Suchergebnisse

Until recently, weather talk was an easy filler for any awkward silence. But tragically for polite conversationalists everywhere, the weather is no longer mundane.Especially in summers like the one we just had in Sydney, weather talk has many of us breaking a surprising sweat — and not only from the heat. With climate change a hot-button issue globally (in spite and even because of its lack of mention in national budgets, or erasure from government websites), talk about the weather now has an unavoidably political tinge.

Composting is a material labor whereby old scraps are transformed—through practices of care and attention—into nutrient-rich new soil. In this provocation, we develop "composting" as a material metaphor to tell a particular story about the environmental humanities. Building on Donna Haraway's work, we insist "it matters what compostables make compost." Our argument is twofold. First, we contend that certain feminist concepts and commitments are foundational to the environmental humanities' contemporary emergence. Second, we advocate for more inclusive feminist composting for the future of our field. We begin with a critical cartography of some of the field's origin stories. While we discover that feminism is named or not named in several different ways, what most interests us here is a particular trend we observe, whereby key feminist scholars or concepts may be mentioned, but their feminist investments are not incorporated as such. Following this cartography, we dig into the stakes of these missed opportunities. A failure to acknowledge the feminist context that grows some of our field's foundational concepts neutralizes their feminist politics and undermines the potential for environmental humanities to build alternative worlds. To conclude, we propose feminist composting as a methodology to be taken up further. We call for an inclusive feminist composting that insists on feminism's imbrication with social justice projects of all kinds, at the same time as we insist that future composting be done with care. Sometimes paying attention to the feminist scraps that feed the pile means responding to feminism's own potential assimilations and disavowals, particularly in relation to decolonization. Like both the energy-saving domestic practice and the earlier social justice struggles that inspire it, composting feminism and environmental humanities involves messy and undervalued work. We maintain, however, that it is a mode of scholarship necessary for growing different kinds of worlds.

If the Anthropocene heralds both a new age of human supremacy and an out-of-control Nature ushering in a premature apocalypse, this living book insists such assumptions must be hacked. Reperforming selections from three live events staged in 2016, 2017 and 2018 in Sydney, Australia, Hacking the Anthropocene offers a series of propositions - argument, augury, poetry, elegy, essay, image, video - that suggest alternative entry points for understanding shifting relationships between humans and nature. Scholars and artists from environmental humanities and related areas of social, political and cultural studies interrogate the assumption of the human "we" as a uniform actor, and offer a timely reminder of the entanglements of race, sexuality, gender, coloniality, class, and species in all of our earthly terraformings. Here, Anthropocene politics are both urgent and playful, and the personal is also planetary.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Foreword -- 1 Matter out of Place: 'New Materialism' in Review -- 2 Method Matters: The Ethics of Exclusion -- 3 Sensory Substitution: The Plasticity of the Eye/I -- 4 Allergy as the Puzzle of Causality -- 5 Pregnant Men: Paternal Postnatal Depression and a Culture of Hormones -- 6 Material Culture: Epigenetics and the Molecularisation of the Social -- 7 Racialised Visual Encounters -- 8 Microbiology as Sociology: The Strange Sociality of Slime -- 9 Nature Represents Itself: Bibliophilia in a Changing Climate -- 10 Climate Change, Socially Synchronised: Are We Really Running out of Time? -- 11 A Sociality of Death: Towards a New Materialist Politics and Ethics of Life Itself -- Notes on Contributors -- Index