Author: Arne Johan Vetlesen Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0429594097 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 378
Book Description
This book engages with the classic philosophical question of mind and matter, seeking to show its altered meaning and acuteness in the era of the Anthropocene. Arguing that matter, and, more broadly, the natural world, has been misconceived since Descartes, it explores the devastating impact that this has had in practice in the West. As such, alternatives are needed, whether philosophical ones such as those offered by figures such as Whitehead and Nagel, or posthumanist ones such as those developed by Barad and Latour. Drawing on recent anthropological work ignored by philosophers and sociologists alike, the author considers a radical alternative cosmology: animism understood as panpsychism in practice. This understanding of mind and matter, of culture and nature, is then turned against present-day posthumanist critiques of what the Anthropocene amounts to, showing them up as philosophically misguided, politically mute, and ethically wanting. A ground-breaking reconceptualization of the natural world and our treatment of it, Cosmologies of the Anthropocene will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory, philosophy and anthropology with interests in our understanding of and relationship with nature.
Author: Anu Valtonen Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing ISBN: 1839108703 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
Featuring an international, multidisciplinary set of contributors, this thought-provoking book reimagines established narratives of the Anthropocene to allow differences in regions and contexts to be taken seriously, emphasising the importance of localised and situated knowledge. It offers critical engagement with the debates around the Anthropocene by challenging the dominant techno-rational agenda that often prevails in socio-political and academic discussions.
Author: Alison Bashford Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226828603 Category : Cosmology Languages : en Pages : 392
Book Description
"This book brings the history of the geosciences and world cosmologies together, exploring many traditions, including Chinese, South and Southeast Asian, Pacific, Islamic, and Indigenous conceptions of earth's origin and makeup. Together the chapters ask: How have different ideas about the sacred, animate, and earthly changed modern environmental science? How have different world traditions understood human and geological origins? How does the inclusion of multiple cosmologies change the meaning of the Anthropocene and the ongoing global climate crisis? By thinking carefully through and with other cosmologies, New Earth Histories sets a new agenda for history. The chapters consider debates about the age and structure of the earth, how humans and earth systems interact, and empire is conceived in multiple traditions. The methods the authors deploy are diverse-from cultural history, visual and material studies, and ethnography, to name a few-and the effect is to highlight how earth knowledge emerged from historically specific situations. New Earth Histories provides both a framework for studying science at a global scale and fascinating examples to educate as well as inspire future work. Essential reading for students and scholars of earth science history, environmental humanities, history of science and religion, and science and empire"--
Author: Earl T. Harper Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000453502 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
Bringing together scholars from English literature, geography, politics, the arts, environmental humanities and sociology, Imagining Apocalyptic Politics in the Anthropocene contributes to the emerging debate between bodies of thought first incepted by scholars such as Mouffe, Whyte, Kaplan, Hunt, Swyngedouw and Malm about how apocalyptic events, narratives and imaginaries interact with societal and individual agency historically and in the current political moment. Exploring their own empirical and philosophical contexts, the authors examine the forms of political acting found in apocalyptic imaginaries and reflect on what this means for contemporary society. By framing their arguments around either pre-apocalyptic, peri-apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic narratives and events, a timeline emerges throughout the volume which shows the different opportunities for political agency the anthropocenic subject can enact at the various stages of apocalyptic moments. Featuring a number of creative interventions exclusively produced for the work from artists and fiction writers who engage with the themes of apocalypse, decline, catastrophe and disaster, this innovative book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the politics of climate change, the environmental humanities, literary criticism and eco-criticism.
Author: Amanda H. Lynch Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 026234890X Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 252
Book Description
A proposal to reframe the Anthropocene as an age of actual and emerging coexistence with earth system variability, encompassing both human dignity and environmental sustainability. Is this the Anthropocene, the age in which humans have become a geological force, leaving indelible signs of their activities on the earth? The narrative of the Anthropocene so far is characterized by extremes, emergencies, and exceptions—a tale of apocalypse by our own hands. The sense of ongoing crisis emboldens policy and governance responses that challenge established systems of sovereignty and law. The once unacceptable—geoengineering technology, for example, or authoritarian decision making—are now anticipated and even demanded by some. To counter this, Amanda Lynch and Siri Veland propose a reframing of the Anthropocene—seeing it not as a race against catastrophe but as an age of emerging coexistence with earth system variability. Lynch and Veland examine the interplay between our new state of ostensible urgency and the means by which this urgency is identified and addressed. They examine how societies, including Indigenous societies, have understood such interplays; explore how extreme weather and climate weave into the Anthropocene narrative; consider the tension between the short time scale of disasters and the longer time scale of sustainability; and discuss both international and national approaches to Anthropocene governance. Finally, they argue for an Anthropocene of coexistence that embraces both human dignity and sustainability.
Author: Jack Pearce Publisher: De Gruyter Open ISBN: 9783110567304 Category : Languages : en Pages : 135
Book Description
This book seeks to bridge the gap between leading edge scholarship about the nature of the physical, tangible Universe and the nature of the life process on Earth on the one hand, and on the other hand challenges facing human society as to the current revolution in energy sources, national and international levels of political and economic organization, and humanity's impacts upon the global ecosystem which have given rise to the depiction of a new era in earthlife termed the "anthropocene". The author's public career included responsibilities for economic policy formulation and implementation at the United States Department of Justice, the United States Agency for International Development, and a White House Office of Consumer Affairs. This provided an elevated overview of many current economic and political issues. These responsibilities stimulated a multi-decade exploration of leading academics' insights into the relational structuring of the Universe, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, complexity in the universe, and the structure of the life process. This book applies such fundamental insights to the question whether humanity will succeed or fail in its ambitious but uncertain quest.
Author: Gabriele Dürbeck Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000432483 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 255
Book Description
The Anthropocene concept draws attention to the various forms of entanglement of social, political, ecological, biological and geological processes at multiple spatial and temporal scales. The ensuing complexity and ambiguity create manifold challenges to widely established theories, methodologies, epistemologies and ontologies. The contributions to this volume engage with conceptual issues of scale in the Anthropocene with a focus on mediated representation and narrative. They are centered around the themes of scale and time, scale and the nonhuman and scale and space. The volume presents an interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology, geography, political sciences, history and literary, cultural and media studies. Together, they contribute to current debates on the (re-)imagining of forms of human responsibility that meet the challenges created by humanity entering an age of scalar complexity. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003136989
Author: Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1003815952 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 151
Book Description
This book presents an innovative and imaginative reading of contemporary Australian literature in the context of unprecedented ecological crisis. The Australian continent has seen significant, rapid changes to its cultures and land-use from the impact of British colonial rule, yet there is a rich history of Indigenous land-ethics and cosmological thought. By using the age-old idea of ‘cosmos’—the order of the world—to foreground ideas of a good order and chaos, reciprocity and more-than-human agency, this book interrogates the Anthropocene in Australia, focusing on notions of colonisation, farming, mining, bioethics, technology, environmental justice and sovereignty. It offers ‘cosmological readings’ of a diverse range of authors—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—as a challenge to the Anthropocene’s decline-narrative. As a result, it reactivates ‘cosmos’ as an ethical vision and a transculturally important counter-concept to the Anthropocene. Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell argues that the arts can help us envision radical cosmologies of being in and with the planet, and to address the very real social and environmental problems of our era. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, and postcolonial, transcultural and Indigenous studies, with a primary focus on Australian, New Zealand, Oceanic and Pacific area studies.
Author: Elisa Randazzo Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 0755634683 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 120
Book Description
Using the recent turn to ecology as a starting point, Hannah Richter and Elisa Randazzo bring ecological thinking into contact with Critical Indigenous Studies, in which awareness of the necessity for sustainable relations between humans and non-humans has long preceded Western Anthropocene discourse. Currently, the drastic ecological changes labelled as 'the Anthropocene' not only increasingly shape the political awareness and the priorities of citizens and governments, but also inform a large body of social scientific scholarship. Indigenous scholarship and practice, in particular ecological adaptability, is intrinsically related to power structures and political struggle hence indigenous understanding of Anthropocene discourses are intertwined with discourses of colonialism and political contestation. This book problematises the depoliticising character of Western Anthropocene discourses in relation to indigenous ecologies. The authors reveal how the anti-colonial struggles of Indigenous communities and the unequal distribution of responsibilities for and suffering from ecological change, are concealed and devalued in Western discourses of the Anthropocene.
Author: Bentley B. Allan Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 110827143X Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 362
Book Description
Scientific Cosmology and International Orders shows how scientific ideas have transformed international politics since 1550. Allan argues that cosmological concepts arising from Western science made possible the shift from a sixteenth century order premised upon divine providence to the present order centred on economic growth. As states and other international associations used scientific ideas to solve problems, they slowly reconfigured ideas about how the world works, humanity's place in the universe, and the meaning of progress. The book demonstrates the rise of scientific ideas across three cases: natural philosophy in balance of power politics, 1550–1815; geology and Darwinism in British colonial policy and international colonial orders, 1860–1950; and cybernetic-systems thinking and economics in the World Bank and American liberal order, 1945–2015. Together, the cases trace the emergence of economic growth as a central end of states from its origins in colonial doctrines of development and balance of power thinking about improvement.
Author: Arne Johan Vetlesen
Author: Anu Valtonen
Author: Alison Bashford
Author: Earl T. Harper
Author: Amanda H. Lynch
Author: Jack Pearce
Author: Gabriele Dürbeck
Author: Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell
Author: Elisa Randazzo
Author: Bentley B. Allan