The following post elaborates on some comments I made this week at the Ritual Creativity conference at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Deep thanks to conference organizers Katri Ratia and François Gauthier for inviting me to what turned out to be an immensely rewarding event, and to my co-panelists Graham Harvey, Sarah Pike, and Susannah […]
Archive for the ‘Eco-theory’ Category
Ways to inhabit the world
Posted in Eco-theory, Process-relational thought, tagged bioregionalism, Fribourg, Hanegraaff, imaginal practices, imagination, inhabitory practices, placemaking, prehension, reinhabitation, religion, religious imagination, ritual, Ritual Creativity, ritual studies, Whitehead on June 24, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
Eco+Deco, a manifesto in progress
Posted in Cultural politics, Eco-theory, Manifestos & auguries, Science & society, tagged colonialism, coloniality, decolonialism, Decolonization, ecological science, ecologization, ecology, indigeneity, indigenization, land, Latour, manifestos, Ontology, postcolonialism, reindigenization, Toronto Biennale of Art on May 31, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
Some of the best art exhibitions today show that the socially engaged art world is undergoing two shifts that some of us in the environmental humanities have been advocating for some time: they ecologize and they decolonize. An excellent example of this is the second edition of the Toronto Biennale of Art, currently wrapping up […]
The Anthropocene Unconscious
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Eco-culture, Eco-theory, tagged Anthropocene Unconscious, Fredric Jameson, geopolitical unconscious, Jameson, Jamesonian ecocriticism, Mark Bould on January 17, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
Mark Bould’s new book The Anthropocene Unconscious makes more or less the same argument as I made in my 2008 New Formations article “Stirring the Geopolitical Unconscious: Toward a Jamesonian Ecocriticism,” later expanded in the “Terra and Trauma” chapter of Ecologies of the Moving Image, but he applies it to literature rather than film. The […]
“Trust your (foamy) immune system”
Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-theory, tagged actor-network theory, anti-vaccination movement, co-immunism, co-immunology, COVID-19, Foams, immunity, immunological theory, networks, Peter Sloterdijk, public health, Spheres on August 2, 2021 | 7 Comments »
“Trust your immune system.” One often hears this slogan, or some version of it, from people who are against vaccination. But what does it mean, or what should it mean for an intensely social species like ours, living in a microbiologically fluid and creative environment like Earth’s biosphere? We can only trust something if we […]
Eco-humanities seminar
Posted in Academe, Eco-theory, tagged Adrian Ivakhiv, Advanced Environmental Humanities, courses, EcoCultureLab, environmental humanities, readings, University of Vermont on January 29, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
I will be making parts of my “Advanced Environmental Humanities” course open to the EcoCultureLab community and a limited broader public. Technical details remain to be worked out, but I’d like to make our readings and discussions open, so as to include interested participants from outside the university community. The course is a graduate and […]
Ecologizing Radiohead
Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Music & soundscape, tagged Brad Osborn, Britney Spears, Daydreaming, ecological psychology, ecology of perception, ecomusicology, J. J. Gibson, James J. Gibson, music psychology, music theory, musicology, perceptual ecology, process-relational thought, Radiohead, Stockhausen, The Pyramid Song, Thom Yorke on January 21, 2021 | 2 Comments »
What better way to understand ecological perception than by applying it to a study of the music of Radiohead, right? Okay, I’ll explain. “Ecological perception” is not what you might think. (And it isn’t what I, in my writing, call “perceptual ecology.“) It is a psychological theory that studies the perception of an organism (such […]
Books of the decade in ecocultural theory
Posted in Eco-theory, tagged Anna Tsing, Anthropocene, books, books of the decade, cosmopolitics, decolonial turn, decoloniality, Donna Haraway, ecocultural theory, Eduardo Kohn, extinction crisis, Marison de la Cadena, multispecies studies, ontological turn on December 18, 2020 | 6 Comments »
How best to characterize the past decade in books? This list focuses on three themes: attempts to grapple with the nature of the climate and extinction crises, the “ontological” and “decolonial” “turns” in cultural and environmental theory, and efforts to map out the “multispecies entanglements” that characterize our world and the acute challenges we face.
Shadowing the Anthropocene
Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-theory, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Adrian Ivakhiv, aesthetics, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Sanders Peirce, cultural theory, ethics, media philosophy, process-relational thought, Punctum Books, religious studies, Shadowing the Anthropocene on October 9, 2018 | 3 Comments »
Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times arrived in the mail today. It’s published by punctum books, an open-access academic and para-academic publisher I’ve found to be a real delight to work with. Eileen Joy deserves a medal for her leadership of punctum, and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei’s cover and book design is beautiful. The book […]
What’s over that dark mountain?
Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, tagged eco-justice, eco-nationalism, ecofascism, globalism, globalization, Heidegger, localism, Paul Kingsnorth on March 22, 2017 | 8 Comments »
Paul Kingsnorth’s “The Lie of the Land: Does Environmentalism Have a Future in the Age of Trump?“, published in last Saturday’s Guardian, has elicited some interesting responses, for interesting reasons. Kingsnorth is a well known novelist and environmental public intellectual, a back-to-the-land “dark ecologist,” former deputy-editor of The Ecologist (which for decades played an indispensible, […]