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Posts Tagged ‘Bruno Latour’

The word ontology comes up a lot in the fields I work in (loosely speaking, the environmental humanities and social sciences), especially among scholars grappling with cultural differences and “decolonial” thinking. Here’s a crack at a 5-minute introduction to it for newbies. Ontology is commonly defined as something like “the philosophical study of being” or […]

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Thinking further about the global climate precariat (and the ontology of climate trauma, etc.), I’ve been reading a set of books that try to articulate a “class politics” for the present eco-political conjuncture. In particular, Matthew Huber’s Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022) and Bruno Latour’s and Nikolaj […]

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Hearing the announcement of Bruno Latour‘s death earlier today, I remembered his visit to the Feverish World symposium, which I co-organized in 2018 in Burlington, Vermont. Despite his health (which was turning for the worse at the time), he participated gracefully in this strange mixture of conference, festival, and street event, and gave a great […]

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Gaia Vince’s Guardian article “The Century of Climate Migration: Why We Need to Plan for the Great Upheaval,” adapted from her forthcoming book Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World, is a very good overview of the coming age of mass migrations. It’s also more or less what I’ve been arguing in my […]

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French philosopher and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, in his The Three Ecologies, was the first to articulate the threefold nature of ecology, but he failed to provide a clear articulation of why there should be three and only three ecologies — not two, not one, not four or more. What is the ontological justification for this […]

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A social media conversation prompted me to dig up something I had written in my notebook years ago after reading Serhii Plokhy’s masterful book on “premodern identities” in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Which in turn prompted me to realize that coronavirus provides an answer to the question I had just finished writing an article about […]

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The global pandemic of Covid-19 has been accompanied by a proliferation of competing narratives of what the crisis is and means, and how it should be addressed. The UN and the World Health Organization have called this an “infodemic,” that is, an epidemic (or pandemic) of information that, in its confusing diversity, has made it […]

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Inspired by the daily litany of depressing news (and by reading Latour’s Down to Earth), I’ve succumbed to the temptation of writing a manifesto. Manifestos are cheap, I know, but we have to start somewhere. (And so many questions arise as you write one: about the proper balance between critique and vision, between generality and […]

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Review of Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018. Down to Earth is in significant part a restatement of Bruno Latour’s theorizing over the last few decades, made more incisive in the light of Trumpism (and other illiberal populisms) and brought to bear specifically on the moment of […]

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Please circulate widely… FEVERISH WORLD 2018-2068: ARTS & SCIENCES OF COLLECTIVE SURVIVAL  A Symposium and Convergence in Burlington, Vermont, October 20-22, 2018 Fifty years after the widespread international protests of 1968 challenged institutional norms, and some sixty years after C. P. Snow lamented the gap between academia’s “two cultures,” those of the arts and the sciences, […]

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The preliminary program is up for the third Under Western Skies conference, “Intersections of Environments, Technologies, Communities,” which will be held in a couple of weeks at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta. And it looks fantastic. I think the biennial UWS gatherings are becoming one of the leading interdisciplinary forums for environmental thinking, critique, and […]

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