates of the environmental humanities, redistribute authority and expertise, and create space for conversation. Translation Tuesday is a space for collective, translinguistic, and transcultural construction, where we will sustain open, plural, and solidarity-based environmental conversations. In accordance with our mission and in resistance to our present, we hope that Translation Tuesday will invigorate and celebrate our shared edge effects.
Featured image: Mural on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin, painted on a boarded-up window after a series of Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020. Photo by Ken Fager, 2020. Mural by KW, 2020.