Critical Environments

The Critical Environments series will publish books that explore the political forms of life and ecologies that emerge from histories of capitalism, militarism, racism, colonialism and more. The publisher seeks to produce books that unsettle everyday assumptions about the environment through their attentiveness to the politics and practices that are both producing contemporary environmental conditions and which are attentive to the new emergent natures, ecologies, and aftermaths that are populating and re-making everyday environments.

The series' notion of "the environment" is capacious in that all manner of ecologies (industrial, agricultural, electronic, parasitic, biophysical, queer, physiological, urban and more) are fair game and the series commitment to articulating the political nature of their formations is unapologetic. In this series the publisher presumes that nature is not a preformed backdrop, the character of which is revealed uncritically by scientific practice. Rather, science and nature are themselves vibrant and contested elements of our environmental politics. As such Critical Environments books will address the histories of these modern ecologies, their entanglements with landscapes and institutions, the politics of their production, and material consequences of their manifestations and the emergent possibilities and tensions of living with and within profoundly altered ecologies. The publisher believes this critical approach to environmental politics deserves detailed and rigorous attention and a disciplinarily promiscuous platform.

The Critical Environments series publishes monographs that are both empirically rich and conceptually rigorous, with an emphasis on the specificity of historical and ethnographic analysis. The publisher hopes to support critical research at the intersection of nature, science, and politics in fields and approaches from Geography, Feminist Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Postcolonial Theory, American Studies, Environmental History, Critical Theories of Race, Science and Technology Studies and beyond. While it is expected that every book in this series engages the relations among nature, science, and politics in a rigorous manner, it is also expected that each book is accessibly written, with deep empirical grounding that gives it not just academic, but broadly intellectual interest.