Category: publication

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.”

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.

In 2021 Marco Amati published the book, The City and the Super-Organism: A History of Naturalism in Urban Planning. You can read about it online here.

Here is the blurb from the book’s back cover:

This book traces how naturalism—the idea of a common theory uniting natural social systems—has contributed to major shifts in urban planning. Beginning in the 17th century, when the human body began to emerge as an inspiration for urban planning, the book examines the work of medical analyses of city life. Responding to the 19th century industrial revolution and 20th century modernism, the Second World War and mass motorisation, Dr Marco Amati shows how vitalism, eugenics, evolutionary theories and medical treatments were applied to understand cities and propose new urban forms. While critically evaluating the uses of naturalism, Amati also observes a renewed interest in the application of sciences to analyse city life, arguing that this is essential to help resolve challenges of human-induced climate change.

Linda Williams published an academic article in Animal Studies Journal. You can visit it online here, and a PDF version can be free downloaded from there.

Here is its’ abstract:

While many writers have advocated the importance of narrative as a means of engaging with the problem of extinction, this paper considers what the qualities of visual aesthetics bring to this field. In addressing this question, the discussion turns to the problem of the ethical limits of art raised by Adorno and takes a theoretical turn away from posthumanism to consider how visual responses can redirect attention back to human agency. The focus of visual analysis is on five paintings by the contemporary Iranian artist Naeemah Naeemaei. Neither exclusively Western nor overtly internationalist in their approach, these artworks refer to the effects of both hunting and the erosion of trans-nationalist habitats as causes of extinction, yet they also show how human affective responses to extinction can extend across geo-political borders to a more global imaginary. As such, Naeemaei’s artworks are regarded as a form of immanent critique of anthropogenic forcing. Her works adapt older traditions in Persian humanism and art to show not only how the human dominion of nonhuman animals has led to extinction, but also how this leads to an almost incalculable sense of human loss. I argue that Naeemaei’s affective imagery of loss is not simply yet another example of how the lifeworld of animals can only be understood from an anthropocentric worldview, but instead points to our inability to yet fully register the immeasurable losses of extinction and what this yet unchartered grief might imply for potential human agency.

And here is the citation: Williams, L., (2021) “Visualising Anthropocene Extinctions: Mapping affect in the works of Naeemah Naeemaei”, Animal Studies Journal 10(2), 59-91. doi: https://doi.org/10.14453/asj.v10i2.4

Linda Williams co-authored an article for the academic journal Environmental Humanities called ‘Everyday Ecocide, Toxic Dwelling, and the Inability to Mourn: A Speculative Response to Geographies of Extinction’. You can visit it online here, and download the article from here.

Here is the abstract:

In responding to the spatiotemporally specific geographies of extinction charted in the articles in this special section, this article reflects on the sociocultural factors that inform the ways in which extinction is framed and impede recognition of the enormity of the anthropogenic extinction event in which we are all bound. This article argues that we are living in an era of ecocide, where the degradation of biodiversity and eradication of species go hand-in-hand with the degradation and eradication of nonmodern culture and identity, and it explores some possible reasons why modern society is failing to respond to impending crisis. Fine-grained stories of spatiotemporally specific geographies of extinction can help to counter the logic of colonization and bring everyday ecocide into view. For the particular multispecies communities they concern, they can also feed into the creation of ritual practices of penitential mourning in ways that enable a collective grieving process poised to activate an ecosocial transformation. The authors consider the implications of grief and mourning—and of not mourning—in what can be seen as not only a terrible time but also the end of (lived) time. They conclude with some reflections of local acts of resistance, witnessing, and narrative.