Open call for submissions through January 29, 2025.
How does the environment emerge within ongoing electoral politics in the US and around the world? As an area of policy intervention, environmental politics is understood broadly as the policies and state negotiations concerning topics such as water and air pollution, natural resource conservation, greenhouse gas emissions, and public lands management. Theorized more expansively, however, “the environment” itself is a concept under constant renegotiation at the local, state, national, and global levels. Voters, politicians, and private and public institutions determine the in-flux categories of policy that fall under the culturally-constructed umbrella of environmental policy within a given electoral context, whether that be a school board nomination, a state representative run-off, or a presidential election. Likewise, debates over legislative processes, party platforms, or candidate’s position on a topic can be framed as focused on the environment while couched in underlying tensions around belonging, demographics, nationalism, or disputed truths. Electoral politics – and their mobilization through campaign speeches, canvassing, and other ‘get out the vote’ drives – iteratively inform the way the environment becomes understood as a sphere of governance as well as a space to imagine alternative relationships with nature and the state.
This Engagement thematic series aims to showcase critical and thoughtful research that explores the negotiation of environmental topics and the environment itself in processes of electoral politics. We encourage ethnographic reflections and experimental pieces that study politics in practice to elaborate on the conceptual, methodological, and political affordances, tensions, and foreclosures that arise when examining environmental policy, or the environment as politicized, within authors’ particular field sites. We welcome submissions from different disciplinary fields such as anthropology, geography, political ecology, sociology, critical environmental studies, political science, and humanities.
If you would like your work to be considered for publication, please submit your article between 1,500 to 3,000 words. This is an open call for ongoing submissions through the end of 2024. Please use the subject line “LAST NAME_Electoral Politics Engagement Submission” in your email. Your work could address some of the following questions, although you are welcome to explore other relevant topics as well.
1. How is the environment discussed, framed, or contested as part of electoral politics? Are they linked to economic, health, environmental, military, or geopolitical concerns? Do they take on local, regional, global, or planetary forms?
2. How are voters mobilizing, responding, or contesting the presence or absence of the environment in political platforms, presidential debates, or electoral campaigns?
3. What images, metaphors, or symbols are being invoked when environmental issues are discussed as part of party and electoral politics?
4. How is tradition, identity, or history mobilized or (re)framed when environmental issues are discussed as part of party and electoral politics?
This series is in collaboration with Talking Politics 2024. Now in its third iteration, Talking Politics aims to create a cross-institutional, interdisciplinary, and publicly accessible platform for reimagining political engagement beyond traditional left-right binaries. By showcasing how various disciplines analyze different types of data to draw meaningful conclusions, this project strive to provide a space where diverse audiences can engage with evidence-based tools and methods for understanding today’s political landscape. Authors selected for this Engagement series will have the opportunity to have their work shared across both platforms and participate in a Talking Politics 2024 + Engagement virtual roundtable event in March of 2025 to build upon this series’ dialogue.
