morethanhumanworlds newsletter - august 2022 |
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Dear friends and followers, I’m thrilled to send you the August 2022 newsletter of morethanhumanworlds, a platform for critical knowledge exchange among academics, activists, artists, and practitioners concerned with human-environment relations. In this second newsletter of the year, you’ll find information on some recent publications, non-scholarly outputs, and recorded talks, and a selection of thought-provoking resources on more-than-human population politics, rubber empires in Liberia, Indigenous and Western intellectual traditions, the ecopolitics of scale and specificity, and more. This newsletter also features four fabulous fresh-off-the-press interviews with Indonesian environmental activist Farwiza Farhan (Forest, Nature & Environment Aceh), social anthropologist Amy Zhang (New York University), blue humanities scholar Killian Quigley (Australian Catholic University), and environmental anthropologist Maron Greenleaf (Dartmouth College). If you’d like to share resources, news, or anything else related to morethanhumanworlds in the December newsletter, please get in touch by email (deadline for submissions: 15 Nov 2022). Enjoy and thank you for subscribing to morethanhumanworlds! |
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new outputs a selection of recent scholarly and non-scholarly publications on human-environment relations in the Pacific and beyond book - "Introduction: Who Benefits from Multispecies Justice?" in Chao, Sophie, Karin Bolender, and Eben Kirksey (eds) The Promise of Multispecies Justice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1-21. Available for free download here.
- In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua. Durham, NC: Duke University Press (2022). Click here for further details.
Sydney-based friends and colleagues are warmly welcome to join the in-person book launch of In the Shadow of the Palms at Gleebooks on Friday 5 August! For further details, click here. articles book review - “Kirsch, Stuart. Engaged Anthropology: Politics Beyond the Text. xvi, 306 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Oakland: Univ. of California Press, 2018. £24.95.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 28(2): 684 – 685. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13717.
podcasts - “In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua.” New Books Network. 2 April. With Alex Golub. Available online.
- “Pluralizing Justice Amidst the Expansion of Palm Oil Projects.” 14 June. Green Dreamer. With Kamea Chayne. Available online.
essays - "Ode to the Gilbert's Potoroo." Bushfire Stories (republished from Plumwood Mountain – An Australian and International Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics as part of the "An Endangered Menagerie" collection). 20 July 2022. Available online.
- “Writing Nature in the Active Voice.” Environmental History Now. 8 July. Available online.
- “Forest Foodways in West Papua.” e-flux Journal. Issue #128. June. Available online.
- “Indigenous Mapmaking, or Bringing a Dead Map to Life.” SAPIENS. 17 May. Available online.
- “The Palate Politics of Eating Kangaroo.” Edge Effects. 29 April. Available online.
- “Mangiati Dalla Palma.” Internazionale. Issue 1458 (April 2022). Available online.
- “The Sky has no Corners: My Journey to a New Understanding of Nature.” 5 Media. 6 April. Available online.
talks - "Decolonizing the Field(s) – Insights from the Pacific in an Age of Planetary Unraveling.” Keynote lecture. Building Bridges: An Interdisciplinary Conference. Postcolonial Studies Centre, Nottingham Trent University. 5 April. Available online.
- “Plants as Persons, Forests as Kin: Indigenous Philosophies of Vegetal Coexistence.” Prada Frames. Milan. 6 June 2022. Available online.
interviews - Kayne, Chamea. 2022. “Pacific Islanders are Embracing their Cultural Past to Better their Climate Future.” Grist. 31 May. Available online.
- Ladouceur, Korine. 2022. “De Java à Bornéo, des Peuples Autochtones Peinent à se Faire Entendre.” L’Apostrophe. Spring. Available online.
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morethanhuman matters interviews with academics, activists, and artists seeking to broaden conversations on the environment across disciplines, practices, geographies, and cultures |
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Farwiza Farhan is an environmental activist and leader of the Acehnese NGO Forest, Nature & Environment Aceh (HAkA). Farwiza focuses on ground-level species protection and high-level legal advocacy. She is one the leading voices in the fight to protect the Leuser ecosystem in Sumatra, Indonesia. Farwiza’s impact on community-driven conservation was recognized with the 2016 Whitley Award. | | |
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Maron Greenleaf is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. Maron is a sociocultural anthropologist, political ecologist, and legal scholar who studies the intersections of the environment and economy. In particular, Maron examines efforts to create “green economies,” together with the political practices, aspirations, and forms of inclusion and exclusion that they create. | | |
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Amy Zhang is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at New York University. Her research focuses on the politics of environmental management and of urbanization in contemporary China. Amy’s current book project investigates how waste infrastructures, materials, and their technical interventions ground and condition the forms, possibilities, and limits of emerging urban environmental politics in China. | | |
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Killian Quigley is Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Australian Catholic University. His primary works reside at the intersections of the environmental humanities, literary studies, the history and philosophy of science, and aesthetic theory. Killian's first book, Reading Underwater Wreckage: An Encrusting Ocean (Bloomsbury Academic, under contract), ecocritically theorizes shipwrecks and other seabed ruins. | | |
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for the reading list a selection of thought-provoking publications on the poetics and politics of more-than-human worlds across geographies, communities, and epistemologies - Srinivasan, Krithika. 2014. “Caring for the Collective: Biopower and Agential Subjectification in Wildlife Conservation.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (3): 501–17.
On conservation as a form of “population politics” that draws attention to the entanglements of harm and care within spaces of more-than-human social change. - Turner, Dale. 2006. This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
On Indigenous intellectual culture, its relationship to dominant Euro-American culture, and avenues for respecting both Indigenous philosophies and Western European intellectual traditions. - Choy, Timothy K. 2011. Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
On the significance of ecological concepts of uniqueness, scale, and specificity within Hong Kong ecopolitics and environmentalism. - Guthman, Julie, and Sandy Brown. 2016. “Whose Life Counts: Biopolitics and the ‘“Bright Line”’ of Chloropicrin Mitigation in California’s Strawberry Industry.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 41 (3): 461–82.
On how biopolitical thinking can help us make sense of regulations that are designed to protect but inherently allow some to become ill, revealing implicit decisions about whose bodies count. - Mitman, Gregg. 2021. Empire of Rubber: Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia. New York: The New Press.
An ambitious and shocking exposé of America’s hidden rubber empire in Liberia, run by the storied Firestone corporation, and its long shadow. |
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I acknowledge the custodians of the lands I work and live on, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and the Darramuragal people of the Darug nation. I offer my respects to their elders past, present, and emergent, and to their kin - human, vegetal, animal, and elemental. The lands of Gadigal and Darramuragal were taken without consent, treaty, or compensation. They are lands whose stories have historically been stolen, silenced, and sanitized. They are lands of ongoing Indigenous survivance, continuance, and resurgence. |
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