This is why this special issue, Human Dimensions of Air Quality, focuses on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research involving social science that integrates and expands current understandings of the complex affective, cognitive, and behavioral relationships humans have with air quality. Thus, across settings, knowledge of the underlying social, cultural, and psychological drivers and barriers to individuals’ decisions to promote and access good air quality remains deserving of further inquiry and synthesis.
For this special issue, the guest editors Chris Zajchowski (Old Dominion University), Joerg Koenigstorfer (Technical University Munich) and Mary Mostafanezhad (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) invite submissions that advance understandings and offer explanatory potential for how individuals, groups, and societies create, interact with, and respond to varying levels of air quality. They seek papers that critically address how and with what socio-ecological implications air quality comes to be understood as a resource to be protected. Social science contributions from diverse disciplines that provide conceptual, empirical, mixed methods and applied research related to the theme will be considered. Potential submission topics include but are not limited to:
- Public health messaging through air quality advisories
- Community responses to wildfire smoke and prescribed burning
- Air quality and social relations at the wildland-urban interface
- Policy for air resource management in parks and protected areas
- Political ecologies of air pollution
- Social-ecological systems modeling of human-airshed interactions
- Politics of uncertainty surrounding the causes and effects of air pollution
- Traditional ecological knowledge and air quality
- Air pollution and Covid-19
For a complete overview of the subject areas as well as the full tender text, please click here.
Submission Instructions:
Prospective authors are encouraged to contact the guest editors regarding topics of interest or with questions regarding the special issue. Abstract submission of 150 words should be e-mailed as MS word attachment file by June 1, 2021, to czajchow(at)odu.edu, joerg.koenigstorfer(at)tum.de, and mostafan(at)hawaii.edu. Guest editors will invite selected authors by July 1, 2021.