Open for Climate Justice - Open for All
University of Michigan Press is excited to celebrate International Open Access Week, October 24-30, 2022!
Open access, or OA, refers to content that is freely and openly available online. OA is integral to the creation of a more equitable scholarly ecosystem. Through our Fund to Mission ebook model, where we are working to make 75% of our new scholarly titles open access by 2023, we ensure everyone has access to research, regardless of location or institutional affiliation.
This year’s Open Access Week theme, Open for Climate Justice , is particularly near and dear to our hearts. Though sharing knowledge for knowledge’s sake is laudable, open access is more than that. It is about how sharing information can have practical impacts on our world. As the International Open Access Week group says,
“…Climate Justice seeks to encourage connection and collaboration among the climate movement and the international open community. Sharing knowledge is a human right, and tackling the climate crisis requires the rapid exchange of knowledge across geographic, economic, and disciplinary boundaries.”
Today we’re highlighting a pair of our recent and forthcoming open access books that discuss climate and environment. We hope you’ll join us in exploring these free-to-read books.
Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty by Molly Wallace
Risk Criticism is a study of literary and cultural responses to global environmental risk in an age of unfolding ecological catastrophe. In 2015, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset its iconic Doomsday Clock to three minutes to midnight, as close to the apocalypse as it has been since 1953. What pushed its hands was not just the threat of nuclear weapons, but also other global environmental risks that the Bulletin judged to have risen to the scale of the nuclear, including climate change and innovations in the life sciences. If we may once have believed that the end of days would come in a blaze of nuclear firestorm, we now suspect that the apocalypse may be much slower, creeping in as chemical toxins, climate change, or nano-technologies run amok.
Forthcoming
Empire and Environment argues that histories of imperialism, colonialism, militarism, and global capitalism are integral to understanding environmental violence in the transpacific region. The collection draws its rationale from the imbrication of imperialism and global environmental crisis, but its inspiration from the ecological work of activists, artists, and intellectuals across the transpacific region. Taking a postcolonial, ecocritical approach to confronting ecological ruin in an age of ecological crises and environmental catastrophes on a global scale, the collection demonstrates how Asian North American, Asian diasporic, and Indigenous Pacific Island cultural expressions critique a de-historicized sense of place, attachment, and belonging. In addition to its thirteen chapters from scholars who span the Pacific, each part of this volume begins with a poem by Craig Santos Perez. The volume also features a foreword by Macarena Gómez-Barris and an afterword by Priscilla Wald.
Find more great books from University of Michigan Press at press.umich.edu .
