[Commlist] Routledge Companion to Photography and the Environment - Call for Chapters

Call for Chapters


The Routledge Companion to Photography and the Environment [under contract]

Routledge Art History and Visual Studies Companions

Editors: Chris Goldie, Stephanie Hartle, Julia Peck, Darcy White

Photography plays a defining role in shaping and mediating our 
perceptions of the world. Environmental photography possesses a broad 
communicative capacity; whether as a form of evidence in the service of 
environmental activism; to articulate emotional responses to ecological 
breakdown, loss, and displacement; or to celebrate the natural world and 
envision alternative ways of being. As ecological collapse becomes more 
pronounced and increasingly evident, photographers, writers, critics, 
and curators need theoretical resources and new frameworks for thinking 
and visualising the complexity and urgency of this situation.

This edited collection is intended to be a pluralistic and globally 
co-constituted volume, with contributions from regions directly and 
continuously affected by environmental degradation as well as from 
authors working in the Global North. Original essays, from a 
multiplicity of theoretical perspectives and framings, and encompassing 
a wide range of case studies, will provide a comprehensive guide to the 
aesthetics and politics of photographic practice in the era of 
environmental crises. The aim of the volume is to provide a strong 
thematic overview and to become a landmark reference work with longevity 
and field-defining potential.


As well as addressing photography practitioners, academics, postgraduate 
and undergraduate students, the book, with its strong interdisciplinary 
dimension, will be of interest to scholars and students in visual 
culture, art history, media and communication studies, environmental 
humanities, geography, anthropology, museum and curatorial studies, 
science and technology studies, and environmental history.


This call for chapters understands photography as an expanded field of 
practice and welcomes contributions that consider analogue, digital and 
hybrid formats, video, emerging visualising technologies, 
experimentation, material interventions, installation, performance, 
artificial intelligence and augmented reality, and creative outputs that 
blur boundaries with other image making practices, including operational 
images; as related to our core concern with environment. It recognises 
that such practices are shaped by various forces, institutional 
procedures and commercial pressures. Photographic images contribute to 
understanding and misunderstanding the world, clarifying as well as 
distorting perceptions. Moreover, photographic practices can express 
affective responses to environmental concerns, including deep love and 
appreciation of ecologies and places, expressed through myriad forms and 
a plurality of material practices. The advent of the networked image, 
combined with expanded photography, complicates our understanding of the 
photographic as permeable, fluid and in flux, yet these material 
practices remain central to visualising the living world and the myriad 
relationships that exist in and within it. At the same time, photography 
is deeply implicated in environmental degradation.
Both ‘the environment’ and 'the photographic’ are unstable and capacious 
categories. Contributions to the book will address these multiple 
meanings, and rather than attempting to resolve these tensions, this 
volume will aim to mobilise conceptual plurality productively.

We invite proposals for critical discussions of photographic practice 
that address (but are not limited to) the environmental themes outlined 
below. These may engage with existing scholarship or be based on 
original research. We welcome a diversity of perspectives and case 
studies from around the world, intersectional approaches, and frameworks 
that address queer perspectives and critical race theory.



1. Causes and Impacts

Structural and systemic causes of environmental collapse and unequal 
environmental effects across the Global North and South
Patterns and structures of consumption and overconsumption, the Imperial 
mode of living
Extractivism and expansion of the extractive frontier, urban 
extractivism, immaterial extractivism
Immediate causes, including (but not confined to) mining, fracking, 
fossil fuel-based energy systems, petro-capitalism, individualised 
transport, water/resource over-use and depletion, the displacement of 
fauna/flora, toxic waste and industrial pollution, the depletion of 
oceans and the destruction of their ecologies, aviation, the military 
industrial complex, AI and data centres
Activities (such as extraction, deforestation, waste and pollution) 
resulting in the destruction of specific habitats and their populations, 
the collapse of biodiversity and species extinction
Agribusiness and big pharma, pesticides, herbicides, toxic runoff, 
monoculture crops, seed sovereignty, water use, soil depletion, 
over-fishing     Slow violence: heat exposure, toxic environments, food 
insecurity, forced migration, and the gradual loss of habitable places
The environmental effects of visualising technologies and 
infrastructures of image production and circulation
2. Space, Place and the ‘Oceanic Turn’

Sites of environment breakdown The spaces of everyday life, work and 
industry
Environmental crisis, war and forced migration
‘Oceanic turn’ (New Thalassology) – fluid boundaries and global flows, 
climate, weather and oceanic systems, atmospheric and water-borne 
pollution, logistics and counter-logistics - routes, destinations and 
ports, supply chains, boundaries, borders, choke points, fishing, 
oceanic data cables, container ports and ships, transportation, tourism
Dark infrastructure: illegal fishing, slavery at sea, trafficking, the 
hidden spaces and infrastructures of the oceanic

3. Photojournalism and Documentary

The role of photojournalism and documentary photography in the 
representation of environmental collapse
Inherent tensions and limitations; bearing witness, issues of 
objectivity, and the status of visual evidence
Documentary form; differing approaches to the representation of 
environmental issues (e.g. realism, critical realism) and the 
possibilities for developing new forms of documentary practice The 
intersection of photography and the global circulation of networked 
images, the significance of operational images and machine/automated 
technologies, apparatuses of surveillance, and augmented and virtual reality

4. Art and Curation

Critical discussions of individual photographic artworks, bodies of 
work, exhibitions and their curatorial approaches Critical discussions 
of differing aesthetic responses to environmental destruction, e.g. the 
anthropocenic sublime
Recent practices addressing photography’s materiality, environmental 
impact and its sustainable future
The role of the art institution or curator as a mediator for 
decolonising, reparative and sustainable curatorial methods and practices
Reworking archives, strategies of appropriation

5. Denial and Obfuscation

Climate denial, disavowal, and disinformation, attacks on scientific and 
environmental expertise, the rise of the far right, the role of 
photographic images in both propaganda and resistance to change
Idealised and fictive worlds; myths of an unspoiled, pristine natural world
Advertising, leisure and tourist photography
Corporate greenwashing, false promise of technological solutions (market 
orientated solutions)
Opacity as refusal in fine art photography / fine art photography 
magazines Misrepresenting environmental breakdown in photojournalism

6. Resistance, Advocacy and Transition

Decolonising the Western gaze
Challenges to Western ideas of human/nature interaction, beyond 
human-centric perspectives that foreground the non-human and the 
non-living / the more than human
Indigenous knowledge, voices and perspectives, prioritising reciprocity 
and community-based, non-extractive relationships and practice
Resistance and site-specific trauma
Protest, exposing elite behaviours
Photography as provocation, intervention and subversion
Participatory and community photography, self-representation
Photomontage as a tool of resistance
Photography as time-critical intervention Envisioning just, sustainable, 
liveable futures
New media practices, imagining new socialities
In distributing this call for chapters, we are seeking a diversity of 
perspectives from around the world; we would be very grateful if 
interested writers shared this CFC with their international networks. We 
are also interested in contributors who represent the global majority 
and authors whose work addresses case studies beyond the already 
familiar photographic cannon dominated by Euro-American perspectives.

Submission guidelines

Proposed chapter title
Abstract: 350–500 words
Short bio: 100 words per author
Language: English
Chapter length: 4,000-5,000 words; shorter contributions will be considered
Please state your anticipated word count
Timeline

Proposal deadline: 2nd November 2026

Notification of acceptance: 15th December 2026

Full chapters due: 29th March 2027

Publication: 2028


Submit to: Please submit your proposal, bio and other details as listed 
above to: (chris.goldie /at/ btinternet.com); (s.hartle /at/ shu.ac.uk); 
(j.peck /at/ lcc.arts.ac.uk); (d.white /at/ shu.ac.uk)


---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely. The commlist has no responsibility for any damage caused by its postings. Subscription to the list automatically implies agreement with this rule.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ commlist.org)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------