Mapping Affective Visual Cultures in Australasia
We are happy to announce that we have now published an online timeline of extinction as a cultural phenomenon, one that takes into account scientific, social, political, and cultural events and moments. This timeline can set out shared understandings about extinction, its causes, and potential solutions, and in so doing illustrate extinction imaginaries.
We are happy to announce that the Circles of Emotion website is all updated and our survey on Animals of Emotion is ready. Please head over and give it a shot…!
Timothy Erik Ström published an article called ‘Exponential Abyss: Technology and Waste‘ in the New Left Review’s Sidecar, and it can be freely read on their website.
Here is a grab quote:
“As cybernetics has supercharged capitalism’s industrial capacities, it has created vast amounts of toxic waste that cascade through supply chains and accumulate across food chains.”
Linda Williams co-authored a chapter called ‘Extinction Rebellion and Non-violent Civil Disobedience’ for the book The Routledge Handbook of Grassroots Climate Activism.
You can see it online here.
Here is its’ abstract:
This chapter explores Extinction Rebellion (XR) in its historical context: from its emergence in Britain, to a global climate movement with viable connections to earlier successful grassroots movements in civil disobedience. Drawing on media analysis we consider some of the ways that the flaws and critiques of XR’s activism, from disruptions to urban infrastructure to less mediagenic yet more publicly engaging appeal to mass civil disobedience, have been framed in the popular imaginary. XR members have been labelled as ‘extremist’ and ‘eco-terrorists’. Yet this practice of discrediting XR can be understood as a form of ‘othering’ aimed at portraying climate activists as anarchists who resist democratic process and reject social values. In response, XR supporters counter that such accusations are overstated and meant to undermine the movement, asserting that an apocalyptic tone and non-violent disruptive civic action is justified, given the severity of the climate crisis. XR’s mission based on the identification of mass grassroots non-violent civil disobedience as the essential factor of social transformation is insightful, and, in our view, the key to its continued success.
Donna Houston was one of the authors of a chapter called ‘Offsetting’ for the book Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities. It is also published by the academic journal Environmental Humanities.
You can read it online here.
Here is its’ citation: Donna Houston (et al), ‘Offsetting’, in Environmental Humanities (2024) 16 (2): 426–432.
Rick De Vos published a chapter called ‘Narwhals for all seasons: Representation, evasion and absence’ in the book Blue Extinction in Literature, Art, and Culture.
You can visit the article online here, or download it direct via this link.
Here is the abstract:
Narwhals have endured and thrived in their sea-ice environment for at least the past one million years, living in familial pods and following established seasonal migration patterns within the Arctic Ocean. However, they remain a cryptic group of marine animals, avoiding contact with humans, sensitive to oceanic disturbances, with little known about the details of their social and cultural lives. In addition to scientific research, narwhals have also been subjected to Indigenous and Western cultural representation, both historically and in contemporary contexts. While these representations have contrasted markedly with biological interpretations of narwhals, they have proved to be enduring to the point that many people are unsure of the habitat, physiology or even the existence of the elusive marine mammals. Narwhals have been culturally implicated in human lives in ways that conflict with or deny their watery ontology, knowledge and perspectives, or indeed the need to protect their environment. In considering the human and nonhuman cultural relationships that narwhals are a part of, this chapter reflects on how these relationships contribute to narwhal endangerment, and thinks through ways of making space and time for narwhals and their Arctic cohabitants.
And here’s it’s citation: De Vos, R. (2024). Narwhals for All Seasons: Representation, Evasion and Absence. In: Fibisan, V., Murray, R. (eds) Blue Extinction in Literature, Art, and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-69910-8_4
Timothy Erik Ström published an article called ‘Los Almos to Neuralink’ in Arena Quarterly. It can be read freely on Arena’s website, or you can download a PDF of the article as excerpted from the Quarterly from here.
Here is a grab quote:
“Albert Einstein issued a dire warning: that we were living under threat not only from the atomic bomb and the spectre of extermination in nuclear war, but also from a second weapon, one he considered just at dangerous for humanity and the planet—‘the Information Bomb.”
www.circlesofextinction.org is officially online…! Here’s some of the website’s source code overlayed onto a thylacine to celebrate.
Paul James and Tim Ström had an article published in the journal Emotions: History, Culture, Society. It’s called ‘Objects of the Anthropocene: Mapping Material-Emotional Culture from Human Beginnings to the End Times’ and you can read it online here, or download the full PDF here.
Here is the abstract:
“Objects are complicated things, and no less so when they are created by us. We layer created objects with additional emotional meaning. Understanding the complexity of this layering requires much more than tracing the narrative history of an object. This essay is about the objects that we make and appropriate. In particular, the essay suggests that objects need to be understood sensitively both in the context of global human history, and the ontological framing of the various moments of their creation, use, appropriation and reception. The essay folds around four contentions. Objects are central to the narration of social relations and emotional life. Objects, as carriers of meaning, move across different ontological orientations. Objects exist in multiple and ontologically different time frames, sometimes at the same time. And objects mediate our (human) relation to the larger social and natural world, even as they (and we) are part of that world.”
Timothy Erik Ström published an article called ‘The Blasted Sea’ via New Left Review’s Sidecar and can be read in full there.
Here is a grab quote:
“At the cutting-edge of science and using some of the world’s most powerful calculation engines, the technique is as rationalised as it gets. Yet the blasting of an atomic bomb of sound every ten seconds is belligerent in the extreme toward the oceanic ecosystems, while the aim of expanding the frontier of fossil fuel extraction at a time of increasingly acute climate crisis is nothing short of demented.”
This article has been translated into Swedish: ‘Ett skövlat hav’, Marxistarkiv.se, translated by Göran Källqvist.