Research Interests

I am Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. My research is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on the social and natural sciences, arts and humanities in order to develop new ways of thinking about how human society and technology fit into the deep history of the Earth, understood as an evolving planet. As well as academic publications, outputs include multi-media performance pieces, art-science exhibitions and events, and experimental participatory workshops. For my current research activities, scroll down to the section covering 2010 onwards.

My academic biography

After school I spent a decade as a musician, composer and sound artist, notably with Hit (Nottingham), The Fashionable Impure (Newcastle-upon-Tyne), Live Support System (Cardiff) and the post-minimalist ensemble Regular Music (London). I then joined Lancaster University as a mature student in 1986, completing a BA in Independent Studies in what we would now call the environmental humanities (Lancaster, 1989) and then a PhD in Sociology (Lancaster, 1993). I worked at Lancaster as an environmental sociologist, first as a postdoctoral Research Associate in the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC), led by Robin Grove-White and Brian Wynne, then as Lecturer in the Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy (IEPPP) and finally moving to the Department of Sociology in 2005, where I served as Head of Department from 2012 to 2015. I retired as Emeritus Professor in 2023, but remain ‘research-active’.

Environmental Sociology – Religion, Technology & Nature (1993 – 2010)

When working as a more conventional environmental sociologist I studied and published in various areas including environmental protest movements (Szerszynski 1997; 1999a; 2002a; 2002b; 2003b; 2005a), public participation, risk and culture (Lash et al. 1996; Szerszynski 1999b), global citizenship (Szerszynski and Toogood 2000; Szerszynski and Urry 2002; 2006; Szerszynski et al. 2000), nuclear waste management, agricultural biotechnology (Reynolds and Szerszynski 2012a; 2012b; 2014) and alternative food networks (Psarikidou and Szerszynski 2012a; 2012b).

In this period, I co-edited Risk, Environment and Modernity (Lash et al. 1996), Nature Performed: Environment, Culture and Performance (Szerszynski et al. 2003) and a special double issue of Theory Culture and Society on ‘Changing Climates’ (2010, with John Urry).

I also published on religion, nature and technology. My own monograph, Nature, Technology and the Sacred (2005b) argued that modern Western ideas of nature and technology are still profoundly shaped by the distinctive religious history of the West. This book was chosen to be the subject of featured in a peer-reviewed ‘book symposium’ in the American journal Zygon: The Journal of Religion and Science, published later that year. I also co-edited Re-Ordering Nature: Theology, Society and the New Genetics (Deane-Drummond and Szerszynski 2003) and edited a special double issue of Ecotheology on ‘Ecotheology and Postmodernity’ (2004). Papers of mine on the topic include Szerszynski (2003a; 2003c; 2004; 2005c; 2006; 2008; 2010b). Much later, I co-edited Technofutures: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Nature and the Sacred (2015), with Celia Deane-Drummond and Sigurd Bergmann. I continue to work in this area: my recent writings, both solo and with Nigel Clark, often touch on it, particularly in relation to Indigenous and non-western cultures (Clark and Szerszynski 2021b; 2023; Szerszynski 2016c; 2017d; 2019b).

Environmental Humanities – The Planetary (2010 – present)

From around 2010 I increasingly situated my work in the emerging wider interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities. My first degree in the 1980s had been grounded in humanities disciplines (philosophy, history and religious studies), and humanities disciplines and preoccupations remained an important strand of my work thereafter. I was co-organiser of the public art–science events Between Nature and Experimentality (see more below), and published in areas such as environmental philosophy, theology, religious studies and performance research.

It was from about 2010 that my work also started taking a ‘planetary turn’. The gateway for me was studying climate geoengineering – the proposed large-scale technological manipulation of the climate system with the goal of counteracting anthropogenic climate change. I explored geoengineering through a wide range of research approaches, including social theory (Szerszynski 2010a), qualitative social science, public engagement, bibliometric analysis, philosophy and policy impact. With Maialen Galarraga I developed analyses of geoengineering that combine philosophical and social scientific inquiry, drawing on biosemiotics and deconstruction (Szerszynski 2010a) (Szerszynski 2010), the philosophy of technology and fabrication (Galarraga and Szerszynski 2012) (Galarraga and Szerszynski 2012) and the sociology of knowledge and interdisciplinarity (Szerszynski and Galarraga 2013) (Szerszynski and Galarraga 2013). With Phil Macnaghten and others I conducted social research using public engagement methods to explore the kinds of world that geoengineering techniques might bring into being, and to critically assumptions of the governability of geoengineering under various future scenarios (Macnaghten and Szerszynski 2013) (Macnaghten and Szerszynski 2013; (Szerszynski et al. 2013) Szerszynski et al. 2013). I summarised much of the above work in Szerszynski (2017b) . With Paul Oldham and others I conducted bibliometric analyses of scientific research and patenting activity in geoengineering in order to make visible the often-hidden networks of collaboration, funding and problem-definition that are shaping this emergent field (Oldham et al. 2014) (Oldham, Szerszynski et al. 2014). As a spin-off, with Maialen Galarraga and Ruth McNally I also conducted EPSRC-supported critical research on wider practices of interdisciplinarity, using a variant of the PROTEE methodology developed by Bruno Latour, McNally and others.

Reflecting on geoengineering as a prospective mega-technology that would take the planet as its object led me to engage with the wider debates about ‘the Anthropocene’ – the proposed new geological epoch in which humans are seen as the determining force in the evolution of the Earth. This led to membership of the European Science Foundation/COST Task Force on ‘New Science Questions’ for the Forward Look Responses to Environmental and Societal Challenges for our Unstable Earth (RESCUE) (resulting in the much-cited paper Pálsson, Szerszynski et al. (2013); an invited contribution to the special issue of Oxford Literary Review on ‘Deconstruction in the Anthropocene’ (Szerszynski 2012); and crucially a sustained involvement with the two-year Anthropocene Project (2013-14) run by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (see list of my contributions here, including to The Anthropocene Project: An Opening, the 4-volume MIT collection Grain Vapor Ray: Textures of the Anthropocene, A Matter Theater, for which I wrote Szerszynski (2014), and the eight-day Anthropocene Campus). I also gave plenary papers on the Anthropocene at conferences in Paris (2013), Rio de Janeiro (2014), Berlin (2014), Edinburgh (2014), Munich (2015) and Stockholm (2015).

In the 2010s I also started my very productive and still ongoing writing collaboration with the geographer Nigel Clark, which led to an even wider framing for social thought: the planetary. After a short provocation by myself on the idea of a ‘planetary turn’, (Szerszynski 2019d), it resulted in many joint publications with Nigel, notably the book Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences (Clark and Szerszynski 2021b). Here we try to go beyond the specific temporal focus of the Anthropocene, engaging with the physical sciences of the Earth to argue that an adequate understanding of human social life – both as a general phenomenon and in its particulars – requires us to situate it within the story of a planet self-organising over deep time. We use two key concepts: planetary multiplicity – the capacity of planets to become other to themselves (a concept in which insights from planetary science were put in dialogue with Deleuzian thought) – and earthly multitudes – human collectives that have learned to work in a skilful way with these processes of planetary self-differentiation. We illustrate and develop this approach with a few familiar examples from human social life to show how they can be recontextualised, redescribed and illuminated in this planetary way without blunting social science imperatives for differentiation and critique. The book resulted in a book review forum in Dialogues in Human Geography, with four commentaries and our response (Clark and Szerszynski 2022c). Nigel and I have continued writing together, expanding and applying our planetary social thought to different areas, resulting in many journal articles and book chapters (Clark & Szerszynski 2021; 2022a; 2022b; 2022c; 2023; 2024; 2025). (Clark and Szerszynski 2021a; 2022b; 2022a; 2023; 2024; 2025)

Within the area of planetary thought, I have also had a number of more specific foci. One is movement. In the article ‘Planetary mobilities’ (Szerszynski 2016b), I sought to develop a language for talking about earthly mobile things that can straddle distinctions between abiotic, biotic and technological entities – by coming to understand the complex, interlinked set of mobilities in the Earth as a planetary phenomenon, radically conditioned by the long, emergent process of the self-organisation of matter over the 4.5 billion-year lifetime of the Earth. In ‘Drift as a planetary phenomenon’ (Szerszynski 2019a) I focus on ‘drift’, which I define as motion without a predetermined destination powered solely by ambient energy, and suggest that atteding to drift can lead us to a deeper understanding of the way that all earthly things move. In chapter 6 of Planetary Social Thought (Clark and Szerszynski 2021b), ‘Terra mobilis’, Nigel and I focus on focusing on wheeled transport, situating its emergence and significance within the story of the Earth. In ‘How to dismantle a bus’ (Szerszynski 2020b), I situate the bus in the long story of the Earth to reveal our debt to the Earth as a storehouse of accumulated potentialities. I then show how metaphorically and physically dismantling the bus can suggest alternative and more generous ways of moving together. In ‘Outer-space driftwork’ (forthcoming), Nigel and I explore how learning from how earthly things move can expand our imaginaties about how – and why – human beings might move in outer space.

Another focus of my planetary work is the technosphere as defined by Peter Haff as including all networked technologcal systems and devices, and as constituting an emergent planetary subsystem following its own endogenous imperatives (Peter was also a major insipration for my work on mobility – see the obituary I wrote for him). In ‘Viewing the technosphere in an interplanetary light’ (Szerszynski 2017d) I argued that understanding the Earth’s emergent technosphere can be enhanced by reflection about how technospheres might arise on other worlds. I also explored how earlier major transitions in Earth’s evolution can shed light on the shifting distribution of metabolic and reproductive powers between the human and technological parts of the contemporary technosphere, and that the long-term evolution of technical objects also suggests that they have shown a tendency to pass through their own major transitions in their relation to animality. In ‘Vom Werkzeug zur Technosphäre [From tools to technosphere]’ (Szerszynski 2019e), I explored how a planetary sphere or subsystem such as the technosphere can establish itself from apparently unpromising initial materials such as simple tools, arguing for the central role of gradients and ‘gratuities’ in the establishing of any planetary subsystem. In ‘Infrastructuring as a planetary phenomenon’ (Szerszynski 2022c) I explore infrastructuring – involving causal relations between subsystems operating at different timescales – as a strategy widely adopted by matter undergoing self-organisation under planetary conditions. In the forthcoming paper for Technophany, ‘Technology as a planetary phenomenon’, I argue that technology in the broadest sense is always already planetary: that it has its conditions of possibility in the very nature of what Nigel Clark and I call ‘planetary multiplicity’ – the capacity and tendency of planets to constantly self-differentiate.

Another current focus is deep, planetary time. This builds on a general interest in the philosophy of time, a strand that runs through early papers on environmental protest (Szerszynski 2002b; 2002a), teaching future studies to undergraduates for many of years, the short story ‘The future iridesces’ (Szerszynski 2026) and my forward for Barbara Adam and Seth Oliver’s book Drawing Futures (Szerszynski 2025). But a growing interest in deep time runs through a number of my works, notably ‘The end of the end of nature’, ‘Anthropocene monument’ (the paper and the project generally), and ‘The onomatophore of the Anthropocene’. An emerging argument across these pieces is the insight that the modern science of geology belongs not to Foucault’s (1970) ‘classical episteme’, which sees absolute time as a container for events that follow each other in predictable ways, but to his ‘modern episteme’, in which transindividual phenomena are understood as the products of contingent and irreversible histories. My article ‘The watchman’s part’ (Szerszynski 2020c) looks at the genre of scientists’ warnings to humanity, relating them to theories of time.

I am currently working on two new journal articles on the topic of deep, planetary time. In ‘Beneath the surface of deep time’, an article for Time and Society, I am arguing that the modern idea of deep, planetary time is more complex and multifaceted than recognised by either its proponents or its critics: a meshwork of human and nonhuman temporalities. I use the diverse meanings connotations of the English word ‘deep’ to reveal how ideas of deep time relate profoundly to human lived, embodied experience, and summarise the various ‘uses’ of deep-time thinking for individuals and society. In ‘Diagramming planetary time’ I critically examine the ‘viscourse’ or ‘visual discourse’ (Knorr-Cetina 1999) employed in diagrammatic representations of long-term human and planetary time, grouping them into families and assessing them against a set of criteria of what we might want such diagrams to do.

Related to the planetary focus is work on the extraplanetary, involving engagements with astrobiology (Szerszynski 2017d), planetary system formation (Szerszynski 2021c), planetary evolution (Clark and Szerszynski 2025) and space travel (Szerszynski forthcoming; Clark and Szerszynski forthcoming). An ongoing project of mine with an extraplanetary focus is Ringmind (http://ringmind.org) – an interdisciplinary art-science-humanities project about the self-organising powers of planetary rings that I initiated in 2019. It has involved collaboration between Sociology, Physics and the School of Computing and Communication at Lancaster University, independent digital artists, students and interns, and has received financial support from Lancaster University, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) and Arts Council England. It is conceived as an exercise in speculative astrophysics, and involves (i) interdisciplinary speculative research, (ii) art-science performances and (iii) public engagement events with hands-on, interactive simulations – on screens and on 3D VR goggles – through which the public can gain familiarity with the phenomenon of planetary rings and explore speculative questions about what rings might do – for example at ‘Life in a planetary ring’ in Lancaster City library in April 2024.

Cutting across much of the above categories of recent and current work is an interest in thinking philosophically about matter-as-such. Both Nigel and I are concerned to extend social thought beyond a focus on living forms, to think about the inherent powers and potentiality of nonorganic matter even when it is not associated with living organisms, let alone humans – what we call the ‘much-more-than-human’ (Clark and Szerszynski 2024). Papers addressing the idea of nonorganic life directly include ‘Life in the open air’ (Szerszynski 2015a), and a forthcoming lexicon entry with Nigel Clark. My work on motion (such as Szerszynski 2016b; 2019a) and action (Szerszynski 2020a) seeks to describe moving and acting things in ways that do not assume a sharp boundary between the powers of living and non-living things. In ‘Planetary alterity, solar cosmopolitics and the parliament of planets’ (Szerszynski 2021c) I speculate that deciding, reckoning, counting and accommodating might be operations that can be carried out by planets as they form and arrange themselves around a central star. A couple of my papers on ‘planetary memory’ explore remembering – and forgetting – as something that planets themselves can do (Szerszynski 2019c; 2022d). In ‘Colloidal social theory’ (Szerszynski 2022a) I argue that human social life participates in a colloidal metapattern of repetition and mediation that is manifest across diverse material substrates and spatial scales: that colloids are social and society is colloidal (later extending this argument to ‘culture’ (Szerszynski 2022b)). In my ongoing work on continuous matter I am also exploring how to think philosophically about entities and phenomena such as air, rock and water that are not organised into countable, discrete objects (Szerszynski 2021d). The Ringmind project on self-organisation in planetary rings also touches on ideas of nonorganic life.

The arts

Over the years I have organised or co-organised a number of arts-based events. In July 2000 I co-organised the four-day conference and art festival Between Nature: Explorations in Ecology and Performance (Lancaster, July 2000), which resulted in two edited collections, Nature Performed (Szerszynski et al. 2003) and Performing Nature Performing Nature: Explorations in Ecology and the Arts. In 2009-10 I directed Experimentality, a year-long collaborative research programme on experimentation in the sciences, arts and wider society, consisting of five two-day interdisciplinary workshops, a three-day international conference, a strand of the FutureEverything festival in Manchester, two public debates (with FutureEverything and the Royal Society), three art exhibitions (at the Peter Scott Gallery and Storey Gallery, Lancaster), 15-cross branded local arts events, and an evening of experimental music, video and live art. In 2014 Anthropocene Monument, with Bruno Latour and Olivier Michelon used the idea of a monument to the Anthropocene to trigger debate about knowledge and aesthetics in an age of global environmental change. An exhibition of monument designs from thirty artists at Les Abattoirs Museum of Contemporary Art, Toulouse, and a three-day colloquium, chaired by myself and Bruno Latour, with 100 participants including natural scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars and artists. The event and exhibition were covered in the French national press, in Libération and Le Monde, and resulted in a journal article (Szerszynski 2017a) and a book chapter (Szerszynski and Jones 2024). Nathan Jones and I are currently working on a web-based artwork based on the exhibition and the wider Anthropocene Monument project. I have worked quite a bit with the Berlin-based artist Tomàs Saraceno, especially in relation to the launching of his solar balloons and his wider Aerocene initiative. Ringmind also has a sci-art dimension. I have published two critical essays about sci-art (Szerszynski 2021b; 2024), a poem, ‘Cosmic hail’ (Szerszynski 2021a) and a short story, ‘The future iridesces’ (Szerszynski 2026).

But my more sustained creative practice has involved a hybrid genre of performance as a method of exploring and communicating complex issues concerning technological and cultural change – for example The Dust Séance (with Tomàs Saraceno and Sasha Engelmann), ‘Drift as a planetary phenomenon’ and ‘Planetary spirit’ (performed in Copenhagen in 2017). Other performance pieces, devise with visual artists, use ‘found’ textual genres, fictional future scenarios, video and soundscapes to create an imaginative space in which audiences can engage with possible post-planetary and post-human futures. The first of these was ‘The Twilight of the Machines’ (the script was published as Szerszynski (2015c)), ‘The Onomatophore of the Anthropocene’, first performed in Paris in 2013 and published as Szerszynski (2015b)) and ‘The Martian Book of the Dead’ (commissioned by HKW in 2014 and published as Szerszynski (2016a). The latter two, and the future fiction piece ‘Liberation through hearing in the planetary transition’ (Szerszynski 2014), are set in the same imagined future; I discuss the ideas behind this in a book chapter (Szerszynski 2017c). I am currently revisiting some of these performances to produce ‘spoken operas’ with musical soundtracks, and animated graphics by Adam York Gregory – completed so far are ‘The Twilight of the Machines 2023’ and ‘The Onomatophore of the Anthropocene 2026’.

References

Clark, Nigel and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2021a) ‘Planetary multiplicity, earthly multitudes: interscalar practices for a volatile planet,’ in Narratives of Scale in the Anthropocene: Imagining Human Responsibility in an Age of Scalar Complexity, ed. Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes, New York: Routledge, pp. 75–93. http://doi.org/10.4324/9781003136989-7

Clark, Nigel and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2021b) Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences, Cambridge: Polity. https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509526345

Clark, Nigel and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2022a) ‘Elemental computation: from nonhuman media to more-than-digital information systems,’ in Routledge Handbook of the Digital Environmental Humanities, ed. Charles Travis, Deborah P. Dixon, Luke Bergmann, Robert Legg, and Arlene Crampsie, London: Routledge, pp. 516–27. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003082798-40

Clark, Nigel and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2022b) ‘Rifted subjects, fractured Earth: ‘progress’ as learning to live on a self-transforming planet,’ The Sociological Review, 70(2), pp. 385–401. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261221084783

Clark, Nigel and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2022c) ‘Thinking through the Earth: surviving and thriving at a planetary threshold,’ Dialogues in Human Geography, pp. 20438206221129204. https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206221129204

Clark, Nigel and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2023) ‘Planetary technics, earthly spirits,’ in Religion, Materialism and Ecology, ed. Sigurd Bergmann, Kate Rigby, and Peter Scott, London: Routledge, pp. 48–65. http://doi.org/10.4324/9781003320722-4

Clark, Nigel and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2024) ‘Planetary thought and the much-more-than-human,’ in The Routledge International Handbook of More-Than-Human Studies, ed. Adrian Franklin, London: Routledge, pp. 101–13.

Clark, Nigel and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2025) ‘What can a planet do?,’ cultural geographies, 32(3), pp. 331–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740251326904

Clark, Nigel and Bronislaw Szerszynski (forthcoming) ‘Outer-space driftwork,’ in The Off-Earth Atlas, ed. V. Buchli, D. Jeevendrampillai, D. Mercier, P. Pitrou, I. Praet, G. Sim, and E. de Smet, Bristol: Intellect Books.

Deane-Drummond, Celia, Sigurd Bergmann and Bronislaw Szerszynski, ed. (2015) Technofutures, Nature, and the Sacred: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate.

Deane-Drummond, Celia and Bronislaw Szerszynski, ed. (2003) Re-ordering Nature: Theology, Society and the New Genetics, Edinburgh: T&T Clark.

Galarraga, Maialen and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2012) ‘Making climates: solar radiation management and the ethics of fabrication,’ in Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management, ed. Christopher Preston, Lexington, MA: Lexington, pp. 211–25.

Lash, Scott, Bronislaw Szerszynski and Brian Wynne, ed. (1996) Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology, London: Sage.

Macnaghten, Phil and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2013) ‘Living the global social experiment: an analysis of public discourse on geoengineering and its implications for governance,’ Global Environmental Change, 23(2), pp. 465–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2012.12.008

Oldham, Paul, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Jack Stilgoe, Calum Brown, Bella Eacott and Andy Yuille (2014) ‘Mapping the landscape of climate engineering,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 372(2031), pp. 20140065. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2014.0065

Pálsson, Gísli, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Sverker Sörlin, John Marks, Bernard Avril, Carole Crumley, Heide Hackmann, Poul Holm, John Ingram, Alan Kirman, Mercedes Pardo Buendía and Rifka Weehuizen (2013) ‘Reconceptualizing the ‘Anthropos’ in the Anthropocene: Integrating the social sciences and humanities in global environmental change research,’ Environmental Science & Policy, 28, pp. 3–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2012.11.004

Psarikidou, Katerina and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2012a) ‘The moral economy of civic food networks in Manchester,’ International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food, 19(3), pp. 309–27. https://www.ijsaf.org/index.php/ijsaf/article/view/207

Psarikidou, Katerina and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2012b) ‘Growing the social: alternative agrofood networks and social sustainability in the urban ethical foodscape,’ Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 8(1), pp. 30–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2012.11908082

Reynolds, Larry and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2014) ‘The post-political and the end of nature: the case of agricultural biotechnology,’ in The Post-Political and Its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Spectres of Radical Politics, ed. Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 48–66. https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-post-political-and-its-discontents.html

Reynolds, Laurence and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2012a) ‘Contested agro-technological futures: the GMO and the construction of European space,’ in Exploring Central and Eastern Europe’s Biotechnology Landscape, ed. Peter T. Robbins and Farah Huzair, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 177–200. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9784-2_9

Reynolds, Laurence and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2012b) ‘Neoliberalism and technology: perpetual innovation or perpetual crisis?,’ in Neoliberalism and Technoscience: Critical Assessments, ed. Luigi Pellizzoni and Marja Ylönen, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 27–46. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781315597775

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (1997) ‘The varieties of ecological piety,’ Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion, 1(1), pp. 37–55. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43809625

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (1999a) ‘Performing politics: the dramatics of environmental protest,’ in Culture and Economy after the Cultural Turn, ed. Larry Ray and Andrew Sayer, London: Sage, pp. 211–28.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (1999b) ‘Risk and trust - the performative dimension,’ Environmental Values, 8(2), pp. 239–52. https://doi.org/10.3197/096327199129341815

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2002a) ‘Ecological rites: ritual action in environmental protest events,’ Theory, Culture and Society, 19(3), pp. 305–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327602401081521

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2002b) ‘Wild times and domesticated times: the temporalities of environmental lifestyles and politics,’ Landscape and Urban Planning, 61(2-4), pp. 181–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-2046(02)00112-3

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2003a) ‘At reason's end: the inoperative liturgy of risk society,’ in Re-ordering nature: theology, society and the new genetics, ed. Celia Deane-Drummond and Bronislaw Szerszynski, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, pp. 202–20.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2003b) ‘Marked bodies: environmental activism and political semiotics,’ in Media and the restyling of politics: consumerism, celebrity and cynicism, ed. John Corner and Dick Pels, London: Sage, pp. 190–206. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-2046(02)00112-3

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2003c) ‘That deep surface: the Human Genome Project and the death of the human,’ in Brave new world? theology, ethics and the Human Genome Project, ed. Celia Deane-Drummond, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, pp. 145–63.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2004) ‘Augustinian ecological democracy: postmodern nature and the City of God,’ Ecotheology, 9(3), pp. 338–58. https://doi.org/10.1558/ecot.9.3.338.59072

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2005a) ‘Beating the unbound: political theatre in the laboratory without walls,’ in Performing Nature: Explorations in Ecology and the Arts, ed. Gabriella Giannachi and Nigel Stewart, Frankfurt and New York: Peter Lang, pp. 181–97.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2005b) Nature, Technology and the Sacred, Oxford: Blackwell. https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/Nature%2C+Technology+and+the+Sacred-p-9780631236047

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2005c) ‘Rethinking the secular: science, technology, and religion today,’ Zygon, 40(4), pp. 813–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9744.2005.00709.x

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2006) ‘Techno-demonology: naming, understanding and redeeming the a/human agencies with which we share our world,’ Ecotheology, 11(1), pp. 57–75. https://doi.org/10.1558/ecot.2006.11.1.57

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2008) ‘Technologie, religie en de beheersing van de natuurin,’ in Deus et Machina: de Verwevenheid van Technologie en Religie, ed. Michiel D.J. van Well, Den Haag: STT, pp. 26–33.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2010a) ‘Reading and writing the weather: climate technics and the moment of responsibility,’ Theory, Culture & Society, 27(2-3), pp. 9–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263276409361915

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2010b) ‘Technology and monotheism: a dialogue with neo-Calvinist philosophy,’ Philosophia Reformata, 75, pp. 43–59. https://doi.org/10.1163/22116117-90000481

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2012) ‘The end of the end of nature: the Anthropocene and the fate of the human,’ Oxford Literary Review, 34(2), pp. 165–84. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44030881

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2014) ‘Liberation through hearing in the planetary transition: funerary practices in twenty-second-century Mangalayana Buddhism,’ in Grain Vapor Ray: Textures of the Anthropocene, Vol. 3, ed. Katrin Klingan, Ashkan Sepahvand, Christoph Rosol, and Bernd M. Scherer, Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 149–64.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2015a) ‘Life in the open air,’ in What Is Life?, Issues in Science and Theology volume 8, ed., ed. Dirk Evers, Michael Fuller, Antje Jackelén, and Knut-Willy Saether, Berlin: Springer, pp. 27–41.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2015b) ‘The onomatophore of the Anthropocene: Commission on Planetary Ages Decision CC87966424/49,’ in The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis, ed. Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and François Gemenne, London: Routledge, pp. 177–83.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2015c) ‘The twilight of the machines,’ in Technofutures, Nature and the Sacred: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Celia Deane-Drummond, Sigurd Bergmann, and Bronislaw Szerszynski, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 241–57.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2016a) ‘The Martian book of the dead,’ in Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene, ed. Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino, London: Rowman & Littlefield International, pp. 325–30.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2016b) ‘Planetary mobilities: movement, memory and emergence in the body of the Earth,’ Mobilities, 11(4), pp. 614–28. http://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2016.1211828

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2016c) ‘Praise be to you, earth-beings,’ Environmental Humanities, 8(2), pp. 291–7.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2017a) ‘The Anthropocene monument: on relating geological and human time,’ European Journal of Social Theory, 20(1), pp. 111–31. http://doi.org/10.1177/1368431016666087

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2017b) ‘Coloring climates: imagining a geoengineered world,’ in The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, ed. Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann, London: Routledge, pp. 82–90.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2017c) ‘From the Anthropocene epoch to a new Axial Age: using theory fictions to explore geo-spiritual futures,’ in Religion in the Anthropocene, ed. Celia Deane-Drummond, Sigurd Bergmann, and Markus Vogt, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, pp. 35–52.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2017d) ‘Gods of the Anthropocene: geo-spiritual formations in the Earth’s new epoch,’ Theory, Culture & Society, 34(2–3), pp. 253–75. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263276417691102

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2017e) ‘Viewing the technosphere in an interplanetary light,’ The Anthropocene Review, 4(2), pp. 92–102. http://doi.org/10.1177/2053019616670676

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2019a) ‘Drift as a planetary phenomenon,’ Performance Research, 23(7), pp. 136–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2018.1558436

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2019b) ‘Epilogue: indigenous worlds and planetary futures,’ in Indigenous Perceptions of the End of the World: Creating a Cosmopolitics of Change, ed. Rosalyn Bold, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 203–9.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2019c) ‘How the Earth remembers and forgets,’ in Political Geology: Active Stratigraphies and the Making of Life, ed. Adam Bobbette and Amy Donovan, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 219–36. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98189-5_8

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2019d) ‘A planetary turn for the social sciences?,’ in Mobilities and Complexities, ed. Morten Tønnessen, Silver Rattasepp, and Kristin Amstrong Oma, London: Routledge, pp. 223–7. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429470097-32/planetary-turn-social-sciences-bronislaw-szerszynski

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2019e) ‘Von den Werkzeugen zur Technosphäre [From tools to technosphere],’ in Technosphäre, ed. Katrin Klingan and Christoph Rosol, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, pp. 48–63. https://archiv.hkw.de/de/media/publikationen/2017_1/2017_technosphaere.php

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2020a) ‘The grammar of action in the critical zone,’ in Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Cambridge, MA; Karlsruhe: MIT; ZKM.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2020b) ‘How to dismantle a bus: planetary mobilities as method,’ in Handbook of Research Methods and Applications for Mobilities, ed. Monika Büscher, Malene Freudendal-Pedersen, Sven Kesselring, and Nikolaj Grauslund Kristensen, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 398–409. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788115469.00047

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2020c) ‘The watchman’s part: Earth time, human time and the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity”,’ Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities, 1(1), pp. 91–9. https://doi.org/10.46863/ecocene.39

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2021a) ‘Cosmic hail,’ Das Questões, 13, pp. 165–7. https://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/dasquestoes/article/view/41335/32003

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2021b) ‘On representation and speculation: a case for the use of representational practices in SciArt,’ Global Discourse, 11(1-2), pp. 131–5. https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/gd/11/1-2/article-p131.xml

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2021c) ‘Planetary alterity, solar cosmopolitics and the parliament of planets,’ in Environmental Alterities, ed. Cristóbal Bonelli and Antonia Walford, Manchester: Mattering Press, pp. 204–26. http://doi.org/10.28938/9781912729142

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2021d) ‘Toward a continuous-matter philosophy,’ Stasis, 11(1), pp. 181–207. http://www.stasisjournal.net/index.php/journal/article/view/192

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2022a) ‘Colloidal social theory: thinking about material animacy and sociality beyond solids and fluids,’ Theory, Culture & Society, 39(2), pp. 131–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211030989

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2022b) ‘Culture and the much-more-than-human: the case of colloids,’ Cultural Science, 14(1), pp. 120–7. https://sciendo.com/de/article/10.2478/csj-2024-0016

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2022c) ‘Infrastructuring as a planetary phenomenon: timescale separation and causal closure in more-than-human systems,’ Historical Social Research, 47(4), pp. 193–214. http://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.47.2022.44

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2022d) ‘O Antropoceno e a memória da Terra [The Anthropocene and the memory of the Earth],’ in Os Mil Nomes de Gaia: do Antropoceno à Idade da Terra, Volume 1, ed. Déborah Danowski, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Rafael Saldanha, tr. Vinícius Portella, Rio de Janeiro: Editora Machado, pp. 86–105.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2024) ‘Um die Welt zu retten, müssen wir mit ihr brechen: Kunst und Experiment auf einem mehr-als-menschlichen Planeten’ [‘In order to save the world, we have to break it: art and experiment on a more-than-human planet],’ springerin, 24(4), pp. 22–6. https://www.springerin.at/2024/4/

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2025) ‘Drawing out the future,’ in Drawing Futures: An Alchemy of Words and Images, ed. Barbara Adam Adam and Seth Oliver, Llanelli: Graffeg.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2026) ‘The future iridesces,’ in Spectral Futures: Fabulations of Worlds to Come, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 233–44.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2026 forthcoming) ‘Multiplanetary,’ in Keywords for Social Studies of Outer Space, ed. Alexander Taylor, London: Palgrave.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw and Maialen Galarraga (2013) ‘Geoengineering knowledge: interdisciplinarity and the shaping of climate engineering research,’ Environment and Planning A, 45(12), pp. 2817–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a45649

Szerszynski, Bronislaw, Wallace Heim and Claire Waterton, ed. (2003) Nature Performed: Environment, Culture and Performance, Oxford: Blackwell/Sociological Review.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw and Nathan Jones (2024) ‘Planetary memory in the Anthropocene: toward a monument for a new geological epoch,’ in [Counter-]Monuments: Memory Practices in Public Space, ed. Maria Engelskirchen, Ursula Frohne, Corinna Kuhn, and Marianne Wagner, Bielefeld: transcript.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw, Matthew Kearnes, Phil Macnaghten, Richard Owen and Jack Stilgoe (2013) ‘Why Solar Radiation Management geoengineering and democracy won’t mix,’ Environment and Planning A, 45(12), pp. 2809–16. http://doi.org/10.1068/a45649

Szerszynski, Bronislaw and Mark Toogood (2000) ‘Global citizenship, the environment and the media,’ in Environmental Risks and the Media, ed. Stuart Allan, Barbara Adam, and Cynthia Carter, London: Routledge, pp. 218–28.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw and John Urry (2002) ‘Cultures of cosmopolitanism,’ Sociological Review, 50(4), pp. 461–81.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw and John Urry (2006) ‘Visuality, mobility and the cosmopolitan: inhabiting the world from afar,’ British Journal of Sociology, 57(1), pp. 113–31.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw, John Urry and Greg Myers (2000) ‘Mediating global citizenship,’ in The Daily Globe: Environmental Change, the Public and the Media, ed. Joe Smith, London: Earthscan, pp. 97–114.