Rural as a Dimension of Environmental Justice: Call for Papers

Abstracts Due: October 1, 2014

Papers Invited for Submission Due: February 1, 2015

Submission: Email abstracts (up to 350-words) to Loka Ashwood (Ashwood@wisc.edu) and Kate MacTavish (kate.mactavish@oregonstate.edu).

Changing community and production dynamics make rural places a state-sanctioned site for some of the most hazardous and toxic industries of our time. From its production treadmill, industrial agriculture has cast onto rural areas a plethora of negative externalities: mounting levels of air and water pollution, farm consolidation, and depopulation. A range of extractive and other risky industries justify the siting of facilities in rural areas because of easy access to ample natural resources, sparse populations that reduce exposure risk, and the possibility of economic revitalization.  State and federal statutes in the U.S. context (e.g., Right To Farm laws, the Federal Code of Regulations for Nuclear Operations) often permit these industries to target rural America based on past practice and low population levels.  

Cities serve as powerful hubs for the global economy, pulling away resources from less prominent urban and rural areas. The growing periphery within core countries, as well as continued resource extraction of rural places abroad, calls for increased attention to the rural facets of injustice in developed and developing countries. 

We invite paper submissions that explore facets of the rural that help explain rural places’ vulnerability to environmental injustices from interdisciplinary perspectives, including (but not limited to) sociology, geography, law, anthropology, public health, and the environmental sciences. We are especially keen to receive papers from scholars working broadly on issues of environmental justice in order to foster conversation between those scholars and scholars whose focus on the rural more generally.

Abstracts of interest will be reviewed and then select papers will be invited for full paper submission on February 1, 2015.  Accepted papers will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Rural Studies.