Open Calls for Special Issues

Call for Papers for a Special Issue in Environmental Science & Policy

Unlearning and undoing for socioecological justice and alternative socioecological futures

Keywords: Transformations, Pluriverse, Relationality, Socioecological justice, Epistemic and ontological justice, Ways of knowing and being, Power politics and resistance, Eco-feminism, Degrowth, More-than-human, Alternatives

Call: There is an increasing awareness about (and a critique of) the role the Eurocentric Modernity and universalistic Science play in defining sustainability pathways in policy and research, delegitimizing and erasing other ways of knowing, being and relating. In particular, Modernity perceives humans as separate from nature, denies the full humanity of some people and the existences of their ways of being and knowing (that do not separate between people and the lands), and finally it uses the European or Western economic development as a yardstick for universally desirable constructs. To this day, the dominance and hegemony of these anthropocentric, colonial, hetero-patriarchal, capitalist, and linear onto-epistemic assumptions over other ways of knowing and being continues to (re)produce epistemic, cognitive, and ontological violences, threatening place-based ancestral knowledges, and practices that are vital for sustaining healthy relations towards the natural world.We argue and argue for a collective unlearning that can shake the pervasive onto-epistemic assumptions underlying Eurocentric Modernity to their core; undoing the current onto-epistemic violences towards other ways of being, knowing, and doing ‘sustainability’ on the ground.

This call for papers calls for theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that explore: (i) what dominant mindsets, assumed scientific truths or myths, and ontological logics require unlearning and undoing, (ii) the multiple and diverse processes of unlearning Eurocentric truth claims and/or undoing Modernity, and (iii) the methodological implications for epistemic and ontological justice and/or for transformations towards just socioecological futures, and finally (iv) the implications for science and policy and the science-policy interface. We call for contributions engaging ontological and relationality shifts, Indigenous, anti-colonial, decolonial, feminist, degrowth thinking.
Guest editors:

Dr. Sabaheta S. Ramcilovic-Suominen, Natural Resources Institute Finland Bioeconomy and Environment

Dr. Maria Ehrnström-Fuentes, Hanken School of Economics

Dr. Maria Fernanda Gebara, Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute

Submission deadline: Dec 31, 2024

You are invited to submit your manuscript at any time before the submission deadline. For any inquiries about the appropriateness of contribution topics, please contact Managing Guest Editor: Prof. Sabaheta S. Ramcilovic-Suominen.

The journal’s submission platform (Editorial Manager®) is now available for receiving submissions to this Special Issue. Please refer to the Guide for Authors to prepare your manuscript and select the article type of “VSI: Socioecological futures” when submitting your manuscript online.

For more information on how to submit your manuscript please visit the journal web page. https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/environmental-science-and-policy/about/call-for-papers