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NYC: Arts & Humanities on the Anthropocene

June 10, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

This week’s AESS conference “Welcome to the Anthropocene” features a breakfast roundtable called “The Arts and Humanities Respond to the Anthropocene.” See the session description below.

Unfortunately the panelists have been dropping like flies: it looks like neither dancer and performance artist Jennifer Monson, eco-artist Jackie Brookner, nor performer and comedian Jennifer Joy can make it. That leaves eco-journalist (and musician!) Andy Revkin (who’ll be giving a keynote address the previous evening), author and biologist Amy Seidl, and myself.

So this is a general call to all artists and eco-humanities folks in the New York City area: come to the breakfast roundtable if you can and if you dare. It’ll take place this Thursday morning, 7:30-9:00 a.m. at Pace University, 1 Pace Plaza in Lower Manhattan.

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Top humanists: final results

June 3, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Since most of us love lists — or at least love and hate them simultaneously — here is the updated version of the “Top humanities theorists of the last century” list.

See the previous version for the full criteria and the caveats. Briefly: it’s a list of the most cited humanities theorists of the last 100 years (roughly) according to their Google Scholar citation numbers.

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Ethics of live-blogging

May 19, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Brian Leiter’s blog recently hosted some interesting conversations on the ethics of live-blogging academic talks.

I’ve done that a few times, but always tried to get the live-blogged speaker’s permission, if not in advance then immediately afterward, and always offering to take the notes down if the speaker preferred that. (No one has requested that from me yet.)

Some of the comments on Leiter’s blog also discuss the ethics of academic institutions making papers available publicly or semi-publicly without permission — which has bearings on the publishability of the papers.

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Prize announcement

May 19, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Announcing a competition:

Which scholars should be on the list of “Top humanists of the last century” but are not?

The person who names the greatest number of such names by the end of the day (12 midnight) EST next Sunday — using the methodology specified there (a simple Google Scholar search) — will win a copy of my book Ecologies of the Moving Image.

The rule is that the names must be listed first in the comments section of that post.

With one exception: James Stanescu, who blogs at Critical Animal, has already named Walter Benjamin, Emile Durkheim, and Antonio Gramcsi, so they are out of the running — and he is in the lead at 3, since the prize was first announced on Facebook. It’s now gone public.

Beat 3!

 

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Top humanists of the last century

May 18, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

A theme that’s been coming up in my conversations recently (including when visiting UC Davis) is the question of the “humanities canon”: i.e., who are the theorists whose views have been most influential in shaping the humanities disciplines, especially over the last century or so? And more specifically, is there anything approximating an “environmental humanities canon,” and who are its key theorists?

I’ll leave the second question for later. As for the first, an easy place to start is with a simple Google Scholar search for some of the most commonly cited humanists of the last century.

Is there any question about who will top that list? For me there wasn’t. (Drumroll coming.) But after first place, there were some surprises.

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Posted in Academe | Tagged , | 18 Comments »

The discipline of interdiscipline

May 16, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

mtg

The Rachel Carson Center’s Minding the Gap: Working Across Disciplines in Environmental Studies has come out (in PDF and MOBI formats). It includes pieces by Gregg Mitman, Rob Nixon, SueEllen Campbell, John Meyer, Basarab Nicolescu, and others.

My piece, “The Discipline of Interdisciplines” (pp. 11-13), is intended as something of a collective statement from my generation (the first generation) of ES doctoral graduates. (Apologies for being so bold, but no one else has done it, to my knowledge, so I thought I’d try.)

I’m sharing it below.

 

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Visiting UC Davis

April 21, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I’ll be participating in the Mellon-sponsored Environments and Societies Colloquium Series next Wednesday, April 30, at the University of California Davis.

My colloquium paper, entitled “On Matters of Concern: Ecology, Ontological Politics, and the Anthropo(s)cene,” is available for reading on the E & S website. (It’s a variation of a chapter for a book on “integral ecologies” which is currently in the peer-review stage.)

The following day I’ll be giving a talk at the same university. Below are the details.

Kirsten_Dunst_Charlotte_Gainsbourg_Melancholia_LarsVonTrier_film_3

“From the Age of the World Motion Picture to the Archive, the Cloud, and the Commons”

May 1, 2014 3:00-4:30 pm, Olson 53A

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Posted in Media ecology, Philosophy | 1 Comment »

Making the news

April 15, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Since I’ve begun paying attention to web sites about the ongoing events in Ukraine, I’ve noticed how similar Russian web trolls are to climate denialist trolls. Both seem to operate on an industrial scale.

Trolling is one way of fabricating news. Acting is another. Here are some priceless encounters with news fabrication.

 

 

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Quaking the subject

April 13, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

This post continues my thinking on the topic of a process-relational “bodymind practice” — an existential art or “technique of the self” building on Buddhist meditation practice reinterpreted and augmented through process-relational philosophy.

In this post, I incorporate insights obtained through the practice of Quaker silent worship. See the posts “ What a bodymind can do” parts 1,  2,  3, and update for background on all of this.

Dark_matter_asteroid

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Posted in Process-relational thought, Spirit matter | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Anthropocene aesthetics

April 10, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Cross-posting this piece by Emil from A(s)cene. Taylor’s coral reef art is beautiful. See also the discussion of Donna Haraway’s “String Figures” lecture and Bruno Latour’s 11 theses on capitalism. 

 

anthropocene-001-jason-decaires-taylor-sculpture
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Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-culture, Visual culture | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

“Lest you think we’re a faceless entity…”

March 25, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

This ad is making the rounds, but in case you haven’t seen it yet, here it is. It is brilliant.

 

 

As Jeff Beer puts it, the stock video footage firm Dissolve illustrates the “marketing strategy equivalent of paint-by-numbers” by putting its own goods to the words of Kendra Eash‘s brilliant McSweeney’s piece.

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Posted in Media ecology | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

SCMS Media & Environment group

March 23, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The Media and Environment Scholarly Interest Group just won the prize for best attended business meeting at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Or so we were informed by the SCMS interest group liaison present at the meeting.

This year’s SCMS featured what to my mind was by far the largest assemblage of panels and papers on all manner of environmental/ecological themes: analyses of filmic representations of nature, disasters and catastrophes, animals and nonhumans; theoretical excursions in ecocinema, eco-aesthetics, toxic and “energetic” media, frontier and extraction imaginaries, and more; and eco-materialist analyses of production processes, data backup systems, and other things. Some of these were sponsored by the M & E interest group; many were not.

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Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Media ecology, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 1 Comment »

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