McKibben & the frontlines of war

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

I recently found myself in a part of Mississauga, Ontario (a bedroom community of Toronto), in which more than 90% of the visible landscape (excepting the sky) appeared to consist of concrete, in the form […]

Anthropocenic sublime

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

I’ll be giving the following talk at the “Popular Culture, Religion, and the Anthropocene” workshop at the National University of Singapore this coming week. Navigating the Zone of Alienation: Chernobyl and the […]

Ecocritical blooms

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

Lexington’s Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series just got its own catalogue, which tells us the series is doing well. As is Wilfrid Laurier’s Environmental Humanities series, Routledge’s series of the same, […]

World Listening Day

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

Today is World Listening Day, a global event held annually to Celebrate the listening practices of the world and the ecology of its acoustic environments; Raise awareness about the growing number of […]

Assessing Murray Bookchin's legacy

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

Damian White has posted an excellent review of Janet Biehl’s book Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin at the Jacobin blog. Bookchin’s legacy has undergone something of a revival of late thanks to […]

Whitehead in Greensboro

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

This post follows up on my previous note about Alfred North Whitehead’s time spent in Greensboro, Vermont. It was updated on July 7, 2016, thanks to information obtained from the Mitchells’ descendants. I […]

Toward telling an adequate story

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

This post builds on the previous one on the state of the eco-humanities. Here I focus on the substantive elements for narratives adequate to the Anthropocene. One of the challenges of our time is to learn […]

Whitehead's genius loci

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

I was astounded to read the following passage as I sat in a cottage on the shore of Caspian Lake in Greenboro, Vermont, earlier today: “Work on ‘The Concept of Organism’ began with the summer of 1927, which […]

The I=PAT of mass murder, and its antithesis -- joy

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

Just as I=PAT serves as a handy, if problematic, formula for thinking about the causes of environmental impact, so I think there is a similar formula underlying tragedies like the massacre at Orlando’s […]

State of the Eco-Humanities, Take 1

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

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 […]

Interview & autobio

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

Interviews are funny things: you have to think on the spot, but later realize how deeply and profoundly imperfect (!) was your choice of words. The Imperfect Buddha Podcast has an interview with me in which […]

A process view of "religious Nones"

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

While I’ve done no formal surveys, my best guess is that about half my students here at the U of Vermont (at least those in Environmental Studies) would fit into the category of “religiously […]

Fort McMurray as fictive image

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

With reality like this, who needs fiction? It’s from Fort McMurray, last week. Harrowing. While the impact of such images is undeniable, the debate over whether and how they […]

Wark on the geopolitics of the Anthropocene

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

McKenzie Wark has written a very provocative piece on the geopolitics of the Anthropocene, or what he calls “The Geopolitics of Hibernation.” A quote: !–more– “Resource wars are no new thing. They are a […]

30 Years (or 30,000): Spectral stories of Chernobyl

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

I’ll be giving this talk at the University of Kansas on Thursday. It’ll be exactly two days after the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. And 16 days before the 30th anniversary of Mikhail […]

Artistic bubbleology 101

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

One of the best ways to respond to the Bubble I mentioned in the last post is through the arts. Here’s the poster for my summer course examining artistic responses to the global crisis.

Living in a bubble

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

I’ve been using the metaphor of the Sustainability Bottleneck in my teaching, but another one that is more immediately graspable is The Bubble. Two things landed in my in-box this morning that testify to […]

Post-Cinema

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

At long last, Shane Denson’s and Julia Leyda’s anthology Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film has come out in Catherine Grant’s Reframe Books open-access series. This mammoth anthology features some […]

... And what I'm reading

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

Some books I’ve recently received and/or am currently reading… If you’d like to review any of them for this blog, let me know. And if there are others published in the last year that should be on this list, let […]

What we ask students to read...

Adrian J Ivakhiv on immanence

Both Open Culture and The New York Times have reported on the Open Syllabus Project, which has tallied over a million college course syllabi to determine the 10,000 or so most commonly assigned texts. The […]