Call for Papers: “Energy, Communication, Environment: Nature and Culture in Times of Socio-Ecological Crisis”

Energy, Communication, Environment

Nature and Culture in Times of Socio-Ecological Crisis

 

Call for papers

New Agenda: South African Journal of Social and Economic Policy

4^th Quarter issue, December 2026

 

 

Guest Editors:

Prof Steven Robins (SARChI Land, Environment and Sustainable Development)

Prof Mehita Iqani (SARChI Science Communication)

Stellenbosch University  

 

 

 

This special issue will bring together a collection of short critical essays exploring a social or political-economy aspect of case studies in energy, communication and environment in times of crisis, with a view to advancing critical dialogue about how nature and culture are dialogically entwined, and influence multiple aspects of society and policy.

 

A dominant response to anthropogenic climate change, aside from flat denialism and mediated misinformation, has been to turn to various technoscientific solutions to address dire predictions of devastating socio-ecological consequences for human and other-than-human life. These calls for ‘technoscientific fixes’, all popular in media coverage, include solar geoengineering, carbon capture technologies, carbon credits, and the rapid expansion of renewable energy infrastructures to prevent a fossil fuel-driven catastrophe in the coming decades. Yet, numerous critics insist that financialised and technoscientific solutions cannot address the systemic problems of over-consumption of energy and the ecologically destructive nature of limitless growth models of development. Meanwhile, climate scientists and activists insist that the pace of devastating climate change is accelerating exponentially, and urgent action is required immediately. These debates take place in public realms shaped by asymmetric media economies, dominated by powerful legacy and tech companies, and are dominated by powerful narratives linked to various structures of power (the fossil fuel industry, in particular), and urgently require attention from critical theorists, activists and policy makers.

 

How do ‘we’ - in South Africa and the continent - think about, act upon, create narratives about, and forge liveable futures in the time of unprecedented life-threatening socio-ecological crises? How will future human and other-than-human life adapt to increasing ecological instability? How do ‘we’ move away from cultures of fast consumption and engage instead with what Steven J. Jackson calls ‘broken world thinking’ and a politics and ethics of care and repair? What policies, economic models and forms of activism can emerge from the research in social policy and environmental communication at this moment in this place? We invite short, critical essays that explore these concerns in relation to a specific, empirical case study.

 

Approaches could include (but are not limited to): policy, activist, technoscientific, infrastructural, socio-ecological, communicative, ethical, cultural, political and economic theories and methods.

 

Topics could include (but are not limited to): questions about the impacts of renewable energy, conservation projects and ‘salvational technologies’ and techno-scientific fixes (e.g., green hydrogen) that critics believe could end up causing and reproducing socio-environmental damage, inequality, land dispossession and the extractivist logics of what some have referred to as green colonialism and ecological imperialism, the role of scientific evidence in policy, media and activist forms of communication that inform and shape these issues.

 

Essays should be 3000-words in length, written in an academic register but with a wide audience in mind, should follow an op-ed style including engagement with relevant scholarship, and speak to a specific current issue or case study, and offers a compelling line of critical argumentation.

 

To propose an essay for the special issue, please email a paper title, 250-word abstract and 100-word author biography to fumanim@sun.ac.za by midnight of 31 January 2026. The guest editors will inform successful applicants by 28 February 2026. Full papers will be due on 31 March 2026. All submissions will undergo double-blind peer review handled by the journal. The special issue is scheduled for publication in December 2026.