New Frontiers

Environmental Change and Human Experience – a series of commissioned articles published online as part of the interdisciplinary Oxford Intersections programme – explores human-environmental relationships throughout history. It draws on research from across the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities.

Within this, the interdisciplinary thematic sub-section, ‘New Frontiers’, edited by Sandra Kemp, examines how humanity’s systematic transformation of both society and the environment has led to emerging frontiers in these relations, re-evaluating humanity’s place in the biosphere, and recalibrating perspectives. As a starting point for commissioning articles on radical shifts in socio-ecological consciousness and the emergence of alternative ontologies, New Frontiers is subdivided as follows, broadly within three areas:

(1) Rewilding: present day initiatives, including alternative social, political, ecological, economic and cultural approaches to the climate crisis, the impact of industrialisation and the recovery of the natural world.

(2) Transitioning: transitional spaces, including movement, migration, adaptation, sparsely populated and uninhabited lands; protection and utilisation of the Arctic and Antarctic, deserts and rainforests, and governance challenges to globally important ecosystems.

3) Uncharted: intersections between future humanity and future spaces and human-environmental resilience and vulnerability, including new urban environments and space expansionism; geo-engineering and biofabrication; cyborgs, ‘extremophiles’ and post-humanism in changing environments. 

We are encouraging contributors to consider their chosen topic across these three thematic areas through the lens of environmental futures, and to reflect upon how approaches and methods may advance new directions within this field through alternative social, scientific, cultural and economic paradigms and spatial imaginaries.

If you are interested in contributing to New Frontiers, please contact: sandra.kemp@lancaster.ac.uk

Project Lead: Professor Sandra Kemp, The Ruskin