"The Phenomenology of Animal Life"
Lestel, Bussolini, and Chrulew present a bi-constructivist approach to the study of animal life, opposed to the realist-Cartesian paradigm in which most ethology operates.
Lestel, Bussolini, and Chrulew present a bi-constructivist approach to the study of animal life, opposed to the realist-Cartesian paradigm in which most ethology operates.
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.
James Hatley’s article for the ‘Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities’ section discusses the horizon of the ‘Aion’ (as formulated in the four geological eons), and the fact that every species is linked in genetic kinship.
Shannon Cram explores the slippery subjectivities of nuclear waste and nature at Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation, examining how this space is framed as both pristine habitat and waste frontier. She examines Hanford’s biological vector control program through the fruit fly and discusses how vector control uses instances of nuclear trespass to articulate the boundary between contaminated and uncontaminated. She concludes that nature is being recruited to do what the U.S. Department of Energy cannot: solve Hanford’s nuclear waste problem.
In this article for a Special Section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Fikile Nxumalo relate raccoon-child-educator encounters to consider how raccoons’ repeated boundary-crossing and the perception of raccoons as unruly subjects might reveal the impossibility of the nature/culture divide. They do so through a series of situated, everyday stories from childcare centers in Canada.
In this article for a Special Section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Alexander R. D. Zahara and Myra J. Hird explore the ways in which western and Inuit cosmologies differentially inform particular relationships with the inhuman, and “trash animals” in particular. They compare vermin control practiced in Canada’s waste sites with the freedom of ravens to explore waste sites within Inuit communities, arguing that waste and wasting exist within a complex set of historically embedded and contemporaneously contested neo-colonial structures and processes.
In the special section titled “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Section,” Simon Pooley reflects on the decisions and implications of conferring the status of “endangered species” on animals.
In the “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Section” of Environmental Humanities, Maan Barua reveals encounters as spatializing and “ecologizing” politics in ways that are vital for the environmental humanities’ efforts to redistribute powers to act and to flourish.
In this introduction to the special issue on Multispecies Studies, Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster provide an overview of the emerging field of multispecies studies. Unsettling given notions of species, the article explores a broad terrain of possible modes of classifying, categorizing, and paying attention to the diverse ways of life that constitute worlds.
In this special issue on Multispecies Studies, Vinciane Despret and Michel Meuret discuss how humans and animals are making their own contributions to a new cosmoecology, creating cosmoecological connections and contributing to what Ghassan Hage has called alter-politics.