morethanhumanworlds newsletter - april 2023 |
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Dear friends, I hope that 2023 is off to a smooth start for you and your close ones. I’m thrilled to send you the April newsletter of morethanhumanworlds, a platform for critical knowledge exchange among academics, activists, artists, and practitioners concerned with human-environment relations. In this newsletter, you’ll find information on new publications since the last newsletter of August 2022, together with updates on non-scholarly outputs and recorded talks, and also a selection of thought-provoking resources on Pacific feminist methodologies, place-wisdom as research ethic, and multispecies democracy. This newsletter features four fabulous interviews with environmental historian Faizah Binte Zakaria, philosopher Dalia Nassar, geographer Donna Houston, and historian of science and mental health James Dunk. If you’d like to share resources, news, or anything else related to morethanhumanworlds in the next newsletter, please get in touch by email (deadline for submissions: 1 October 2023). 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 edited volume Chao, Sophie, Karin Bolender, and Eben Kirksey (eds). 2022. The Promise of Multispecies Justice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Contributor(s): Margaret Leanne (M. L.) Clark, Radhika Govindrajan, Zsuzsanna Ihar, Noriko Ishiyama, Elizabeth Lara, Jia Hui Lee, Kristina M. Lyons, Michael Marder, Alyssa Paredes, Craig Santos Perez, Kim Tallbear What are the possibilities for multispecies justice? How do social justice struggles intersect with the lives of animals, plants, and other creatures? Leading thinkers in anthropology, geography, philosophy, speculative fiction, poetry, and contemporary art answer these questions from diverse grounded locations. In America, Indigenous peoples and prisoners are decolonizing multispecies relations in unceded territory and carceral landscapes. Small justices are emerging in Tanzanian markets, near banana plantations in the Philippines, and in abandoned buildings of Azerbaijan as people navigate relations with feral dogs, weeds, rats, and pesticides. Conflicts over rights of nature are intensifying in Colombia’s Amazon. Specters of justice are emerging in India, while children in Micronesia memorialize extinct bird species. Engaging with ideas about environmental justice, restorative justice, and other species of justice, The Promise of Multispecies Justice holds open the possibility of flourishing in multispecies worlds, present and to come. For more details, click here.
articles & book chapters "Chao, Sophie, and Giovanni Aloi. 2023. “In the Shadow of the Palms.” Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 60 (Spring): 89–108. Available online. Price, Catherine, and Sophie Chao. 2023. “Multispecies, More-than-human, Non-human, Other-than-human: Reimagining Idioms of Animacy in an Age of Planetary Unmaking.” Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal 10(2): 177–193. Available online. Chao, Sophie. 2023. “Bouncing Back? Kangaroo-Human Resistance in Contemporary Australia.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 6(1): 331–354. Available online. Chao, Sophie. 2023. “The Multispecies World of Oil Palm: Indigenous Marind Perspectives on Plantation Ecologies in West Papua.” In: Le Petitcorps, Colette, Macedo, Marta, and Irene Peano (eds) Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. 315-338. Available online.
essays & interviews Chu, Kymberley, and Sophie Chao. 2023. “An Interview with Dr. Sophie Chao on Palm Oil Worlds.” American Ethnologist website. 13 February. Available online. Chao, Sophie. 2023. “Decanonizing the Field.” Cambridge University Social Anthropology Society Magazine. Lent edition. Available online. “International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples: Celebrating the Custodians of Global Biocultural Diversity.” Duke University Press blog. 8 August 2022. Available online. Chao, Sophie, and Christine Winter. 2022. “The Entanglements of Oil Palm Plantations.” Sydney Environment Institute. 2 August. Available online.
podcasts 2023. “Episode 86: Sophie Chao, University of Sydney.” The Gatty Lecture Rewind Podcast. Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University. With Francine Barchett. 21 March. Available online. 2022. “Conversation with Dr. Sophie Chao.” Samtal Jameer Samtal Jameen/Equal Terrains, Equal Selves. 27 September. With Ravi Agarwal. Available online. 2022. “Sophie Chao on West Papua and Oil Palm.” Radical Australia – 3RC Community Radio. 31 August. With Joe Toscano and Kelly Whitworth. Available online. 2022. “Worlds of Gray and Green: Mineral Extraction as Ecological Practice.” 18 August. Occasional Talks Series, Sydney Environment Institute. With Sebastián Ureta, Thom van Dooren, and Susan Park. Available online.
recorded talks “In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua.” Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks. The University of Stavanger. 26 Sep 2022. Available online. “Eating and Being Eaten: More-Than-Human Metabolisms on the West Papuan Agribusiness Frontier.” Metabolic Matterings Symposium. Deakin University. 19 Oct 2022. Available online. “Crafting Humanimal Histories: Anticipatory Reflections on Some Methodological, Conceptual, and Ethical Stakes.” Deep Conversations. Centre for Environmental History. The Australian National University. 25 Oct 2022. Available online.
book reviews Chao, Sophie. 2022. “Tik Merauke: An Epidemic Like No Other, by John Richens.” Bijdragen tot de Land-, Taal- en Volkenkunde/Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 178(4): 524–526. Available online. Chao, Sophie. 2022. “Book Review – Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia’s Oil Palm Zone.” Inside Indonesia 146, October – December. 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 please open the interviews on a desktop computer with the Google Chrome browser for optimal layout |
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Donna Houston is Associate Professor in the Discipline of Geography and Planning at Macquarie University, Australia. She is a cultural and urban geographer whose research focuses on environmental justice in the Anthropocene; geographies of extinction, and urban planning in more-than-human cities. She is interested in how methodologies such as storytelling, visual methods and cultural memory can help address socio-environmental challenges. | | |
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Dalia Nassar is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her work sits at the intersection of the history of German philosophy and environmental philosophy and ethics. Her research demonstrates the significance of art for knowledge, and highlights how epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics are fundamentally interdependent. Dalia has strong interests in the contributions of women philosophers sidelined in philosophical canons. | | |
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Faizah Binte Zakaria is Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her scholarship centers on religion and ecology in maritime Southeast Asia. Her book, The Camphor Tree and the Elephant, was published by Washington University Press in 2023. It uses the North Sumatran highlands as a lens to examine how mass religious conversions from animism to monotheism were catalyzed by environmental transformations. | | |
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James Dunk is a a Research Fellow in the Discipline of Anthropology and the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney, Australia. A historian of psychology and medicine, his research explores the way that ecological crises since the mid-twentieth century have produced planetary imaginaries. His book Bedlam at Botany Bay won the Australian History Prize at the New South Wales Premier’s History Awards. | | |
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for the reading list a selection of publications on the poetics and politics of more-than-human worlds across geographies, communities, and epistemologies Naepi, Sereana. 2019. “Masi Methodology: Centring Pacific Women’s Voices in Research.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 15 (3): 234–42. Available online. On masi as an anchoring metaphor for research that centres Pacific women’s voices, values Pacific women’s voices, and acknowledges the importance of Pacific women's knowledges for generations to come. Wooltorton, Sandra, Anne Poelina, and Len Collard. 2021. “River Relationships: For the Love of Rivers.” River Research and Applications 38 (3): 393–403. Available online. On how feeling, hearing, writing and storytelling can support the verbalization of experience, bring to mind place-wisdom, and offer an everyday possibility for people now estranged from their riverine kin. Clavería, Miguel Z. 2016. “Convertir La Zoé En Bíos: Democracia, Respresentación y Animales.” Acta Sociológica 71: 101–21. Available online. Sobre una democracia que dejaría de considerar la competencia discursiva como una condición necesaria para la representación política y le daría la palabra a animales humanos y no humanos que no poseen o que han perdido la capacidad de expresar lingüísticamente sus propios intereses.
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upcoming talks tune in for some conversations on more-than-human matters, in person or online 10 Apr 2023. “Gastrocolonialism di Liputan Hutan dan Lingkungan.” Rainforest Journalist Fund. Pulitzer Center. 9 Apr 2023. “On Being and Mourning Waste: Insights from the Papuan Plantation Nexus.” Prada Frames/Formafantasma. Milan. 26 Apr 2023. “In the Shadow of the Palms: Industrial Plantations as Zones of More-Than-Human Extinction, Extraction, and Emergence.” University of Milan. 1 May 2023. “Un(Worlding) the Plantationocene.” International Institute of Social Studies. The Hague. 2 May 2023. “Plantation Necrobiopolitics on the West Papuan Oil Palm Frontier.” Leiden University. 3 May 2023. “Multispecies Mourning: Grieving as Resistance in West Papua.” Wageningen University. 4 May 2023. “Plants, Plantations, Plantationocene: Life and Death in the Papuan Oil Plm Nexus.” Rotterdam University. 3 Jul 2023. “Patchy Artfulness: Exploratory Insights from the West Papuan Plantation Frontier.” Multispecies Ethnography and Artistic Methods (MEAM) Network. Keynote. 21 Aug 2023. “Multispecies Mourning: Grieving as Resistance on the West Papuan Oil Palm Frontier.” Australian National University.
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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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