“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 […]
Archive for the ‘Eco-theory’ Category
“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 »
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, […]
State of the Eco-Humanities, Take 1
Posted in Academe, Anthropocene, Eco-theory, tagged academic initiatives, conferences, eco-arts, eco-humanities, engaged scholarship, environmental humanities on June 8, 2016 | 4 Comments »
This post is the first of a series of reflections on the state of the Environmental Humanities, or Eco-Humanities, and of where this interdisciplinary field might be headed. A note on terminology: The term “Environmental Humanities” has caught on in ways that “Eco-Humanities” and other variations have not, but the debate between them has hardly occurred, […]
Eco-humanities glossolalia
Posted in Academe, Eco-theory, tagged eco-humanities, environmental humanities on September 18, 2015 | 3 Comments »
I’ve just come across the earliest outline I wrote for the course I’m currently teaching (in its third incarnation), “Environmental Literature, Arts, and Media.” The course has also turned into a book project I’m working on, which will be a thematic primer to the environmental arts and humanities. Both course and book have changed shape so […]
Rethinking the ‘three ecologies’
Posted in Eco-theory, tagged ecocriticism, Ecologies of the Moving Image, epistemology, Guattari, music, Ontology, Peirce, three ecologies, visual art on March 8, 2014 | 10 Comments »
Or, process-relational ecocriticism 2.0 Two of the courses I’m currently teaching — the intermediate-level “Environmental Literature, Art, and Media” and the senior-level “The Culture of Nature” — require introducing an eco-critical framework appropriate to a wide range of artistic forms, from literature to visual art, music, film and new media. The process-relational framework developed in […]