Coloniality, Ontology, and the Question of the Posthuman

Coloniality, Ontology, and the Question of the Posthuman
Author: Mark Jackson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2017-11-22
Genre: Science
ISBN: 131741599X

This book brings together emerging insights from across the humanities and social sciences to highlight how postcolonial studies are being transformed by increasingly influential and radical approaches to nature, matter, subjectivity, human agency, and politics. These include decolonial studies, political ontology, political ecology, indigeneity, and posthumanisms. The book examines how postcolonial perspectives demand of posthumanisms and their often ontological discourses that they reflexively situate their own challenges within the many long histories of decolonised practice. Just as postcolonial research needs to critically engage with radical transitions suggested by the ontological turn and its related posthumanist developments, so too do posthumanisms need to decolonise their conceptual and analytic lenses. The chapters' interdisciplinary analyses are developed through global, critical, and empirical cases that include: city spaces and urbanisms in the Global North and South; food politics and colonial land use; cultural and cosmic representation in film, theatre, and poetry; nation building; the Anthropocene; materiality; the void; pluriversality; and, indigenous world views. Theoretically and conceptually rich, the book proposes new trajectories through which postcolonial and posthuman scholarships can learn from one another and so critically advance.

Transdisciplinary Thinking from the Global South

Transdisciplinary Thinking from the Global South
Author: Juan Carlos Finck Carrales
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1000508099

This book promotes constructive and nuanced transdisciplinary understandings of some of the critical problems that we face on a global scale today by thinking with and from the Global South. It is engaged in transmodernising, pluriversalising, decolonising, queering, and/or posthumanising thinking and practice. The book aims to contribute to and challenge current debates regarding knowledge, diversity, and change. This is achieved through the application of transdisciplinary and indisciplined perspectives to the Himalayan Anthropocene; transport services in Mexico City; the EU-Turkey border regimes and policy; egoism and the decolonisation of whiteness; the Witch and the decolonisation of the gender binary; Nepalese students in Denmark; and the decolonisation of global health promotion. The book thereby provides the reader a multiplicity of pathways of knowledges and practices that address current problems co-produced by the dominant Western colonial onto-epistemic outset, giving way to ‘other’ knowledge-practices, towards a pluriversal approach. This book will be of interest to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in disciplines such as human geography, development studies, politics, international relations, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, planning, and philosophy. It is also relevant to researchers, development workers and human rights/environmental activists, and other intellectual practitioners.

Posthuman Gaming

Posthuman Gaming
Author: Poppy Wilde
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2023-09-21
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 1000963071

Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities explores the relationship between avatar and gamer in the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game World of Warcraft, to examine notions of entangled subjectivity, affects and embodiments – what it means and how it feels to be posthuman. With a focus on posthuman subjectivity, Wilde considers how we can begin to articulate ourselves when the boundary between self and other is unclear. Drawing on fieldnotes of her own gameplay experiences, the author analyses how subjectivity is formed in ways that defy a single individual notion of "self", and explores how different practices, feelings, and societal understandings can disrupt strict binaries and emphasise our posthumanism. She interrogates if one can speak of an "I" in the face of posthuman multiplicity, before exploring different analytical themes, beginning with how acting theories might be posthumanised and articulate the relationship between avatar and gamer. She then defines posthuman empathy and explains how this is experienced in gaming, before addressing the need to account for boredom, the complexity of nostalgia, and ways death and loss are experienced through gaming. This volume will appeal to a broad audience and is particularly relevant to scholars and students of cultural studies, media studies, humanities, and game studies. Chapters 2 and 7 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Internal Colonialism and International Relations

Internal Colonialism and International Relations
Author: Ana Carolina Teixeira Delgado
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2021-06-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000406164

This book investigates decolonization as a local process and its connections to international relations, introducing "internal colonialism" as a crucial analytical category for internationalists. Using Bolivia as a case study, the author argues that the reshaping of colonialism and its resistance domestically is also reflected and reproduced abroad by political actors, be they the governments or indigenous movements. By problematizing postcolonial debate concerning the constitution/reproduction of colonial logics in International Relations, the book proposes a return to the local to show how power relations are exercised concretely by the protagonists of political process. Such dynamics reveal the interrelationship between the local and the international, especially, in which the latter represents a necessary dimension to both reinforce colonialism and oppose colonial logics. Of interest to scholars and students of IR, Latin American and Andean Studies, this book will also appeal to those working in the fields of area studies, anthropology, indigenous politics, comparative politics, decolonization and political ecology.

The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History

The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History
Author: Tatiana Flores
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 822
Release: 2023-11-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000969991

This companion is the first global, comprehensive text to explicate, theorize, and propose decolonial methodologies for art historians, museum professionals, artists, and other visual culture scholars, teachers, and practitioners. Art history as a discipline and its corollary institutions - the museum, the art market - are not only products of colonial legacies but active agents in the consolidation of empire and the construction of the West. The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History joins the growing critical discourse around the decolonial through an assessment of how art history may be rethought and mobilized in the service of justice - racial, gender, social, environmental, restorative, and more. This book draws attention to the work of artists, art historians, and scholars in related fields who have been engaging with disrupting master narratives and forging new directions, often within a hostile academy or an indifferent art world. The volume unpacks the assumptions projected onto objects of art and visual culture and the discourse that contains them. It equally addresses the manifold complexities around representation as visual and discursive praxis through a range of epistemologies and metaphors originated outside or against the logic of modernity. This companion is organized into four thematic sections: Being and Doing, Learning and Listening, Sensing and Seeing, and Living and Loving. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, museum studies, race and ethnic studies, cultural studies, disability studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.

Pollution Is Colonialism

Pollution Is Colonialism
Author: Max Liboiron
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 134
Release: 2021-03-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478021446

In Pollution Is Colonialism Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. They point out that even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals, environmental science and activism are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Métis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)—an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland, Canada—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land. Liboiron's creative, lively, and passionate text refuses theories of pollution that make Indigenous land available for settler and colonial goals. In this way, their methodology demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible but is currently being practiced in ways that enact more ethical modes of being in the world.

The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies

The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies
Author: Antonio López
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 561
Release: 2023-08-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000955605

The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies gathers leading work by critical scholars in this burgeoning field. Redressing the lack of environmental perspectives in the study of media, ecomedia studies asserts that media are in and about the environment, and environments are socially and materially mediated. The book gives form to this new area of study and brings together diverse scholarly contributions to explore and give definition to the field. The Handbook highlights five critical areas of ecomedia scholarship: ecomedia theory, ecomateriality, political ecology, ecocultures, and eco-affects. Within these areas, authors navigate a range of different topics including infrastructures, supply and manufacturing chains, energy, e-waste, labor, ecofeminism, African and Indigenous ecomedia, environmental justice, environmental media governance, ecopolitical satire, and digital ecologies. The result is a holistic volume that provides an in-depth and comprehensive overview of the current state of the field, as well as future developments. This volume will be an essential resource for students, educators, and scholars of media studies, cultural studies, film, environmental communication, political ecology, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities.

Biopolitics and Resistance in Legal Education

Biopolitics and Resistance in Legal Education
Author: Thomas Giddens
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2023-06-30
Genre: Law
ISBN: 100087656X

Taking up the study of legal education in distinctly biopolitical terms, this book provides a critical and political analysis of resistance in the law school. Legal education concerns the complex pathways by which an individual becomes a lawyer, making the journey from lay-person to expert, from student to practitioner. To pose the idea of a biopolitics of legal education is not only to recognise the tensions surrounding this journey but also to recognise that legal education is a key site in which the subject engages, and is engaged by, a particular structure—and here the particular structure of the law school. This book explores the resistance to that structure, including: different ways in which law’s pedagogic structures might be incomplete, or are being fought against; the use of less conventional elements of cultural discourse to resist the abstraction of the lawyer in students’ subject formation; the centralisation of queer and feminist discourses to disrupt the hierarchies of the legal curriculum; the use of digital technologies; the place of embodiment in legal education settings; and the impacts of posthuman knowledges and contexts on legal learning. Assembling original, field-defining essays by both leading international scholars and emerging researchers, this book constitutes an indispensable resource in legal education research and scholarship that will appeal to legal academics everywhere.

Introducing Human Geographies

Introducing Human Geographies
Author: Kelly Dombroski
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 1081
Release: 2024-07-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0429556373

Introducing Human Geographies is a ‘travel guide’ into the academic subject of human geography and the things that it studies. The coverage of the new edition has been thoroughly refreshed to reflect and engage with the contemporary nature and direction of human geography. This updated and much extended fourth edition includes a diverse range of authors and topics from across the globe, with a completely revised set of contributions reflecting contemporary concerns in human geography. Presented in four parts with a streamlined structure, it includes over 70 contributions written by expert international researchers addressing the central ideas through which human geographers understand and shape their subject. It maps out the big, foundational ideas that have shaped the discipline past and present; explores key research themes being pursued in human geography’s various sub-disciplines; and identifies emerging collaborations between human geography and other disciplines in the areas of technology, justice and environment. This comprehensive, stimulating and cutting-edge introduction to the field is richly illustrated throughout with full colour figures, maps and photos. The book is designed especially for students new to university degree courses in human geography across the world, and is an essential reference for undergraduate students on courses related to society, place, culture and space.

The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms

The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms
Author: Taryne Jade Taylor
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 1068
Release: 2023-10-30
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1000934136

The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms delivers a new, inclusive examination of science fiction, from close analyses of single texts to large-scale movements, providing readers with decolonized models of the future, including print, media, race, gender, and social justice. This comprehensive overview of the field explores representations of possible futures arising from non-Western cultures and ethnic histories that disrupt the “imperial gaze”. In four parts, The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms considers the look of futures from the margins, foregrounding the issues of Indigenous groups, racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, and any people whose stakes in the global order of envisioning futures are generally constrained due to the mechanics of our contemporary world. The book extends current discussions in the area, looking at cutting-edge developments in the discipline of science fiction and diverse futurisms as a whole. Offering a dynamic mix of approaches and expansive perspectives, this volume will appeal to academics and researchers seeking to orient their own interventions into broader contexts.