"Refining Uranium: Bob Wiseman's Ecomusicological Puppetry"
Andrew Mark describes Bob Wiseman’s allegorical piece, Uranium, arguing that it accesses emotion to alter the consciousness of percipients.
Andrew Mark describes Bob Wiseman’s allegorical piece, Uranium, arguing that it accesses emotion to alter the consciousness of percipients.
In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Alexa Weik von Mossner analyzes Dale Pendell’s speculative novel The Great Bay.
In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Wolfgang Struck’s essay examines the renewed attraction to the medium of the atlas in light of representational challenges raised by the model of the Anthropocene.
For the special section “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities,” Kate Wright points to a photograph of two young men laughing as their hair stands up, only to be struck by lightning moments later, as a reminder of how tragic and dangerous the cognitive illusion of human exceptionalism can be. She sees Environmental Humanities as an attempt to address the systemic pathology of a species disconnected from the conditions of its world.
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.
In this commentary piece, the six authors attempt to “reboot” or reinstitute a concept close to the heart of the Moderns, namely the assumption that the traditional concept of nature, as developed through modern European history, would no longer be adequate to a future beset by environmental crises.
Dave Foreman’s Books of the Big Outside is a catalog of books, poetry, music, and material pertaining to what he calls the “Big Outside,” compiled for “wilderness defenders.”
Dave Foreman’s Books of the Big Outside is a catalog of books, poetry, music, and material pertaining to what he calls the “Big Outside,” compiled for “wilderness defenders.”
Gordon M. Sayre explores the metaphor of a species as a book, represented in the Alexandrian library. He argues that this obscures the fact that the Alexandrian library consisted of manuscripts, not print books and that, in essence, species may be more like manuscripts than books after all.
Stefan Helmreich’s foreword to a Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, concludes that the anthropology of outer space these days is a machine for chaotic and cosmic travel, chrono-synclastic infundibulation, and analogical involution, a wrinkle in the discipline and its companion fields that changes what can count as both the “environment” and the “humanities.”