Call for papers: Climate Change and issues of Race/Gender/Class

Posted by on March 15, 2010

Call for papers on Climate Change and issues of Race/Gender/Class

For this special issue of Race, Gender, Class we seek articles that take on this challenge in their approach to climate change by including the interrelated and integrated layers of race, gender and class. Submissions may focus on any aspect of climate change (legal, political, social, educational, agricultural, economic, religious, sexual, ideological, international, local…etc) but the analysis must be multifaceted in terms of race, gender and class, bringing to the fore a complexity that has been sorely lacking. Approaches may be empirically or theoretically based, may be qualitative or quantitative and may represent a variety of styles and perspectives but they should be well supported by argument and / or data and should attempt to bring new and provocative insight to the discussion of climate change.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) most recent report on climate change it behooves academics and activists to ensure that the interrelated issues of race, gender and class are not further obscured but become as central to combating climate change as the policy that enforces corporate reductions in carbon emissions. In his New York Times Op-Ed piece on 8/22/2009 writer Thomas Friedman planted an intriguing analytical seed that nevertheless needs much more ‘water’ and ‘light’ if it is to illuminate more than it obscures. He stated that “We’re trying to deal with a whole array of integrated problems – climate change,energy, biodiversity loss, poverty alleviation and the need to grow enough food to feed the planet – separately.” He then goes on to say that the key to addressing one is to address them all simultaneously in an integrated manner as observable with any ecosystem. Freidman’s observation is certainly correct that climate change (as with so many other issues) is being discussed in a social, political and economic vacuum with little or no reference to the contributing issues such as poverty, food production, energy creation and consumption, etc.

However, his analysis likewise does not go deep enough in that he overlooks the systemic and endemic forces that are creating the “whole array of integrated problems” that he himself mentioned. Such structural forces are of course the social, political and economic articulations of unequal power relations as created by the ideologies and practices of racism, sexism, classism, nationalism, ethnocentrism, speciesism .etc. Thus, the need for more inclusive, interrelated and complex analyses of climate change is dire.

Abstracts (500 words) should be sent by April 1st, 2010 to the address below. Selected authors will be notified by May 1st 2010, and the deadline for submission of the final paper (8000 words) will be June 1st, 2010. For further information or submission of abstracts, please contact by email phoebe.godfrey@uconn.edu or by snail mail: Phoebe C Godfrey Assistant Professor-in-Residence, Department of Sociology, 344 Mansfield Rd., University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06226-2068.