Call for Contributors: Canada’s Great Acceleration

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Canada’s Great Acceleration

A NiCHE Series

Proposal Deadline: 18 February 2026

As a social and political idea, as much a material and socioeconomic reality, Canada is a child of the Anthropocene. If the Earth has shifted from the Holocene into a new epoch of planetary history, then Canada has served as an incubator for its defining concepts, a laboratory for the experiments that gave it form, and ground zero for witnessing its consequences.1

So what would a framework for Canadian environmental history look like if scholars attended to the country’s role in, and contributions to, the rapid socioeconomic and Earth system trends that have come to define the human imprint on the planet, which are widely referred to as the Great Acceleration?2

The Great Acceleration refers to the period after WWII when the pace and scale of socioecological changes departed dramatically from previous trajectories. This reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history would need to evaluate the patterns of changing social relations, economic activity, and environmental transformation in Canada since 1867, which characterized the material precursors to the key indicators of the Great Acceleration after 1950. It would also need to extend the scope of analysis backwards to examine the ideas and ideologies that informed anthropocentric relations with the non-human world well before the mid-twentieth century, including imperialism, colonialism, liberalism, and capitalism.3

With the ambitious project of developing a new framework for Canadian environmental history in mind, NiCHE invites contributions to a blog series on Canada’s Great Acceleration.

Contributions may include, but are not limited to:

  • New research in Canadian environmental history that engages with the concept of the Great Acceleration,
  • Reassessments, reframings, synthesis work, or revisionist interpretations of existing Canadian environmental history with the framework of the Great Acceleration,
  • Efforts at crafting a periodization of Canadian environmental history within the terms of reference of the Great Acceleration,
  • Methodological approaches to studying Canadian environmental history that draw from, or reflect the importance, of key indicators of the Great Acceleration,
  • Novel approaches or tools that make it possible to synthesize various subfields of Canadian environmental history in ways that are informed by the concept of the Great Acceleration,
  • Critiques or alternatives to the framework of the Great Acceleration as a means of understanding Canadian environmental history,
  • Other ideas that might help scholars undertake a reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history in the 21st century.

Contributions should be between 800-1200 words and may include images and other multi-media. Scholars from all stages of their career (students, postdocs, early career, professors, etc) are encouraged to contribute. Anyone interested in contributing to this series should contact Andrew Watson by email (a.watson [@] usask.ca) by February 18 with a short 200-word expression of interest.

Accepted contributions will be due in early April 2026, and final posts in the series will be published on the NiCHE website in May and June 2026.

Notes

1. Alan MacEachern, “Canada’s Anthropocene: A Roundtable.” The Otter. January 24, 2018; Sean Kheraj, “Culpability and Canada’s Anthropocene: A Response.” The Otter. January 29, 2018; F.M. McCarthy, et al., ”The Varved Succession of Crawford Lake, Milton, Ontario, Canada as a Candidate Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point for the Anthropocene Series.” The Anthropocene Review, 10,1 (2023): 146-176.
2. J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. Havard University Press, 2014; Will Steffen, et al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration.” The Anthropocene Review, 2,1 (2015): 81-98.
3. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry, 35,2 (2009): 197-222; Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. PM Press, 2016; Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 16,4 (2017): 761-780.

Featured image: Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
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Andrew Watson

Assistant Professor at University of Saskatchewan
Andrew is the Director of NiCHE and Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan. His current research includes commodities and urban metabolism in Toronto between the mid 19th and mid 20th centuries; and a study of the relationship between liberalism and fossil fuel energy in Canada in the first half of the 20th century. His first book, Making Muskoka: Tourism, Rural Identity, and Sustainability, 1870-1920, was published in 2022 with UBC Press.

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