[Commlist] call for chapters

First Reminder


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: 2ndNovember 2026

Notification of acceptance: 15thDecember 2026

Full chapters due: 29thMarch 2027

Publication: 2028


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


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