“Infection”
For the special section “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities,” Celia Lowe reflects on the meanings of “infection” and the problems these pose for the Environmental Humanities.
For the special section “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities,” Celia Lowe reflects on the meanings of “infection” and the problems these pose for the Environmental Humanities.
In his article for the special section “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities,” Tom Bristow unpacks the concept of memory and the idea of the archive.
Through a case study of the “invasive alien species” (IAS) narrative in South Africa, Susanna Lidström, Simon West, Tania Katzschner, M. Isabel Pérez-Ramos, and Hedley Twidle suggest that IAS oversimplifies the webs of ecological, biological, economic, and cultural relations to a simple “good” versus “bad” battle between easily discernible “natural” and “nonnatural” identities.
Owain Jones raises questions about the relationships between self, time, memory, materiality, and place, using a non-representational creative approach based on image and textual collage.
Looking at the case of organisms attached to tsunami debris rafting across the Pacific to Oregon, Jonathan L. Clark examines how invasive species managers think about the moral status of the animals they seek to manage.
Andrew Whitehouse considers the semiotics of listening to birds in the Anthropocene by drawing on Kohn’s recent arguments on the semiotics of more-than-human relations and Ingold’s understanding of the world as a meshwork, and comparing the work of Bernie Krause with responses to the the Listening to Birds project.
Anna Svenson considers the epistemological implications of the digitization of the Directors’ Correspondence (DC) collection (1841-1928) at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She concludes that care is needed to avoid replicating the invisible losses of extractive approaches to knowledge production, particularly in the context of collection-based biodiversity conservation.
Investigating the natural landscapes and built structures at the Manzanar National Historic Site, the first of ten incarceration camps to open in 1941 and a temporary home for over 11,000 Japanese Americans, Jennifer K. Ladino
develops the notion of affective agency to describe the impacts generated by environments and objects there.
In his article for the special “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities Section,” Mike Hulme goes beyond traditional, institutional definitions to view climate as an idea which mediates between the human experience of ephemeral weather and the cultural ways of living which are animated by this experience.
In this commentary piece, Donna Haraway calls for the stretching and recomposition of kin and kinship, as all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense. She feels it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages (not species one at a time).