Substituting one thing for another–things, people, habits–happens all the time. Substitution is so mundane that it can easily be taken for granted as a natural or insignificant process. Yet attention to substitution, including when and how it takes place, helps reveal a wide array of social, technical, and political dynamics. This series contributes to the growing scholarship that explores examples of substitution developed or emerging amid environmental threats, including renewable fuels and materials, land-use and labor changes, carbon metrics and standards, and more. Fourteen essays from a wide range of geographic locations, topical perspectives, and scholarly positions examine the ideological work that the concept and/or act of substitution performs as an ordering device and in its practical consequences. They consider how substitution is made common sense, what it achieves in success and failure, and what is obscured, masked, reframed, and displaced through or as substitution. The series ultimately shows how thinking about substitution constitutes a method for tracing continuities amid seeming change, disruption amid seeming continuity, and possibility within constraint.

Acknowledgements

We thank Nandita Badami for early conversations around substitution, and likewise the members of the 2019 AAA panel, “Different but Not Different: Ethnographies of Substitution,” organized by Katie Ulrich and Nandita Badami. We also thank the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies and UCL Anthropocene for facilitating and funding conversations and research that led to these ideas. Finally, we are appreciative to Lucy Sabin for letting us use her artwork as this series’ cover image.