While discussions on the porosity of bodies and environments in studies of science, technology, and medicine (STM) have granted us new ways to think about knowledge, unequal relations, violence, and toxicity, little attention has been given to mental health in these dynamics. While there are robust and growing scientific and medical literatures on mental health and environmental health, how mental illness and wellness become known, produced, and linked to environments is seldom explored in STM scholarship.
Minds, bodies, and environments are shaped by particular histories, ethics, and ideologies. They are not only intertwined; they dissolve and reconstitute each other. Understanding them along a continuum of health can reveal inequities as well as solidarities. Attending to mental illness and wellness through an STM lens offers a way to interrogate the boundaries between mind, body, and environments, restoring the disembodied mind to the porous body, with implications for how to approach environ-mental health.
We invite fellow STM scholars to help us develop better vocabulary, methods, and theories for understanding and analyzing practices surrounding mental health and its relationship to environments. Topics may include:
-mental illness and wellness in the midst of ecological devastation
-causality, responsibility, and accountability in environ-mental health
-violence, trauma, and toxicity
-intersecting marginalizations (e.g. citizenship, housing status, disability, queerness, indigeneity, race, ethnicity, and gender) re/produced through limitations or intentional absences in environ-mental health
-environ-mental knowledges
-creative, innovative, and otherwise strange methodologies for approaching environ-mental health
-practitioners navigating environ-mental health
