immanence

This blog has been a bit quiet as I transition to my new position as Woodsworth Chair in Global Humanities at Simon Fraser University. I’ll be sharing more about that soon. In the meantime, I can share links to a few recent talks.

Last year’s Free Cultural Spaces symposium “Towards the Symbiocene,” held in Amsterdam’s Club Paradiso and at the “free cultural space” of Ruigoord, Netherlands, has just made available some symposium highlights on YouTube. My talk, “Eco-Trauma & Beyond: Ways of Becoming Earthbound,” can be watched here or below (first video). The talk was a part of a series featuring Glenn Albrecht, philosopher and theorist of the Symbiocene (“era of mutually beneficial relationships between humans and everything else”), critical political geographer Erik Swyngedouw, and philosopher Lisa Doeland, and we shared a panel moderated by Indira van ‘t Klooster, which you can also watch below (second video).

Here’s “Eco-Trauma & Beyond: Ways of Becoming Earthbound”:

And the Symbiocene panel:

For more on the symposium, see my post about it from last year. The Symposium’s Free Cultural Spaces Declaration can be read on page 12 of this issue of Amsterdam Alternative.

My Vermont Humanities talk from last month, “Environmental Humanities 101: Critical Studies for Feverish Times,” can be watched here or here.

And here’s an open-access article I’ve just published with colleague Rachelle Gould and two computer scientists. It’s the first time I’ve co-written something with AI researchers. The article, “Nature is resource, playground, and gift: What artificial intelligence reveals about human–Nature relationships,” is not groundbreaking, but its bridging between environmental humanities themes and the possibilities of big-data research is somewhat novel. Here’s the abstract:

This paper demonstrates how artificial-intelligence language analysis can inform understanding of human–nature relationships and other social phenomena. We demonstrate three techniques by investigating relationships within the popular word2vec word embedding, which is trained on a sample from over 50,000 worldwide news sources. Our first technique investigates what theory-generated analogies are most similar to nature:people. The resource:user analogy is most similar, followed by the playground:child and gift:receiver analogies. Our second technique explores whether nature-related words are affiliated with words that denote race, class, or gender. Nature words tend slightly toward associations with femininity and wealth. Our third technique demonstrates how the relationship between nature and wellbeing compares to other concepts’ relationships to wellbeing—e.g., spirituality–wellbeing, social relations–wellbeing. Nature is more semantically connected to wellbeing than money, social relations, and multiple other wellbeing correlates. Findings are consistent with previous social science and humanities research on human-nature relationships, but do not duplicate them exactly; our results thus offer insight into dominant trends and prevalence of associations. Our analysis also offers a model for using word embeddings to investigate a wide variety of topics.

I remain skeptical of AI, but that’s largely because of the “wild west” style in which it’s being developed (which is echoing the development of social media over the past two decades) and because the amount of energy and data it requires to continue developing is so voluminous.

Other updates can be found on my UVM web page, which will continue to be updated as I remain affiliated with that university.