“In what follows, I examine terrain as a conceptual (rather than descriptive) category in relation to violence, vision, and ontologies of multiplicity.”
Gastón Gordillo via Space and Politics.
All posts by dispatcher2013
An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene
In the video below Katherine Gibson (one half of the amazing JK Gibson-Graham feminist economic-geographer duo; unfortunately Julie Graham died in 2010) delivers a powerful and insightful plenary lecture entitled, ‘An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene‘ (2011), sponsored by the Ethics, Justice, and Human Rights Specialty Group, of the Association of American Geographers.
Abstract: Over Antipode’s 40 years our role as academics has dramatically changed. We have been pushed to adopt the stance of experimental researchers open to what can be learned from current events and to recognize our role in bringing new realities into being. Faced with the daunting prospect of global warming and the apparent stalemate in the formal political sphere, this essay explores how human beings are transformed by, and transformative of, the world in which we find ourselves. We place the hybrid research collective at the center of transformative change. Drawing on the sociology of science…
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If terror thrives on the production of epistemic murk and metamorphosis, it nevertheless requires the hermeneutic violence that creates feeble fictions in the guise of realism, objectivity, and the like, flattening contradiction and systematizing chaos.
Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987)
New Book: Thinking with Water
“An exploration of the relationship between water’s cultural meanings and urgent ecological issues.”
McGill-Queens Press has its fall catalogue out and it includes a new book Thinking with Water, which has this companion website describing the project.
Here is the publisher’s description of the book:
“An exploration of the relationship between water’s cultural meanings and urgent ecological issues.”
As a life-giving but also potentially destructive substance, water occupies a prominent place in the imagination. At the same time, water issues are among the most troubling ecological and social concerns of our time.
Water is often studied only as a “resource,” a quantifiable and instrumentalized substance. Thinking with Water instead invites readers to consider how water – with its potent symbolic power, its familiarity, and its unique physical and chemical properties – is a lively collaborator in our ways of knowing and acting. What emerges is both a rich opportunity to encourage more thoughtful environmental engagement and a challenge to common oppositions between…
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indigenous studies
research on and by First Peoples
http://www.firstpeoplesnewdirections.org/index.php
a multi-year publishing collaboration among five university presses
All societies live by fictions taken as real. What distinguishes cultures of terror is that the epistemological, ontological, and otherwise philosophical problem of representation–reality and illusion, certainty and doubt […] becomes a high-powered medium of domination…
Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987)
The Indigenous World 2013
IWGIA – International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs 2013 Yearbook
for purchase or free download here
honey bee collapse
Apis mellifera—the honey bee, native to Europe, Africa and Western Asia—is disappearing around the world. Signs of decline also appear now in the eastern honey bee, Apis cerana.
We know what is killing the bees. Worldwide Bee Colony Collapse is not as big a mystery as the chemical companies claim. […] The causes of collapse merge and synthesize, but we know that humanity is the perpetrator, and that the most prominent causes appear to be pesticides and habitat loss.
via Worldwide Honey Bee Collapse: A Lesson in Ecology | NationofChange.
Occupy Chevron – resistance in Poland
3 histories, what future?
HKW conference on the Anthropocene — keynote talk of historian and post-colonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago
The Anthropocene Project An Opening
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin — January 12, 2013
