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New Issue of Environment and Society!

Berghahn Journals is pleased to announce that the latest volume of Environment and Society has recently published and is available online at www.berghahnjournals.com/environment-and-society.

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Volume 8, edited by Dan Brockington, revolves around the theme of “Measurements and Metrics” and explores how “themes of measurement are played out in diverse settings, including counting fish stocks, migration, social resilience, local measures of sustainability, oil exploitation, forest conservation, calculating ecosystem services, and measuring heat.” The editor’s introduction is available to all readers for free. The volume also features two Open Access articles freely available to all readers.

Environment and Society 8 is rounded out by a section of book reviews on recent and relevant publications.

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Happy Earth Day from EnviroSociety!: Free Access to Journal Articles

Each year, Earth Day—April 22—marks the anniversary of what many consider the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. Earth Day 1970 capitalized on the emerging consciousness, channeling the energy of the anti-war protest movement and putting environmental concerns front and center. The very first Earth Day celebration brought 20 million Americans to the streets to peacefully demonstrate for environmental protection.

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New Featured Article!: “Placing Plants in Territory”

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article, “Placing Plants in Territory” comes from Volume 7 (2016), a special issue on people and plants edited by Kay E. Lewis-Jones. In their article, Sarah Besky and Jonathan Padwe use plants to think about territory, a concept that is at once a bulwark of social theory and an undertheorized category of social analysis. Through examples of how plants operate in different domains, they illustrate the analytical potential that a more-than-human approach to territories provides.

Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.

Photograph by Rania Hatzi via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Photograph by Rania Hatzi via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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New Featured Article!: “Anthropological Engagement with the Anthropocene”

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article, “Anthropological Engagement with the Anthropocene: A Critical Review,” comes from Volume 6 (2015), a special issue on the Anthropocene. In their review of anthropology’s evolving engagement with the Anthropocene, HannahGibson and Sita Venkateswar contemplate multifarious approaches to research and discuss critical engagement discussed including anthropology beyond disciplinary borders, queries writing in the Anthropocene, and anthropology of climate change.

Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.

“It is not a concrete state of ‘being’ but a process of becoming. For example, consider that a rider on a horse has to some extent ‘become’ like a horse in order to interact, connect, and think with the horse, just as we can say that an animal may ‘become human’” (Gibson and Venkateswar 2015: 13). Photograph by Pranav Bhasin via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
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New Issue of Environment and Society!

Berghahn Journals is pleased to announce that the latest volume of Environment and Society has recently published and is available online at its new home, www.berghahnjournals.com/environment-and-society.

This volume, guested edited by Kay E. Lewis-Jones, revolves around the theme of “People and Plants,” as “recent research on plants … is now expanding our appreciation both of the fundamental role plants have in the function and health of the living world, and of their own intimate interactions within it.” The guest editor’s introduction is available to all readers for free.

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New Featured Article!: “Transforming Participatory Science” Available as Free PDF

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article, “Transforming Participatory Science into Socioecological Praxis,” comes from Volume 5 (2014). Brian J. Burke and Nik Heynen evaluate the participatory traditions of citizen science and sustainability science, finding that they often fall short of the transformative potential because they do not directly confront the production of environmental injustice and political exclusion.

Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.

BRIAN J. BURKE is an assistant professor in the Goodnight Family Sustainable Development Department at Appalachian State University. From 2012 to 2014 he was a postdoctoral researcher with the Coweeta Listening Project. His research aims to support movements for social justice and environmental sustainability by examining their ethical visions and strategies and the challenges they face. Drawing on political economy and political ecology, he studies how material and sociocultural forces shape processes of social and socionatural change in specific contexts. His work has included projects on urban environmental activism on the US-Mexico border, rural cooperatives in Latin America, alternative economies in Colombia, and environmental knowledge.

NIK HEYNEN is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia and director of the Coweeta Listening Project. His research utilizes a combined urban political ecology/urban political economy framework to investigate how economic, political, and cultural processes contribute to the production of material inequality and uneven urban environments. His three main research foci relate to the analysis of how social power relationships, including class, race, and gender, are inscribed in the transformation of nature, and how in turn these processes contribute to interrelated and interdependent connections between nature, space, and social reproduction.

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New Open Access Article from Environment and Society!

“Less Than One But More than Many: Anthropocene as Science Fiction and Scholarship-in-the-Making”

By Heather Anne Swanson, Nils Bubandt, and Anna Tsing

Anthropocene

ABSTRACT: How might one responsibly review a field just coming into being—such as that provoked by the term Anthropocene? In this article, we argue for two strategies. First, working from the premise that the Anthropocene field is best understood within its emergence, we review conferences rather than publications. In conference performances, we glimpse the themes and tensions of a field-to-come. Second, we interpret Anthropocene as a science-fiction concept, that is, one that pulls us out of familiar space and time to view our predicaments differently. This allows us to explore emergent figurations, genres, and practices for the transdisciplinary study of real and imagined worlds framed by human disturbance. In the interplay and variation across modes for constructing this field, Anthropocene scholarship finds its shape.

HEATHER ANNE SWANSON, NILS BUBANDT, and ANNA TSING are core members of the Aarhus University Research in the Anthropocene program (AURA). With Elaine Gan, they are editors of the forthcoming Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Stories from the Anthropocene and curators of More Than Human: AURA Working Papers. Among their current and forthcoming books are Caught in Comparisons: Japanese Salmon in an Uneven World; The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island; and The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/ares.2015.060109

Free PDF Download

This article is Open Access under license CC-BY-NC-ND 4. To access all of the articles of Environment and Society Volume 6, which specifically focuses on the Anthropocene, visit the journal’s website here.

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New Featured Article!: “Nature’s Market?” Available as a Free PDF Download

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article, “Nature’s Market? A Review of Organic Certification,” comes from Volume 2 (2011). Shaila Seshia Galvin takes a critical look at literature on organic certification from diverse national and regional contexts while incorporating her own extensive fieldwork with organic smaller holders in north India.

Photo: U.S. Department of Agriculture
Photo: U.S. Department of Agriculture

Shaila Seshia Galvin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Development Studies (Geneva, Switzerland). Her research interests include political ecology, the anthropology of environment and development, and political anthropology.

Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.