Catalyst and the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (CSW) invite contributions from scholars, artists, activists, and community members for a special issue which will feature cross-disciplinary dialogue on chemical exposure and gender.
This publication is an outgrowth of CSW’s larger Chemical Entanglements research initiative. In the context of increased reports of environmental illnesses like Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, and rising rates of hypospadias, ADHD, autism, cancer, endocrine disruption, and other conditions linked to environmental exposure, CSW’s Chemical Entanglements initiative aims to create space for cross-disciplinary feminist research on how the impacts of everyday chemical exposures are complex, compounded, and gendered. For more details, please visit: https://csw.ucla.edu/chem-ent
We hope that using gender as a lens for examining the issue of exposure will elicit collaboration across fields and will engage diverse stakeholders, including researchers, community activists and educators, and “canary” storytellers: i.e. visual artists, ethnographers, and poets variously self-identified or in solidarity with a growing subset of the US population–those environmentally ill and transgenerationally affected by un(der)regulated toxic hazards. Moreover, this project aims to reveal the complexity of activism on this issue by examining tensions between precautionary consumerism and government regulation that must be addressed in order to work towards intersectional community well-being.
We welcome submissions of original research articles of up to 7000 words, with an abstract and keywords.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Responses to the 2017 Chemical Entanglements symposium (from speakers, attendees, and participants)
- Toxicity as tool and product of colonialism and capitalism
- Exposure as state-sponsored violence
- Chemicals as racial capital of the state
- Indigenous knowledge and approaches to exposure
- Environmental justice, reparative justice, and intersectional movements to redress the harm of exposure
- Transgenerational effects of chemical exposure, particularly on communities of color
- Feminist approaches to toxicology
- The role of regulation and the safety of everyday products and living/working spaces
- Feminist interventions in government regulation of chemicals
- Intersectional approaches to occupational health
- Gendered responsibilities and body burdens
- Approaches to assessing complex exposures from everyday products
- Critical histories of the advertising and marketing of chemical products
- The role of chemical exposure and endocrine disruption in constructing gendered/sexed selves
- Building trans and intersex allyship by reframing scientific inquiry
- Cross-disciplinary communication strategies for change
- Endocrine disruption, health, and unseating the old toxicological wisdom that “the dose makes the poison”
Submission length: 7000 words maximum, plus an abstract and keywords
Style and formatting: Submissions should adhere to the American Psychological Association style, using as a reference the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, (6th ed., 2nd printing).
Please refer to Catalyst’s Author Guidelines for further formatting parameters: https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/about/submissions#authorGuidelines
To Submit: Email submissions in .doc, .docx, .odt, .rtf, or .pdf format to cswpubs@women.ucla.edu
Publication Date: Fall, 2020
Questions? Contact the Center for the Study of Women at cswpubs@women.ucla.edu