Call for Papers - Resilience in the era of the Anthropocene

2026-03-25

Nordia Geographical Publications Theme Issue "Resilience in the era of the Anthropocene"

Guest Editors: Roosa Ridanpää, Maija Toivanen, Aleksi Räsänen, Alberto Amore

The Geographical Society of Northern Finland and the Geography Research Unit at the University of Oulu are pleased to announce a call for papers for Nordia Geographical Publications’ Theme Issue on “Resilience in the era of the Anthropocene”. Nordia Geographical Publications is a peer-reviewed, non-profit, open access academic journal focusing on contemporary interventions in geography. The journal particularly welcomes research that is committed to northern dimensions of human, physical, and applied geography.

This theme issue is a joint effort between two research programmes at the University of Oulu: FRONT (Frontiers in Arctic and Global Resilience) and ANTS (Biodiverse Anthropocenes). Both programmes address critical questions of resilience and sustainability in northern and Arctic contexts, bringing together perspectives from natural and social sciences.

Why resilience and the Anthropocene?

Resilience and the Anthropocene have become key concepts for understanding environmental and social change. Resilience examines how systems absorb shocks, adapt to change, and transform when needed (Folke 2006). The Anthropocene refers to our current era, in which human activities have become a dominant force shaping Earth’s ecosystems and geosystems (Steffen et al. 2018). Taken together, these are two complementary concepts rooted in interdisciplinary thinking (Grove 2025; Powell et al. 2014), helping us understand both the scale of contemporary environmental change and how communities and ecosystems respond to it.

Originally developed in the natural sciences (Crutzen 2002; Holling 1973), both concepts have been taken up and reimagined across disciplines. Geography has played a key role in this transition, providing theoretical, conceptual and empirical frameworks (e.g., Castree 2014a; Davoudi 2014) to examine how environmental changes intersect with social structures, spatial relations, and everyday practices across scales. By its nature, geography brings together insights from natural and social sciences. A geographical approach to resilience acknowledges both ecological and societal perspectives and how they shape each other (Weichselgartner & Kelman 2015). For the Anthropocene, geographical perspectives provide critical frameworks for understanding humans not as external to nature but as embedded within Earth systems (Castree 2014b; Lorimer 2012).

Both concepts have become widely used, even overused, as buzzwords in research and policy. On the one hand, resilience is often simplified to mean “bouncing back” recovery and also been critiqued for shifting responsibility onto individuals rather than addressing root causes of vulnerability (MacKinnon & Derickson 2013). On the other hand, Anthropocene risks have sometimes become a vague label for environmental problems generally, and the concept has been challenged for obscuring questions about which actors and systems drive environmental change (Moore 2016; 2022).

Questions of resilience and environmental change are especially pressing in northern regions, where climate change is happening multiple times faster than the global average, military confrontation has intensified, and interest to extract natural resources has increased. These regions are home to unique coevolving geological, ecological, social, and knowledge systems facing multiple simultaneous interacting pressures.

Aims and scope

This theme issue brings together research on resilience across scales, from individuals to global systems, and across disciplinary boundaries. We are particularly interested in articles integrating social and ecological aspects of resilience in the Anthropocene era, and we especially encourage submissions engaging with northern contexts. While the issue has a focus on geographical research, we are also looking forward to receiving research originating from other disciplines. Recognizing that both resilience and the Anthropocene remain debated concepts, we are interested in papers that examine them critically, exploring not only what they can help us understand but also their limitations, assumptions, and political implications.

We invite contributions on topics including, but not limited to:

  • Critical, theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches to resilience and the Anthropocene
  • Empirical research on resilience in social, ecological, and social-ecological systems
  • Scale dynamics and resilience processes from individuals to global level at various temporal trajectories
  • Resource extraction, land use change, climate change, and other pressures
  • Indigenous and local knowledge systems
  • Geopolitical dimensions of resilience and environmental change
  • Regional governance and planning related to resilience
  • More-than-human or multispecies approaches to resilience
  • Seasonal mobilities and transient human–environment encounters shaping resilience in the Anthropocene

Submission information

The contributions can take the form of:

  • Peer-reviewed research articles (ca. 6000–9000 words)
  • Peer-reviewed academic essays or review articles (ca. 3000–6000 words)
  • Editorially reviewed interventions and discussions or debates that seek to clarify and outline relevant issues related to the theme (ca. 2000–4000 words)

Important dates:

  • Abstract submission deadline: April 30, 2026
  • Full manuscript submission deadline for peer-reviewed papers: September 30, 2026
  • Full manuscript submission deadline for editorially reviewed papers: November 30, 2026

How to submit:

  1. Submit your preliminary title and abstract (maximum 500 words) by April 30, 2026 via the abstract submission form: https://link.webropol.com/s/NGP-resilience
  2. Authors will be notified whether their paper has been accepted for the theme issue.
  3. Submit your full manuscript by September 30, 2026 or November 30, 2026 via the journal submission system: https://nordia.journal.fi/about/submissions

Manuscript guidelines:

  • Writing language is English and the author is responsible for proof-reading the manuscript.
  • Manuscripts should follow the guidelines provided by Nordia Geographical Publications, available on the journal's website https://nordia.journal.fi/authors.
  • The journal follows the peer review standards set by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV) and submitted papers will undergo a rigorous peer-review process to ensure the highest academic standards and quality of the publication.
  • Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted and copyedited).
  • Papers are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) license which ensures that authors retain full copyright to their work.
  • The journal is indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Scopus.

Questions?

In case of problems and questions do not hesitate to contact roosa.ridanpaa@oulu.fi (for theme issue specific questions) and maija.toivanen@oulu.fi (for journal specific questions).

References

Castree N (2014a) Geography and the Anthropocene II: Current contributions. Geography Compass 8(7): 450–463. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12140

Castree N (2014b) The Anthropocene and the environmental humanities: Extending the conversation. Environmental Humanities 5(1): 233–260. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615496

Crutzen P (2002) Geology of mankind. Nature 415: 23. https://doi.org/10.1038/415023a

Davoudi S (2014) Climate change, securitisation of nature, and resilient urbanism. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 32(2): 360–375. https://doi.org/10.1068/c12269

Folke C (2006) Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for social–ecological systems analyses. Global Environmental Change 16(3): 253–267. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2006.04.002

Grove K (2025) Resilience, Critique and the Limits of Geographic Thought in the Anthropocene. Geoforum 166: 104405. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104405.

Holling CS (1973) Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4: 1–23. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2096802

Lorimer J (2012) Multinatural geographies for the Anthropocene. Progress in Human Geography 36(5): 593–612. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132511435352

MacKinnon D & Derickson KD (2013) From resilience to resourcefulness: A critique of resilience policy and activism. Progress in Human Geography 37(2): 253-270.

Moore JW (2016) Introduction: Anthropocene of Capitalocene? Nature, history and the crisis of capitalism. In JW Moore (ed.) Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (pp. 1-14). PM Press.

Moore JW (2022) Anthropocene, capitalocene & the flight from world history: Dialectical universalism & the geographies of class power in the capitalist world-ecology, 1492-2022. Nordia Geographical Publications 51(2): 123-146.

Powell NS, Larsen RK & van Bommel S (2014) Meeting the ‘Anthropocene’in the context of intractability and complexity: infusing resilience narratives with intersubjectivity. Resilience 2(3): 135–150. https://doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2014.948324.

Steffen W, Rockström J, Richardson K, Lenton TM, Folke C, Liverman D, et al. (2018) Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 115(33): 8252–8259. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1810141115

Weichselgartner J & Kelman I (2015) Geographies of resilience: Challenges and opportunities of a descriptive concept: Challenges and opportunities of a descriptive concept. Progress in Human Geography 39(3): 249–267. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513518834