Hello and welcome to the January newsletter of morethanhumanworlds! This month, I'm sharing three new research outputs: a review of Maria Puig de la Bellacasa's Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds published in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, a guest seminar on resistance and collaboration in oil palm plantations hosted by the University of Waikato (Aotearoa New Zealand), and a podcast on "Adapting Methods, Human Difference, Virtual Dojos, and Foggy Field Notes" hosted by the Australian National University's The Familiar Strange. In addition, you'll find below a series of thought-provoking publications exploring the intersections of tea, taste, and species in Darjeeling tea plantations, the relationship between wretched lives and wretched earth, and the material-semiotic force of margins in understanding the imaginative quality and specificity of local/global cultural formations. In this month's Morethanhuman Matters interview, I speak with Karin Bolender (aka K-Haw Hart), an artist-researcher who seeks “untold” stories within muddy meshes of mammals, plants, microbes, and many others through time-based performance, video, writing, sound, and experimental book arts. If you'd like to share resources, news, or anything else related to morethanhumanworlds, please send them to me for inclusion in the February newsletter. Enjoy and thank you for subscribing to morethanhumanworlds! |
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NEW OUTPUTS Read a review of Maria Puig de la Bellacasa's Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds published in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. In this review, I examine how Puig de la Bellacasa grapples with the concomitant challenges of decentring human agency as the starting point of care, keeping specific ethical obligations, and thickening the meanings of care within the situatedness of more than human relations. Listen to a current affairs podcast produced by the Australian National University's The Familiar Strange. In this podcast, I discuss COVID-19, memory, fieldwork, and ontological difference with fellow Familiar Strangers Alexander d’Aiola, Deanna Catto, and Simon Theobald. |
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Watch a guest seminar on resistance and collaboration in oil palm plantations hosted by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Waikato (Aotearoa New Zealand). In this seminar, I explore how Indigenous Marind in West Papua theorize the lively and lethal relations of parasites and mutualists to oil palm, and the implications of these interspecies dynamics for Indigenous resilience and coexistence under settler-colonial regimes and their attendant logic of racialization and extraction. An article derived from this talk will be coming out in American Anthropologist in 2021 so watch this space :) |
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“The book form of The Unnaming of Aliass reckons primarily with the limits of language and storying when it comes to more-than-human-ass worldings. So the text must actively fail to represent the journeys and home-makings with Aliass in different timeplaces.” Karin Bolender |
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MORETHANHUMAN MATTERS This week, morethanhuman matters interviews Karin Bolender (aka K-Haw Hart), an artist-researcher who seeks “untold” stories within muddy meshes of mammals, plants, microbes, and many others. Karin has lived and traveled with a family of American Spotted Asses since 2002. Through time-based performance, video, writing, sound, and experimental book arts, she explores dirty words and the wisdoms of earthly bodies in the company of she-asses Aliass and Passenger and their whole muddy ass herd. | | |
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FOR THE READING LIST Kumpf, Desiree. 2020. “Organic Taste and Labour on Indian Tea Plantations.” Social Anthropology. DOI: 10.1111/1469-8676.12951. On how organic tea agriculture and taste affect both nonhuman relations and unequal human labor dynamics on Indian tea plantations. Tsing, Anna L. 1994. “From the Margins.” Cultural Anthropology 9 (3): 279–97. On margins as a conceptual site from which to explore the imaginative quality and the specificity of local/global cultural formations and the instability of social categories. |
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Gray, Ros, and Shela Sheikh. 2018. “The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions. Introduction.” Third Text 32 (2–3): 163–75. On how doing justice to Fanon’s diagnosis of ‘the wretched of the earth’ requires that we understand more deeply the extent to which this is due to the fact that the earth itself is wretched, and that part of this condition has been the destruction of ‘ecological’ relations with the earth. |
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