Call for articles - Race and climate change

We are currently looking for extra articles to fit with a forthcoming special issue of the journal Politics on Race and climate change. Please send abstracts to L.Tilley@bbk.ac.uk before 29 May 2020.

Work grounded in the Global South is particularly encouraged, further details can be found below.

Race & Climate Change – a special issue of Politics edited by Lisa Tilley, Anupama Ranawana, Andrew Baldwin and Tyler Tully

This special issue advances a comprehensive examination of race and climate change in the context of the critical present conjuncture. Within wealthy polluter countries, climate change is increasingly framed in terms of political ‘emergency’ and impending apocalyptic futures. However, much of the Global South has been living through enduring crises of environmental harm and expropriation for many decades, if not centuries. The action that is being urged in ‘emergency’ terms is informed and delineated by existing global structures, power relations and technologies of governance which defer to militarised and imperialist techniques. In this contemporary moment, meaningful examination of the material and discursive relations of climate change is vital to understanding how climate harms are produced, who bears the burden of climate effects, and how mitigation will impact upon us in differential ways.

This special issue draws together analyses of race and climate change by established and emerging scholars working from diverse disciplinary positions, including law, critical geography, politics, and critical security studies. The articles curated critically examine the temporalities of race and climate change in terms of past and present suffering against apocalyptic futures. They also develop the analytics of race in relation to new and situated experiences, from the clear and stark global colour line, to the complex grades of Caribbean colourism. Overall, this collection speaks to the changing dynamics of the present as new forms of eco-modernism, eco-nationalism and eco-fascism burgeon under ‘emergency’ conditions. Our collective appeal is for a reading of the harms and responses to the present through historically informed and critical optics which illuminate the reproduction and mobilisation of racial orders and technologies in the guise of environmentalism.

Articles should be no more than 8,000 words in length and conform to the Politics style guide.