NatureCultures
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Recent papers in NatureCultures
Breathing and politics are not usually considered relevant to one another. Is it therefore possible to engage with breathing as a force of social justice? What kinds of atmospheres can corpomaterial dynamics of breathing help envision for... more
What new forms of ethical engagement are emerging in naturecultural worlds? In this paper I take explore the example of the practical ethics of the permaculture movement. I put these in dialogue first with discussions regarding ethics in... more
Authors: Halina Łapińska, Joanna Łapińska The article analyzes the idea of a sensory garden as a place of symbiotic affective coexistence of human and non-human subjects in urban space, based on the concept presented in the study of... more
Working with nature -and not against it -is a global trend in coastal management. This ethnography of coastal protection follows the increasingly popular approach of "soft" protection to the Aotearoa New Zealand coast. Friederike Gesing... more
This article situates the geological turn in media theory within the critical posthumanities, defining them in both quantitative and qualitative terms. They can be assessed quantitatively by reviewing the proliferation of... more
After the cultural turn, it has become necessary to reconsider society's relations to nature. This article provides a theoretically sound basis for feminist interventions in global environmental policies drawing on feminist economics and... more
Recension pour la revue Critique (numéro spécial "Vivre dans un monde abîmé") de l'ouvrage dirigé par Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren et Matthew Chrulew : "Extinction Studies, Stories of Time, Death, and Generations.
This Element provides an accessible introduction to ecosemiotics and demonstrates its pertinence for the study of today’s unstable culture–nature relations. Ecosemiotics can be defined as the study of sign processes responsible for... more
The term ‘Anthropocene’ brings together a range of interrelated ecological catastrophes and relates human history to the time scales of the earth. While dominant modes of thinking maintain technocratic notions of nature and time, art has... more
Growing ecological problems have raised the need for conceptual tools dedicated to studying semiotic processes in cultural-ecological systems. Departing from both ecosemiotics and cultural semiotics, the concept of an ecosemiosphere is... more
The second of ten volumes in the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series on gender, Gender: Nature retraces feminist and queer engagements with biology and science in scholarship, activism, art, and everyday life. The volume’s... more
Is it true that the 'force' of a human body, when conceived as the potential of a body to attack and defend, shows itself as a 'male' dominion? If the common sense tends to anwer adfirmatively to this question, this article goes in... more
In 2013, President Xi Jinping formulated China’s vision of Eurasian connectivity: The Silk Road Economic Belt. The strategy envisages the construction of infrastructure networks that will enmesh the Eurasian continent and form an... more
Anita Desai's The Artist of Disappearance opens with the first line of "Ever-ness" by Jorge Luis Borges to suggest that nothing can be forgotten except for what is not strong enough to become memory. If oblivion is the main theme of this... more
, 2013, Biosocial Becomings: Integrating biological and social anthropology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 281. Old beings new becomings: Neo-Darwinism and Descartes dualisms are dead-again! Biosocial Becomings advances the... more
This paper aims to provide an overview of ecosemiotics (or semiotic ecology) particularly as developed at the University of Tartu (Estonia) and adjacent academic communities. The first ecosemiotic publications were issued in Tartu in 1998... more
This is a story of community protest, natural landscape, and the conservation of a small area of National Trust land in North West England. Taking an ethnographic approach into the history of this conflict over the management of nature,... more
The critique of the separation of natural and cultural heritage is now well established. Rather than repeat arguments against what many would now acknowledge as an artificial separation, this paper considers the implications of working... more
This article uses a concept of “Hybrid Geographies” in Human Geography to discuss empirical fndings from a study of freshwater fshery goods network in Yom river basin, Baan Kong, Kong Krailat district, Sukhothai province. It suggests that... more
The publication of Noah & Eckstein's Toward a Science of Comparative Education (1969, Macmillan, NY) marked the beginning of an increasingly narrow research trajectory in comparative education, claiming a universality for Western... more
Since the early 1990s, the Dutch artist herman de vries has installed several works in public space with the title sanctuarium (or sanctuary)-empty plots of land, surrounded by a fence, where nature is left to grow uninterrupted. For the... more
This article explores the cleanup and conversion of former plutonium production facility Rocky Flats, located near Denver, Colorado, into a wildlife refuge. The article addresses the ethical demands of the ‘post-nuclear’ nature refuge and... more
agents in their own right to form a relational ontology of multi-species assemblages (ROMA). Keywords Science and technology studies • Ontological turn • Anthropology beyond the human • Critical posthumanism • Naturecultures • Social... more
This article draws heavily on Francesca Ferrando’s Philosophical Posthumanism (2019) to analyse the ways in which the contrast between ‘techno-driven’ and ‘nature-driven’ civilisations in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber (2000), while... more
Nahe dem North River machten zwei Eichhörnchen um mich und über mir viel Wesen von sich; sie rannten hurtig von Baum zu Baum, sprangen von der Spitze eines Asts auf die eines anderen Asts am nächsten Baum, bis sie eine große Weißtanne... more
This paper responds to Donna Haraway's (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, arguing that, Candida albicans, as opportunistic pathogens of humans, are—like dogs— “not here just to think with.... more
This article engages with the philosophical reflections of the French historian of science Hélène Metzger (1886–1944) in order to develop a vocabulary for understanding the rise of non-reductive Continental naturalism in the contemporary... more
The Nordia Geographical Publications Theme issue for 2021 seeks to shift focus from the broad universal thinking of the Anthropocene-Capitalocene to multi-scalar and mid-level concepts that enable a better understanding of... more
This Lab Meeting took place as a roundtable titled Cyborg Manifestations. Hosted at MIT in February 2020, it was part of the Boston-area Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality's (GCWS) series Feminisms... more
Rooted networks provide a conceptual framework that embeds network thinking in nature-society geography in order to investigate socio-ecological relations, while emphasizing the place-specific materiality of these relations. This progress... more
The contradictions inherent in European Enlightenment-based “logics” that externalize humans from “nature” were a concern for the Romantic Naturalists, Dadaists, and Surrealists. More recently, some in the environmental humanities and... more
If the environmental humanities are a transdisciplinary endeavor, how can writing be a method for dialogue across and between disciplines? In this workshop, we explore writing not simply as a way of “recording” or “representing” our... more
Cubilose (swiftlet-saliva) has been seen as a kind of traditional Chinese delicacy for hundreds of years. Despite human practices of "farming" the birds and then using birdsongs to lure them into building new nests, swiftlets remain... more
In this paper I present a design project developed in Córdoba, Argentina, entitled ‘Spices-Species’. Through this case study, I discuss the possibility of designing using two decolonial strategies —"objectivity (or truth) in parenthesis"... more
This Lab Meeting took place as a roundtable titled Cyborg Manifestations. Hosted at MIT in February 2020, it was part of the Boston-area Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality’s (GCWS) series Feminisms... more