Environment and Society: Advances in Research  
CFP- Transitions: The Promises and Pitfalls of "Clean" Energy as Climate Mitigation  
 
Editors: Jerry Jacka and Amelia Moore  
Special Issue Guest Editors: Thomas A. De Pree, University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, METALS Superfund Research Program and Dana E. Powell, Associate Professor, Taipei Medical University, Graduate Institute of Humanities in Medicine 
 
What are the social, cultural, and political implications of “clean energy transitions”? How are environmental social scientists and humanists exploring these complexities, contradictions, materialities, conceptual and empirical problems posed by such infrastructures, when viewed ethnographically, empathetically, and critically? This special issue of Environment & Society invites diverse and dynamic responses to this provocation, with the goal of advancing the critical-theoretical and grounded-empirical analytics of extractivism, when it takes “renewable” form.  

RATIONALE  
The exploitation of fossil fuels has dramatically increased the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, driving a global temperature increase and resulting in uncertain and unpredictable planetary weather patterns, ecological changes, emergent policies, and urgent responses. At a more local level, fossil fuel exploitation often serves political ends, interpolating capitalist development into rural and increasingly urban spaces and places, with varying effects and affects. Attempts to decrease atmospheric carbon loading have resulted in technoscientific and policy development of low carbon technologies such as solar, wind, hydro, biomass, geothermal, and other sources that are considered in terms of “carbon output” to be less damaging than coal, gas, and oil. Yet, many of these technologies themselves depend upon the extraction of other kinds of energy, minerals, metals, and natural resources; in the expansion of risky infrastructures; in the massive alterations of ecosystems; and the production of environmental health disparities, vulnerabilities, and injustices on overburdened communities that have been structurally marginalized and minoritized.  

In 2020, the World Bank predicted that mineral exploitation would have to increase over 500% to meet current low carbon energy goals - with minerals such as lithium and rare earth metals driving the “green energy” market. Likewise, the siting of solar panels, wind turbines, and hydropower dams has caused consternation among Native Nations and environmentalists alike, for the negative effects these projects have on jurisdictional arrangements, agricultural land, biodiversity conservation, species movements, and watershed hydrology. These and other so-called “clean” energy transitions, important as they may be in attenuating the global impacts of climate change, continue to produce new kinds of “sacrifice zones” (Kuletz 1998) as an inherent part of national energy resource extraction and capital-intensive, developmentist agendas, in a number of transnational sites within but also beyond the nation-state.  

We invite papers that explore these often awkward dimensions of extraction, renewability, carbon reduction, and their social and environmental impacts. As STS anthropologists whose perspectives on these matters have been transformed by witnessing the complicated socio-ecological, political dynamics facing Native Nations in energy-rich homelands in the US Southwest and beyond, the guest editors take very seriously the task of a holistic critique of the emerging concepts of “green energy” and “clean energy” in the context of anti-colonial, feminist, and inclusive work to examine the technopolitical entanglements of energy systems and infrastructures with long-standing forms of social harm, emerging forms of restorative justice and decolonial action.1 Despite global calls climate mitigation and technological transitions, we know that the lived impacts of low-carbon energy transitions remain poorly understood and there is an urgent need for community-informed, critical scholarship in this area. 

DRIVING QUESTIONS  
What does “clean” energy mean to differently situated social actors, communities, and Nations, and what qualifies as “clean” in public discourse about the politics of energy and mineral resource extraction? What kind of conceptual and empirical work do “clean” and “transition” compel? What is at stake for differently positioned humans and nonhumans/other relations in these dominant “climate mitigation” strategies, and what are their different ontological and epistemological standpoints? How does the double optic of climate and environmental health perspectives apply to toxic mixtures of heavy metals from the extraction of energy mineral resources, like uranium, lithium, coltan, rare earth minerals, and other industrial minerals used in forms of electrical generation that are often described as “clean” and “sustainable” from a pure carbon perspective? What new kinds of analytics might be emerging from these experiences, knowledges, and encounters that shed new light on how particular environmental futurities operate to enable or foreclose justice and wellbeing?  

We are interested in literature reviews and ethnographically rich articles that explore these questions, as they investigate the deeply entangled politics of climate mitigation, environmental health, and extractivism in specific settings. This special issue will thus build upon recent work in anthropological STS and energy studies that examines the politics, poetics, pitfalls, and surprises of various forms of energy (Ballard and Banks 2003; Boyer 2019; Howe 2019; Curley 2023; Godoy 1985; Jacka 2015; Kirsch 2006; Kneas 2018; Lennon 2017; Li 2015; Nash 1993; Smith 2021; Taussig 2010; Willow 2018; and other kindred projects). At the same time, it is informed by wider conversations in extractivism and transition studies (Bandiarian 2019; Escobar 2018; Jalbert et al. 2017; Middleton Manning 2018; Szeman & Boyer 2017, etc.) that invite new articulations in theory and ethnography, history and biology, technoscience and embodiment, to examine how “transition” as both noun and verb demand careful, sustained interrogation into for whom, and for what, such calls are brought forth. 

Potential topics could include:  
• Critical development studies  
• Disaster/Discard studies  
• Critical infrastructure studies  
• Environmental health governance  
• Settler colonial determinants of health  
• Feminist/Antiracist/Anticolonial understandings of energy and energy transition  

WRITING FOR E&S  
Environment & Society is a journal that specializes in essays that are heavily literature review-oriented but at the same time, highlight research-driven arguments, emergent forms of social practice, and new analytics for environmental anthropology and related fields. As such, articles must include a substantial review of existing scholarship as well as advancing new work, insights, projects, and claims. 

KEY DATES  
Abstracts Due (abstracts may be up to 250 words): February 2, 2024  
Notifications for Authors: February 15, 2024  
Completed Articles Due for initial review: July 1, 2024  
Final Submission Due: May 1, 2025  
Please submit a 250-word abstract to [log in to unmask] to be considered for this special issue of Environment and Society: Advances in Research. Please send all inquiries to [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask] 

########################################################################

To unsubscribe from the ENV-ED-RESEARCH list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/WA-JISC.exe?SUBED1=ENV-ED-RESEARCH&A=1

This message was issued to members of www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ENV-ED-RESEARCH, a mailing list hosted by www.jiscmail.ac.uk, terms & conditions are available at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/