By Elaine Stratford, co-editor of Palgrave Series in Elemental Thinking

The Social Science Matters campaign exists to show how we make sense of the world’s most pressing problems. Social science matters because it explains how power operates and in what ways inequalities persist and helps us think about the resources that we have to imagine alternatives into being.

Social science’s reach is arguably greater when placed in conversation with the geohumanities, environmental humanities, and other allied disciplines and fields. These links remind us that questions of justice, culture, and meaning are inseparable from the social, cultural, and earth systems on which life depends. They bring human geography, history, literature, philosophy, and the arts together with ecology, climate science, and technology studies, for example. Social science is enriched by these conversations, and the work social scientists do help to ground them in our lived experiences in place and on the move over the whole life course.

One way to enhance these crucial labours is to return to thinking about the elements. Depending on one’s cultural perspectives, earth, air, fire, water, metal, or wood are more than the ‘stuff’ of the physical world. They are categories of human thought and imagination, shaping and even structuring how we live, govern, and narrate ourselves and others into existence. This is the premise of the Palgrave Series in Elemental Thinking, a new book series with Palgrave Macmillan that I edit with Peter Adey (Monash University, Australia), Sasha Engelmann (Royal Holloway University of London, UK), Weiqiang Lin (National University of Singapore), and Aya Nassar (Durham University, UK).

The series is grounded in the idea that elements influence what lives are possible and affect how those lives unfold—in our bodies, social settings, environs, and worlding processes at varied scales.

Our invitation to authors and readers is to rethink the elements as central to questions of identity, power, knowledge, survival, and our capacities to flourish. We hope in the process that authors attend to how elements form, constrain, and enable bodily, emotional, spiritual, cultural, political, and other experiences.

The series will publish short and long books and edited collections that use elemental framings to engage deeply with social questions: for example, how fire shapes cultures of hazard, how air is tied to health and surveillance, how earth is implicated in extraction and dispossession, how water is mobilised for violence and justice. The point is not to return to the “classical elements” as quaint metaphors, but to enrol them—and other elemental apprehensions in diverse cultural traditions—as critical lenses to understand and evaluate how we live in the elemental world and explore critically and creatively how we might live differently.

The Drowned

The first title in the series, my own book The Drowned: Elements of Loss and Repair, takes water as its focus.

The Drowned examines how water has mediated violence and loss, and possibilities for recognition, respect, posthumous dignity, and repair. It shows how infants have been drowned in shame and silence; witches ducked in muddy ponds; enslaved people cast overboard and counted as lost cargo; rivers enrolled in Indigenous massacre; assisted and forced migrants forced onto oceans in hope and despair and waterboarding deployed to create the living drowned in shattering examples of institutional cruelty; and how flood myths foreshadow today’s climate crises.

In this work, I insist that water is never neutral. It marks who is remembered and who is forgotten, who is celebrated and who is rendered abject. The work calls us to mourn, to reflect on posthumous dignity and justice, and to consider possibilities for repair and forgiveness.

Why this conversation matters

In an age of rising seas, refugee drownings, and intensifying floods, The Drowned speaks to urgent global challenges. It also exemplifies the intellectual and political force of elemental thinking. By tracing how water has been mobilized across centuries and geographies, the book shows that, especially in borderlands with other fields, social science matters because it explains our places and movements in the past equips us to face and move with turbulent futures.

Forgetting is political—it always benefits some while harming others. Memory is elemental—water, earth, air, and fire hold and mediate our histories. Care is possible—recognition, responsibility, and even forgiveness can reshape how we live with loss. These lessons are not abstract. They implicate how we make policy, build institutions, and sustain communities in the face of the climate crisis, forced migration, and enduring inequities.

The challenge is to confront difficult knowledge without despair. Drownings, massacres, and displacements are challenging subjects. But they also reveal resources for reimagining responsibility. By facing violence clearly, we can act with greater care.

More broadly, the Elemental Thinking series will show, we hope, how social scientists and related others in associated fields can do such work: moving across disciplines, integrating theory with practice, and engaging audiences beyond the academy. The Drowned is the first step.

Social science matters because it helps us reckon with violence and injustice while offering tools for transformation. Elemental Thinking extends this ambition by returning to the elements as critical frameworks for understanding. And The Drowned begins the journey by showing what water has done—and what it still demands of us.

Elaine Stratford is Professor of Human Geography and Planning at the University of Tasmania, Australia. Her research explores how people flourish and languish in place and on the move. University of Tasmania Discovery Page. Amazon author. Network with me at Linked In.