Hello and welcome to the March newsletter of morethanhumanworlds! This month, I'm sharing a SAPIENS review of Don Kulick's latest book, Death in a Rainforest, an Oceania co-edited special issue on Oceanic Societies in COVID-19, and a recorded seminar on food and water sovereignty in Indonesia, hosted by Universitas Udayana. A couple of exciting conferences are coming up this month - featured here are the annual conference of the Association of Asian Studies and the second international Temporal Belongings conference. In addition, you'll find below a series of thought-provoking publications on decolonizing research framings in the Pacific, non-human legal personhood and community entrepreneurship in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the intersections of urban farming, localism, and care in Singapore. In this month's Morethanhuman Matters interview, I speak with Stefanie Fishel, a lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of the Sunshine Coast (Australia) whose research interests include the gendered and racialized experiences of environmental harm; new materialism and posthumanism; critical animal studies; science and technology studies; and global environmental theory and law focused on climate change, biodiversity, and the Anthropocene. If you'd like to share resources, news, or anything else related to morethanhumanworlds, please send them to me for inclusion in the April newsletter. Enjoy and thank you for subscribing to morethanhumanworlds! |
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NEW OUTPUTS Read a review of anthropologist Don Kulick's latest book, Death in a Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea, published in SAPIENS. In this review, I examine how Kulick's account speaks more broadly to the power and politics of anthropological research in making the strange familiar and the familiar strange. To read more about Kulick's book, click here. |
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Read a special issue on Oceanic Societies in COVID-19, published in Oceania and co-edited by Ute Eickelkamp and myself. In this special issue, scholars, students, and practitioners from Oceania report on their experiences of the pandemic through articles, photo-essays, love stories, and poems. Listen to a seminar on food and water sovereignty in Indonesia, hosted by Universitas Udayana. In this seminar, I examine land use changes and its impacts on the health and livelihoods of West Papuan communities. In conversation with Dr. Dasapta Erwin Irawan and Ni Luh Putu Ariastuti, MPH. |
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UPCOMING EVENTS Join us at the Second International Temporal Belongings Conference on 15 - 17 March, centred on The Material Life of Time. I'll be presenting at the panel "Envirotechnical Assemblages and Indigenous Resistance" together with Kirsty Howey, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Karly Burch, Marama Muru-Lanning, Katharine Legun, and Hugh Campbell. For more details, click here. Join us at the Asian Studies Association Virtual Annual Conference on 21 - 26 March, themed around Connection, Community, and Engagement. I'll be co-chairing and presenting at the panel "Plantationocene in Southeast Asia" together with Aida Arosoaie, Ahmad Dhiaulhaq, Aaron Hope, Ward Berenschot, and discussant Tania Murray Li. For more details, click here. |
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"[W]e know that power among humans and human institutions aren’t only homogenous and oppressive, but also productive and positive, and that the addition of complex natural systems and processes only complicates this traditional telling of power. To add to this complexity, human domination of and power over “nature” need to be rethought and reversed." Stefanie Fishel |
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MORETHANHUMAN MATTERS This week, morethanhuman matters interviews Stefanie Fishel, speak with Stefanie Fishel, a lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of the Sunshine Coast (Australia) whose research interests include the gendered and racialized experiences of environmental harm; new materialism and posthumanism; critical animal studies; science and technology studies; and global environmental theory and law focused on climate change, biodiversity, and the Anthropocene. | | |
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FOR THE READING LIST Nabobo-Baba, Unaisi. 2008. “Decolonizing Framings in Pacific Research: Indigenous Fijian Vanua Research Framework as an Organic Response.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 4 (2): 140–54. On how Indigenous Pacific people describe and articulate their preferred processes of knowledge gathering, processing, and dissemination, as part of a wider move to achieve self-determination in academia and in knowledge institutions more broadly. |
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Argyrou, Aikaterini, and Harry Hummels. 2019. “Legal Personality and Economic Livelihood of Whanganui River: A Call for Community Entrepreneurship.” Water International 44 (6–7): 752–68. On how human economic activities can preserve the right of the Whanganui river to be free from pollution, remain an integral part of the Māori culture and tradition, improve Māori living conditions, and support their rights to self-determination and prior consent. Wang, Jamie. 2021. “The Sprouting Farms: You Are What You Grow.” Humanities 10(27). https:// doi.org/10.3390/h10010027. On how urban agriculture might forge a kind of thick localism rooted in situated care as it carries out social missions, experimenting with and subverting the dominant imaginary of industrial farming. |
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