Anthropocene Back Loop

Anthropocene Back Loop
Author: Stephanie Wakefield
Publisher:
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2020-05-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781785420719

We are entering the Anthropocene's back loop, a time of release and collapse, confusion and reorientation, in which not only populations and climates are being upended but also physical and metaphysical grounds. Needed now are forms of experimentation geared toward autonomous modes of living within the back loop's new unsafe operating spaces.

Anthropocene Back Loop

Anthropocene Back Loop
Author: Stephanie Wakefield
Publisher:
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2020-10-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9781013295577

In the face of climate chaos, post-truth politics, and growing tribalisms, it's clear that liberalism's old structures are unraveling. Drawing on resilience ecology, Stephanie Wakefield suggests we understand such phenomena to be indicators that we are entering the Anthropocene's back loop, a time of release and collapse, confusion and reorientation, in which not only populations and climates are being upended but also physical and metaphysical grounds. Anthropocene Back Loop takes us on a journey though different responses and manifestations of the back loop, exploring urban resilience infrastructures, post-apocalyptic imaginaries in fiction and critical theory, and a range of everyday practices from survival skills and physical fitness to experimentation with one's soul. Rather than returning to liberalism's safe operating space, what is needed and what can be seen in many contemporary practices, Wakefield argues, are forms of experimentation geared toward charting autonomous modes of living within the back loop's new unsafe operating spaces. Such efforts often let go of old frameworks, hubristically experiment with new uses, cultivate an allowance for the unknown, and embrace a confidence in exploring one's own pathways. What these iterations suggest is that the back loop, long imagined in the singular, is spiraling out into myriad trajectories. After all, if we take seriously the idea that liberalism's single world order is unraveling, we have the opportunity - one many have long fought for - to create our own new codes, if not new worlds. Being in the back loop means that we have already crossed various tipping points, and that in doing so, everything from social practices, technologies, and truth to plants, animals, and places have become shaken out of their normal frameworks. We are free to move on new planes. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Resilience in the Anthropocene

Resilience in the Anthropocene
Author: David Chandler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2020-04-21
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1000052125

This book offers the first critical, multi-disciplinary study of how the concepts of resilience and the Anthropocene have combined to shape contemporary thought and governmental practice. Faced with the climate catastrophe of the Anthropocene, theorists and policymakers are increasingly turning to ‘sustainable’, ‘creative’ and ‘bottom-up’ imaginaries of governance. The book brings together cutting-edge insights from leading geographers, international relations scholars and philosophers to explore how the concepts of resilience and the Anthropocene challenge and transform prevailing understandings of Earth, space, time and knowledge, and how these transformations reshape governance, ethics and critique today. This book examines how the Anthropocene calls into question established categories through which modern societies have tended to make sense of the world and engage in critical reflection and analysis. It also considers how resilience approaches attempt to re-stabilize these categories – and the ethical and political effects that result from these resilience-based efforts. Offering innovative insights into the problem of how environmental change is known and governed in the Anthropocene, this book will be of interest to students in fields such as geography, international relations, anthropology, science and technology studies, sociology, and the environmental humanities.

Anthropocene Islands

Anthropocene Islands
Author: Jonathan Pugh
Publisher: University of Westminster Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2021-06-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1914386019

'A must read … a new analytical agenda for the Anthropocene, coherently drawing out the power of thinking with islands.' – Elena Burgos Martinez, Leiden University ‘This is an essential book. [The] analytics they propose … offer both a critical agenda for island studies and compass points through which to navigate the haunting past, troubling present, and precarious future.’ – Craig Santos Perez, University of Hawai’i, Manoa ‘All academic books should be like this: hard to put down. Informative, careful, sometimes devasting, yet absolutely necessary - if you read one book about the Anthropocene let it be this. You will never think of islands in the same way again.’ – Kimberley Peters, University of Oldenburg ‘ … a unique journey into the Anthropocene. Critical, generous and compelling’. — Nigel Clark, Lancaster University The island has become a key figure of the Anthropocene – an epoch in which human entanglements with nature come increasingly to the fore. For a long time, islands were romanticised or marginalised, seen as lacking modernity’s capacities for progress, vulnerable to the effects of catastrophic climate change and the afterlives of empire and coloniality. Today, however, the island is increasingly important for both policy-oriented and critical imaginaries that seek, more positively, to draw upon the island’s liminal and disruptive capacities, especially the relational entanglements and sensitivities its peoples and modes of life are said to exhibit. Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds explores the significant and widespread shift to working with islands for the generation of new or alternative approaches to knowledge, critique and policy practices. It explains how contemporary Anthropocene thinking takes a particular interest in islands as ‘entangled worlds’, which break down the human/nature divide of modernity and enable the generation of new or alternative approaches to ways of being (ontology) and knowing (epistemology). The book draws out core analytics which have risen to prominence (Resilience, Patchworks, Correlation and Storiation) as contemporary policy makers, scholars, critical theorists, artists, poets and activists work with islands to move beyond the constraints of modern approaches. In doing so, it argues that engaging with islands has become increasingly important for the generation of some of the core frameworks of contemporary thinking and concludes with a new critical agenda for the Anthropocene.

Art in the Anthropocene

Art in the Anthropocene
Author: Etienne Turpin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2015-06-11
Genre:
ISBN: 9781785420054

Taking as its premise that the proposed epoch of the Anthropocene is necessarily an aesthetic event, this collection explores the relationship between contemporary art and knowledge production in an era of ecological crisis. Art in the Anthropocene brings together a multitude of disciplinary conversations, drawing together artists, curators, scientists, theorists and activists to address the geological reformation of the human species. With contributions by Amy Balkin, Ursula Biemann, Amanda Boetzkes, Lindsay Bremner, Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr, Heather Davis, Sara Dean, Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse (smudge studio), Irmgard Emmelhainz, Anselm Franke, Peter Galison, Fabien Giraud, & Ida Soulard, Laurent Gutierrez & Valerie Portefaix (MAP Office), Terike Haapoja & Laura Gustafsson, Laura Hall, Ilana Halperin, Donna Haraway & Martha Kenney, Ho Tzu Nyen, Bruno Latour, Jeffrey Malecki, Mary Mattingly, Mixrice (Cho Jieun & Yang Chulmo), Natasha Myers, Jean-Luc Nancy & John Paul Ricco, Vincent Normand, Richard Pell & Emily Kutil, Tomas Saraceno, Sasha Engelmann & Bronislaw Szerszynski, Ada Smailbegovic, Karolina Sobecka, Richard Streitmatter-Tran & Vi Le, Anna-Sophie Springer, Sylvere Lotringer, Peter Sloterdijk, Zoe Todd, Etienne Turpin, Pinar Yoldas, and Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer & Marina Zurkow. This book is also available as an open access publication through the Open Humanities Press: http: //openhumanitiespress.org/art-in-the-anthropocene.html"

Challenging Anthropocene Ontology

Challenging Anthropocene Ontology
Author: Elisa Randazzo
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2024-04-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0755634683

Using the recent turn to ecology as a starting point, Hannah Richter and Elisa Randazzo bring ecological thinking into contact with Critical Indigenous Studies, in which awareness of the necessity for sustainable relations between humans and non-humans has long preceded Western Anthropocene discourse. Currently, the drastic ecological changes labelled as 'the Anthropocene' not only increasingly shape the political awareness and the priorities of citizens and governments, but also inform a large body of social scientific scholarship. Indigenous scholarship and practice, in particular ecological adaptability, is intrinsically related to power structures and political struggle – hence indigenous understanding of Anthropocene discourses are intertwined with discourses of colonialism and political contestation. This book problematises the depoliticising character of Western Anthropocene discourses in relation to indigenous ecologies. The authors reveal how the anti-colonial struggles of Indigenous communities and the unequal distribution of responsibilities for and suffering from ecological change, are concealed and devalued in Western discourses of the Anthropocene.

Race in the Anthropocene

Race in the Anthropocene
Author: Farai Chipato
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2024-08-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1040133797

Race in the Anthropocene provides a radical new perspective on the importance of race and coloniality in the Anthropocene. It forwards the Black Horizon as a critical lens which places at its heart the importance of ontological concerns fundamental to problematising the violences and exclusions of the antiblack world. At present, multiple new approaches are emerging through the shared problem field of Anthropocene thought and policy, offering to save not just the world, but the practice of governance, the business of Big Data, the progress of development, and the dream of peace. It is against this backdrop that Race in the Anthropocene unsettles not just the already shaky foundations of modernity but also the affirmative visions of its critics, by directing our gaze to how race and coloniality are baked into the grounding concepts of international thought. This book is essential reading for students of International Relations, particularly those interested in international politics, security, and development. It is also of relevance for those interested in contemporary social, political, and environmental debates and policy practices.

The Rough Poets

The Rough Poets
Author: Melanie Dennis Unrau
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2024-10-15
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0228023394

Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and wilful ignorance of the extractive industries and petrostates they work for. But their poetry troubles these assumptions, revealing the fear, confusion, betrayal, and indignation hidden beneath tough personas. The Rough Poets presents poetry by workers in the Canadian oil and gas industry, collecting and closely reading texts published between 1938 and 2019: S.C. Ells’s Northland Trails, Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk, Dymphny Dronyk’s Contrary Infatuations, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease, Naden Parkin’s A Relationship with Truth, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons, and Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time. These writers are uniquely positioned, Melanie Dennis Unrau argues, both as petropoets who write poetry about oil and as theorists of petropoetics with unique knowledge about how to make and unmake worlds that depend on fossil fuels. Their ambivalent, playful, crude, and honest petropoetry shows that oil workers grieve the environmental and social impacts of their work, worry about climate change and the futures of their communities, and desire jobs and ways of life that are good, safe, and just. How does it feel to be a worker in the oil and gas industry in a climate emergency, facing an energy transition that threatens your way of life? Unrau takes up this question with the respect, care, and imagination necessary to be an environmentalist reader in solidarity with oil workers.

Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene

Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene
Author: Joanna Zylinska
Publisher:
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2020-10-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9781013284915

Life typically becomes an object of reflection when it is seen to be under threat. In particular, humans have a tendency to engage in thinking about life (instead of just continuing to live it) when being confronted with the prospect of death: be it the death of individuals due to illness, accident or old age; the death of whole ethnic or national groups in wars and other forms of armed conflict; but also of whole populations, be they human or nonhuman. Even though Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene is first and foremost concerned with life-understood as both a biological and social phenomenon-it is the narrative about the impending death of the human population (i.e., about the extinction of the human species), that provides a context for its argument. "Anthropocene" names a geo-historical period in which humans are said to have become the biggest threat to life on earth. However, rather than as a scientific descriptor, the term serves here primarily as an ethical injunction to think critically about human and nonhuman agency in the universe. Restrained in tone yet ambitious in scope, the book takes some steps towards outlining a minimal ethics thought on a universal scale. The task of such minimal ethics is to consider how humans can assume responsibility for various occurrences in the universe, across different scales, and how they can respond to the tangled mesh of connections and relations unfolding in it. Its goal is not so much to tell us how to live but rather to allow us to rethink "life" and what we can do with it, in whatever time we have left. The book embraces a speculative mode of thinking that is more akin to the artist's method; it also includes a photographic project by the author. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Miami in the Anthropocene

Miami in the Anthropocene
Author: Stephanie Wakefield
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2025-01-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781517917180

Reimagining adaptation amidst climate change-driven mutations of urban space and life Between its susceptibility to flooding and an ever-expanding real estate market powered by global surges of people and capital, Miami is an epicenter of the urban Anthropocene and a living laboratory for adaptation to sea level rise. In Miami in the Anthropocene, Stephanie Wakefield explores the social, environmental, and technical transformations involved in climate adaptation infrastructure and imaginaries in a global city seen as climate change ground zero. Using Miami as a compelling microcosm for understanding the complex interplay between urbanization and environmental upheaval in the twenty-first century, Wakefield shows how "aqua-urban futures" are being imagined for the city, from governmental scenario exercises for severe weather events to proposals to transform the city's metro into an archipelago of islands connected by bridges. Wakefield examines the shifts reweaving the fabric of urban life and presents designs that imagine dramatic new ways of living with water. Grounded in the dynamic landscape of Miami but reaching far beyond its shores, Miami in the Anthropocene delves into the broader debates shaping urban thought and practice in the Anthropocene. Focusing on postresilience urban designs, Wakefield illuminates the path toward a future where cities embrace opportunities for evolution rather than merely for survival.