Special Issue Call for Papers
Environmental justice and psychology: Alternative ideas on environmental issues
Guest Editors: Erinn Cameron, Luca Tateo, and Gonzalo Bacigalupe
Deadline October 15, 2023
Hegemonic psychology is still, predominantly, the science of behavior prediction and control. When it comes to the environmental crisis, it mainly focuses on the short-term behavioral and/or emotional dimensions. On the one hand, there has been a focus on behavioral change as a way to develop a sustainable relationship with the environment. Hence, the work on cognitive and behavioral formation of habits and beliefs on climate change. On the other hand, climate change is understood as an overwhelming and ungraspable phenomenon that may cause traumatic effects, hence the primacy of an affective and embodied relationship with nature . Emotional healing and reconnection with nature is understood as key to build a sustainable future and overcoming of environmental trauma. Both approaches may not be capturing the complex dimensions that determine the answers that psychology provides to questions related to dominant political values-including neoliberalism and authoritarian regimes and the growing injustices accelerated by the environmental crisis. It partly depends on the lack of ecological epistemological foundations and the consequent incapability to glimpse an alternative outside the current hegemonic development framework, as is implemented in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals on Wellbeing, Education, Reduction of Inequalities, a Empowerment of Women and Girls. In this special issue, we will promote and discuss alternative perspectives and lay the groundwork for a new ecological epistemology in social and developmental psychology – also in dialogue with other disciplines – and will touch on global issues of environmental injustice and relationship with both the human and non-human inhabitants of the Earth. The special issue aims to open a debate on the foundations of a future social and developmental psychology able to deal with the global issues of environmental justice.
Articles can be both theoretical and empirical. Interdisciplinary, collaborative, and diverse proposals will be preferred. Research areas and topics of interest for this special issue include (but are not limited to):
- Epistemology, history, and theory of psychology vis-a-vis the ecological crisis and environmental injustice;
- The psychological dimensions of the relationships between human and non-human entities;
- Alternative, non-hegemonic and indigenous epistemologies, cosmologies, and philosophical perspectives about our relationship with the environment;
- Innovative perspectives on existing concepts (e.g., sustainability, solastalgia, atmosphere, eco-anxiety, epistemicide, environmental injustice, etc.)
- Ecological and ethical consequences of human activities in relation to environmental justice;
- Human development and/or health and environmental justice.
Proposals: Submit 1 page, single-spaced descriptions of the proposed manuscript to the guest editors by August 31, 2023. Selected authors will be contacted by October 15, 2023, and invited to develop their manuscripts. Completed manuscripts will be due April 15, 2024.
Submit proposals via email as Word attachments to:
ecameron@email.fielding.edu, lucatateo@gmail.com, gonzalo.bacigalupe@umb.edu
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