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Marco Armiero: Mediterranean Culture Award 2022 with “Wasteocene”

Achim Klüppelberg , 2022-11-07

We are happy to announce that Marco Armiero, director of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, has been awarded the Mediterranean Culture Award 2022 in the section for Human Sciences with the book Wasteocene – Stories from the global dump. He recieved the award at a price ceremony in Cosenza, Italy, on the 13th of October.

This year it was the XVI edition of the Mediterranean Culture Award founded by the Carcial Foundation. The foundation represents the historical continuation of the Cassa di Risparmio di Calabria, established in Cosenza in 1861. Marco Armiero was nominated in the Human Sciences section together with emeritus professor of economy, Joan Martínez Alier and political scienteist Gille Kepel. His book Wasteocene – Stories from the global dump was published in 2021.

Summary of the book

Humans may live in the Anthropocene, but this does not affect all in the same way. How would the Anthropocene look if, instead of searching its traces in the geosphere, researchers would look for them in the organosphere, in the ecologies of humans in their entanglements with the environment? Looking at this embodied stratigraphy of power and toxicity, more than the Anthropocene, we will discover the Wasteocene. The imposition of wasting relationships on subaltern human and more-than-human communities implies the construction of toxic ecologies made of contaminating substances and narratives. While official accounts have systematically erased any trace of those wasting relationships, another kind of narrative has been written in flesh, blood, and cells. Traveling between Naples (Italy) and Agbogbloshie (Ghana), science fiction and epidemic outbreaks, this element will take the readers into the bowels of the Wasteocene, but it will also indicate the commoning practices which are dismantling it.

Get the book here!

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Also recently published by Marco:

Armiero, Marco/ Biasillo, Roberta/ Graf von Hardenberg, Wilko: Mussolini’s Nature. An environmental History of Italian Fascism, MIT Press 2022.

Ruiz Cayuela, Sergio a. Armiero, Marco: Cooking Commoning Subjectivities. Guerilla Narrative in the Cooperation Birmingham Solidarity Kitchen, in: Franklin, Alex (ed.): Co-Creativity and Engaged Scholarship. Transformative Methods in Social Sustainability Research, Palgrave Macmillan 2022.

Armiero, Marco: From Waste to Climate. Tackling Climate Change in a Rebel City, in: Social Text (2022), 40 (1(150)): 69-89.

 

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Achim Klüppelberg

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Publications, Research, The Division, The EHL

Ecopoetry for Just Futures: Transcultural Poetic Practices in the Anthropocenes

Achim Klüppelberg , 2022-04-19

The Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies at Stockholm University and the Rizoma platform are inviting everyone to an Open Lecture. There, our division’s postdoctoral researcher Nuno Da Silva Marques, affiliated with the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, is going to talk about and discuss the transcultural role of ecopoetry. Ecopoetry is a genre for peace, sustainability and ecology with deep roots in Latin American culture. Apart from Nuno, Swedish poet Jonas Gren and Argentinian poet Gisela Heffes join the debate.

The lecture takes place on 28 April 2022 from 6 to 8pm (Stockholm time). Participation is possible both on-site at the Library of the Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies at Stockholm University and online through the registration form available here.

Abstract of the event (original here)

Latin America has a robust tradition of ecopoetry featuring the work of world-renown poets as Nicanor Parra, Homero Aridjis, Esthela Calderón, among many others. Since the emergence in the 60s, this poetry has renovated the lyrical expression to mourn the vanishing of ecosystems, to propose ways to connect to the environment beyond neoliberal ideologies, and to push for environmental legislation in the region, “to fight for an e-constitution” as the ecopoem by Parra goes. Ecopoetry constitutes a kind of environmental knowledge that registers the ecological crisis contributing embodied and situated ways to relate to the planet. As a literary practice, ecopoetry revisits cultural imaginaries of nature to foster an ethics of care that traverses national and linguistic barriers. This open lecture will feature poetry readings in a transcultural and translingual perspective from Argentina-USA (Gisela Heffes), Sweden (Jonas Gren) and Portugal (Nuno Marques). The readings will be framed by discussions prompted by the moderator (Azucena Castro) to highlight ecopoetry as a kind of expression that connects environmental, cultural, biological, technological and political concerns. Attention will be paid to how ecopoetry assembles word and world, art and science, human and nonhuman to portray diverse Anthropocenes in ways attentive to situated and local experiences. At a time of accelerated species extinction, social instability and climate change, this open lecture will consider what role can (eco)poetry play as a cultural phenomenon, an epistemology and a critical practice to reweave ourselves to others and the planet.

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Achim Klüppelberg

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Ecopoetry, Environmental Humanities, Events, The EHL

Corona environments and some reflections on the entanglements of the coronavirus pandemic

, 2020-04-30

by Leonoor Zuiderveen Borgesius, PhD Candidate, University of Oslo  

The Covid-19 pandemic testifies to the importance of understanding human relationships to the environment as entangled. This pathogen is the most recent, but certainly not the first, aggressive reminder of how overwhelmingly physical the intertwinement between environments and human bodies is. SARS-Cov-2 is a zoonosis, a disease transferred to people by animals from another species. It may have transferred from pangolin to human on a Chinese ‘wet market’ (Image 1). In these open-air markets, wild game is sold and slaughtered on sight for its meat or, in the case of the pangolin, its scales. In some brands of Asian traditional medicine, the consumption of body parts of certain wild animals allows humans to ingest their characteristics like strength, agility, or fertility. Building on these traditions, it is the exquisite nature of such meat that raised its high demand among the ultra-rich. The devastating effects of this virus invite a discussion about the complex and intimate connections among humans as consumers, between humans and those animals they consume, and finally, about how together they cohabit in space and time.

Image 1: A ground pangolin, native to central Africa and one of the eight subspecies that can be found in tropic climates in Africa and Asia where they feed on ants and termites. Pangolins are critically endangered due to loss of habitat and heavy poaching because of their scales and meat. Source: Wikimedia commons.

The new coronavirus is not the first zoonosis with vast deadly effects. However, it is the first that, since the Spanish flu, has made its way to the cultural and capitalist centers of the western world, with catastrophic effects for their economies. Ebola (transferred by human consumption of bats) has caused tens of thousands of deaths, and HIV (presumably transferred from a chimpanzee) has made no less than 34 million victims. These viruses were raging in West-Africa, Eastern Europe, and LGBTQ-communities in the western world, by and large marginalized spheres around the globe.

A disease with an unimaginable deadliness like Ebola seems to belong to “Other” spaces, including its occurrence in other times. Violent imperial histories of explorers fighting malaria have narrated Africa as primitive and impenetrable because of the relentless tropic fevers. The HIV-virus made its way to the United States, where it victimized and stigmatized the outlandish members of society. Their vulnerability was unforgivingly explained by what was considered abhorrent, immoral, uncivilized behavior. Today, the exoticization of the new coronavirus can be seen with the insistence of the US Government to address China as the virus’ origin. Quite like skyrocketing everyday racism against Asian Europeans, this blame builds upon much older colonial discourses that dictate what is “Other” and therefore dangerous. As can be seen, those discourses that connect the tropics to dangerous disease and disposability of human life are violently persistent today. French doctors suggested that Africa could be a testing ground for the vaccine against the new coronavirus, a “hangover from colonial mentality that needs to stop” according to the head of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Feeding into this idea of the virus as something of another place, species, or environment, is the nature of the interactions with animal bodies through which the virus could spread. Sonia Shah shows in her book Pandemic, Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond (2016) how a combination of enhanced and prolonged interspecies contact and a lack of biodiversity allows pathogens to circulate between human and nonhuman bodies. In Europe, cattle are not slaughtered in the open air, and there are no farms where civets or dogs are caught or bred for consumption. Nonetheless, animals are bred into being for humans to eat their body parts on an unprecedented and industrial scale.

For instance, the Netherlands is the most densely populated country in Europe, both in terms of people and cattle, and it has a substantial and politically present agricultural sector. The latest zoonosis was Q-fever, causing extreme fatigue and heart failure. Between 2007 and 2010, this virus infected about a hundred thousand people, left a thousand chronically ill, and killed about a hundred people on and around goat farms. Q-fever was hard to trace down, because it could not move through interhuman contact; and in some people the symptoms only manifested themselves after months or even years. The RIVM, the national health authority, responded to the Q-fever crisis by intensifying communications and knowledge sharing between veterinarian and human medical scientists. Although their recommendations for the preservation of public health have been systematically dismissed by the Ministry for Agriculture under pressure of the agricultural sector, this effort goes to show how microbes also blur scientific boundaries between environments.

Ironically, many of the Dutch goat farmers had chosen to switch the production from pigs to goats after the swine flu outbreak had caused them to cull and destroy no less than 11 million animals a few years earlier. When animals are held in stables with hundreds or even thousands of genetically similar individuals at the same time, pathogens can easily move from one body to another. For that reason, and because it causes a slight increase in physical growth of the animals’ body mass, the use of antibiotics is widespread among pig farmers across the world. The closer humans and animals are moved into the same habitat, the lower and less sophisticated the microbial barriers for both viruses and bacteria become. The aggressive and drug-resistant MRSA bacteria, that has been ravaging the effectiveness of antibiotics within the health sector in the last decades, shows that microbes that can repeatedly move from pigs to humans and back can pose serious, deadly threats to human and nonhuman bodies (Image 2).

Image 2: An electro-microscopic image of a human white blood cell (blue) ingesting an antibiotic resistant MRSA-bacteria (purple). Source: Wikimedia Commons

This goes to show why environmental boundaries between human urban space and the nonhuman, wild space become increasingly unhelpful in understanding how also the current Covid-19 pandemic came about, how to suppress it, and how it could have been prevented. Like historian of technology Kate Brown argues, “self-isolation is key if we want to stop the pandemic – and yet the need for isolation is, in itself, an acknowledgement of our deep integration with our surroundings.” Not only in terms of scientific knowledge practices but also in biological terms, different environments, nature, and culture are all intimately entangled.

Animals have a particular role to play in defining those spaces as separate environments of home, wilderness, and production. Confined to their domestic spheres, people have collectively been seeking out the company of pets. In Chicago, they have been adopting so many dogs and cats that that the local shelter has been empty for the first time in its existence. In these same homes, Netflix aired the mega-success Tiger King, a documentary about the unadulterated insanity of private tiger farms that keep more tigers in captivity in the US than exist in the wild worldwide. After seven episodes of absurdist entertainment, a viewer might arguably conclude that the charismatic animals with which it all started are the ones that are left stranded by the very people that claimed to protect them, and deserve better than to live a life in small, filthy cages to the amusement of naïve spectators.

Whether it is tigers, dogs, pigs, goats, or pangolins, the deadly devastation and socio-economic disruption of pandemics like the one caused by the new coronavirus testify to the fact that in biological terms, their bodies as microbial ecosystems are part of the same multi-species environment. Yet, the cognitive dissonance that has been cultivated for the last decades with regards to what animals deserve compassion and which are consumption products is part and parcel to what dictates a discursive separation of what animals are house pets, poached or captive wild animals, domesticated factory goods, or a combination. At best, upholding this separation runs the risk of being analytically limited for environmental humanities scholars, and, at worst and when perpetuated by national governments with economic interests, it has proven to be lethal.

Further reading:

Author’s Bio: Leonoor is a PhD candidate at the University of Oslo and a guest at the EHL in the Spring of 2020. As part of the research project LIFETIMES – A Natural History of the Present, she writes a dissertation on imperial infrastructure and Dutch civil engineering in the late 19th and early 20th century. In particular, the project deals with imaginaries of empty space and progress in engineering practices, and how they travelled and developed between colonial and domestic spaces, while shaping both.

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Opinion

Cosmopolitanism in the Anthropocene (with a Postscript on the coronavirus)

, 2020-03-27

By Prof. Miyase Christensen (Stockholm Univesity & Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)

This is a moderated version (see Postscript at the end) of a chapter published in “The Sage Handbook of Media & Migration” (Sage, 2020). Editors: Kevin Smets, Koen Leurs, Myria Georgiou, Saskia Witteborn & Radhika Gajjala.

Introduction

In early 2019 it was announced that Greta Thunberg, a 16-year old Swedish climate activist, had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Thunberg originally gained national and international fame with her (then) solo climate-protest outside of the Swedish parliament building in Stockholm, a protest that grew in fame to the point where it developed into the ‘School Strike for Climate’ movement and the genesis for tens of thousands of student ‘strikes’ worldwide. The question, for some, was what Thunberg’s environmental protests had to do with peace. The answer can be found in, among other places, Africa where disputes over access to water along the Nile continue to escalate (with the threat of military intervention). In addition, and just a few days after Thunberg’s nomination, a cyclone hit the African countries of Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, killing large numbers and causing floodwaters in excess of 20 feet, destroying 90 percent of Mozambique’s fourth largest city, Biera. Thus, the concept of ‘peace’ cannot be separated from nature, as we witness both military conflict and humanitarian catastrophe in the Anthropocene (the current geological age marked by human influence on the environment), nor can it be separated from how human impact on the environment shapes migration, mobility and peace.

As Burke (2013) has noted in relation to what he calls the ultimate failure of a ‘moral community’, recent events such as those in north and east Africa are stark reminders of the futility of considering rising global temperatures, resource depletion or natural disasters simply as issues of national relevance:

When states draw on the same water sources, experience a common climate, depend on global prices and currency values, transmit conflict and weapons beyond their borders, and threaten and affect the lives of others far away, enclosed or circular models of moral community — however generous — fail to reflect an urgent reality. It is no longer a matter of deciding whether national interests and global goods must clash, but of honoring the common space of life and death that we have created.
Clearly, in all of these cases — from warfare to famine to human/natural disasters — mobility and migration are central components. It is the purpose of this chapter to offer a discussion of cosmopolitanism vis-à-vis mobility and migration from the standpoint of planetary politics and the Anthropocene, rather than within a global framing. Here, cosmopolitanism and mobility are considered in an integrativemanner in which the material and symbolic aspects can be considered together to open up new cosmopolitan horizons.

A Brief History Of Cosmopolitan Thought

In her 1980 collection of essays, Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag wrote a chapter on the Bulgarian-born writer Elias Canetti, who was taken from Austria to Britain in 1938 to escape the incoming Nazi regime. Canetti, described as the ‘son of a family of wandering Sephardic Jewish merchants’ and inspired by Goethe, wrote of his experiences in war-torn London. Sontag saw the connection between Canetti’s personal history, his writing and his connection to cosmopolitanism, and wrote of him:
He has, almost by birthright, the exiled writer’s easily generalized relation to place: a place is a language. And knowing many languages is a way of claiming many places as one’s territory. Canetti has the privilege and the burden of understanding, Jew that he is, the higher cosmopolitanism. (Mitgang, 1981)

Sontag continued by writing that a great deal of Canetti’s works point toward the importance of ‘how to pay attention to the world’ and that, in his work, ‘there is no doctrine’. Of course, the very form of cosmopolitanism that Sontag ascribed to Canetti — the fluid, exiled Jewish artist able to adapt and understand multiple cultural contexts — was the same form reviled by Stalin in the late 1940s and early 1950s Soviet Union. Employing the term ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ (originally used in 19th century Russia against Jewish writers), an anti-Semitic campaign to smear Jewish intellectuals was put into action in which their loyalty to both party and nation were questioned.

The flexibility and utility of the terms cosmopolitanand cosmopolitanism — there were, after all, only 30 years between the pejorative Stalinist use and Sontag’s celebration — speak to the long, rich (and often problematic) history of the terms. The concepts of cosmopolitanism and the cosmopolitan have, in various iterations and for various political and social ends, been woven into the intellectual history of humankind: from early Chinese Confucianism, to the ancient Greeks to Stalinist Russia. Ancient Greece is perhaps most famous for what was clearly not a cosmopolitan political and social project, namely evident in the political philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, in which men (and only men) swear their allegiance to a specific city (‘polis’) and its inhabitants alone. This essentially anti-cosmopolitan ideology — where sharing or collaborating with those who resided outside of polis was frowned upon, and where the only foreigners with whom one could/should interact were those already living within the walls of the polis — was juxtaposed by the philosophy famously attributed to the Cynic Diogenes, a 4th century BC resident of Sinope (now part of the Black Sea region of Turkey) who, when asked where he came from, answered: ‘I am a citizen of the world (kosmopolitês)’. This philosophy was then adapted by the Stoics and crystalized by the philosopher Hierocles who envisioned Stoic cosmopolitanism in the form of concentric circles with the human mind at the center, expanding outward to encompass family, extended family, local community, wider community, country/nation and, at the outer edge of the circles, the entirety of the human race. The goal, Hierocles posited, was to pull these various circles inward, thereby making the human, the national and the local issues of the person and the mind.

The ‘citizen of the world’ position taken by Diogenes was later adopted by intellectuals such as Thomas Paine. While in Paris in the late 1790s, Paine argued that, although not French by birth, his opposition to the execution of the deposed king Louis XVI — Paine claimed that capital punishment was inhumane and that the former monarch should be exiled — should be taken seriously because he was a ‘citizen of the world’. As Lamb (2014) writes, there is perhaps no political thinker in the post-ancient era that is so closely associated with the philosophy originally espoused by Diogenes. Lamb (2014: 638) notes that Paine regularly points out the ‘universal validity (and falsity) of moral and political claims’ and that their ‘evaluation can never be confined to one particular national, historical or cultural context’. In a famous line from his pamphlet Common Sense, and in the spirit of universalism and inter-connectedness, Paine (2003) unwittingly presaged questions related to environmental degradation and the Anthropocene when he wrote, ‘the cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind’. At almost precisely the same time as Paine was writing Common Sense, Immanuel Kant published Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch(1970) in whichhe outlined his ideas for a program of global peace to be enforced by national governments. In addition to a list of articles intended to eliminate warfare, three additional articles were included to ensure that peace and stability could be maintained with the third of these directly related to cosmopolitanism: ‘The law of world citizenship shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality’. This ‘Cosmopolitan Law’ was an addition to constitutional and international law and was predicated on the belief that human beings have inalienable rights as citizens of earth and not just as citizens of states.

What this brief history of cosmopolitanism shows us is not only the flexibility in how the term has been used, but, also, how the conception of being a ‘citizen of the world’ tends to dominate the epistemological framing of being a cosmopolitan. This is a citizenship that is on the surface dynamic, but ultimately static and rooted in time. Interestingly, however, it was the original proponent of cosmopolitanism, Diogenes, who provided the most forward-thinking and radical conception of the term. For Diogenes, cosmopolitanism was more than simply the acceptance of ‘the other’, it was about active (rather than theoretical) participation in dissent: to challenge prevailing wisdom, to question power, to expose excessive consumption and greed and to live a life free of material possessions and waste. The ‘anti-elite and anti-institutional notions of belonging and citizenship’ held by Diogenes and the Cynics were in opposition to the more conservative Stoic tradition (Delanty, 2012: 3). It is this conception of cosmopolitanism that is perhaps most useful when considering the relationship to the Anthropocene and environment as it foregrounds the long-term, temporal impact of human action (and inaction) rather than focusing on short-term impact. For example, Marxist notions of dominating nature and expanding production to benefit workers were geared toward an ultimately cosmopolitan end: the erosion and collapse of nation-states and the emergence of a classless, humanitarian society. Yet, this end is untenable and can result in the destruction of earth if no governed tightly and sensibly. In the subsequent sections, how cosmopolitanism must embrace not only a philosophy of inclusion, but one of dissent and activism in the face of radical environmental change, will be addressed.

Cosmopolitanism in the Mediated Anthropocene

How might we conceive of a cosmopolitan vision connecting the concepts of the Anthropocene and migration within the more radical tradition of Diogenes and the Cynics? One way to start would be to challenge the ways in which media and communication studies have traditionally addressed questions of cosmopolitanism and the media. To date, the mediated ‘cosmopolitan vision’ has usually been discussed within the parameters of consumption of various forms of representation: from popular culture to news (Robertson, 2019). Such a focus, however, runs the risk of reducing media ‘consumption’ to the act of reading, listening or seeing. It doverces the acts of producing and purchasing media hardware from the act of absorbing representation. This conception also ignores what Parikka (2012; in Christensen & Nilsson, 2018) described as the ‘dirty matter’ produced in modern society. This matter includes the chemicals and minerals required for the production of contemporary communication technology hardware: chemicals and materials that are mined in predominantly poorer nations, with catastrophic environmental effects. In addition to the devastating consequences of the extraction of these materials, there exists similarly devastating environmental consequences for the disposal of the same materials. Cultural imperialism studies (e.g. Boyd-Barrett, 1977; Schiller 1976; 1991) addressed the ‘core-periphery’ relationship between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ nations, yet reduced the material that would flow back from core (wealthy nations) to periphery (poorer nations) to media/cultural products (TV programs, films, music). This analysis, while canonic and highly insightful, overlooked the extent to which the discarded hardware of media, including vast quantities of toxic material (in the case of, for example, computers), are also dumped in poorer nations, again leading to environmental degradation (Christensen & Nilsson, 2018: 271–2).

In relation to the Anthropocene and migration, therefore, a radical cosmopolitan perspective must take into account the material impact of the consumption of media hardware upon the environment, and the potential of that consumption to contribute to the conditions that lead to forced and involunatry migration. This follows the longitudinal perspective, embraced by Diogenes, within which all stages and all forms of media ‘consumption’ — from the mining of the materials required to produce media hardware to their eventual disposal in the form of e-waste — must be considered for a truly radical and holistic cosmopolitian understanding of media consumption. This is what Parikka (2012: 97) termed ‘media-natures’, which would be used for the study of the ‘continuum between mediatic apparatuses and their material contexts in the exploitation of nature’.
In media and communication studies, notable perspectives and empirical analyses have been produced over the past few decades. Yet, we have probably just begun to scratch the surface in terms of the potential of cosmopolitan thought. As a result of media and communication studies being the off-shoot of various other disciplines (for example, Literary Studies in the US), as well as being periodically ridiculed in popular press as ‘Mickey Mouse Studies’ in the UK not so long ago, there has, at times, been a tendency to defer to dominant paradigms of thought and research, and not to develop new, radical, progressive theory (related to, for example, issues of central importance to the earth on which we live). It is telling that many of the strands of theory and thought that were perceived as marginal to media and communication research — such as environmental humanities — should, in truth, be at the heart of media and communication studies. It is only this form of thinking that will enable media and communication studies to take the steps required to address the relationship between, for example, the Anthropocene and media consumption. In concrete terms, Peters (2015: 2) has argued that we should ‘conceive of the media as both nature and culture’.

One connective tissue between this new form of theory and research, the Anthropocene and the theme of migration, is that of geo-politics. The traditional conception of geopolitics has been one of ‘the world’ or ‘the global’, yet we need to move beyond these concepts and embrace the notion of planetary politics. Along these lines, Elden (2013) suggests that we think of a ‘politics of the earth’ rather than a ‘politics of the global’. This meshes well with Burke’s (2013) cosmopolitan notion of ‘honoring the common space of life and death that we have created’. Of course, migration is one part of geo-politics and so a cosmopolitan vision should go beyond moral, ethical, legal and representational notions, and develop a more holistic understanding within the framework of the Anthropocene. As Christensen and Nilsson (2018: 272–3) write: ‘bringing in geopolitical perspectives (makes) visible the planetary scale through addressing questions of geographic interplay as well as the human scale through an emphasis on politics and power (such as colonial legacies and contemporary dynamics of subordination)’.

Conclusion

In this short essay, the goal has been to stimulate thought on the relationship between cosmopolitanism, migration and the Anthropocene, but to also consider how media and communication studies can and should adapt to contemporary planetary environmental conditions. The Nobel Prize nomination given to Sweden’s Greta Thunberg was presented as a starting point to consider how climate and peace are interconnected. Thunberg’s Swedish nationality is a good place to end. As has been well documented, Sweden has, per capita, taken more refugees than any other country in Europe and far more per capita than countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia. Much has also been made of the fact that a majority of these refugees have come from war-torn Syria and, just over a decade ago, from war-torn Iraq. The destabilization of Iraq, and the political and military vacuum that followed, contributed to the formation of the Islamic State (IS) which, in turn, led to the de-stabilization of Syria. Sweden’s intake of refugees and immigrants from these nations has a direct relationship to the Anthropocene: the US bombing of Iraq in the early 1990s and the US/UK invasion and occupation of Iraq that began in 2003 were both efforts to secure US and European access to oil. Thus, it can be reasonably argued it was the excessive demand for oil and petroleum products that contributed to Sweden’s considerable intake of refugees from Iraq and Syria.

How does this bring us back to cosmopolitanism and academic research? To take the case of media and communication studies, the analysis of, for example, the representation of migrants from Syria or Iraq has usually defined these groups as fleeing conflict or war. Less common (if at all) is to define them, ultimately, as victims of a hyper-consumption fuelled by the media that cover them, politicians who use them as pawns and media consumers who now read reductionist stories about them. Thus, framing refugees and migrants as the effects of specific conflicts bypasses deeper global environmental and consumption issues in favor of discourses of war which absolve the reader (and researchers) from personal responsibility.
Cosmopolitanism has usually been framed as a question of space, and empathizing with those from other places. What it rarely has been framed as, however, is a question of empathy and engagement across time. As history changes, the work and activism of Diogenes reminds us of the need to think of cosmopolitanism in temporal terms, as our actions today will have effects many years down the road.

Postscript, March 2020

Given the issues raised in this chapter, the current coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak is a stark reminder of how those who work within the field of Media and Communication Studies (and academia in general) would do well do consider how our own professional practices are often at odds with the (admittedly laudible) egalitarian and pro-social framework within which a great deal of research is conducted. Earlier in this piece, I noted how the technology hardware used in the media industry, and by academics, make a significant contribution to environmental degradation: a fact that often goes without comment in political economic and social analyses of the “impact of media.” By the same token, we might ask how and why these same technologies that, at the very least, allow for instantaneous visual and aural communication over great distances — technologies used on a daily basis in so many other areas of our work — are suddenly abanadoned in favor of highly damaging long-distance travel for events such as academic conferences. That it takes an outbreak like COVID-19 to stop these practices, even in the face of existing overwhelming evidence of the damage caused by things such as air travel, speaks to the chasm between much academic rhetoric on progressive practice and action.

References

  • Boyd-Barrett, O. (1977). Media imperialism: Towards an international framework for the analysis of media systems. Mass Communication and Society, 116–135.
  • Burke, A. (2013). Security cosmopolitanism. Critical Studies on Security, 1(1), 13–28.
  • Christensen, M., & Nilsson, A. E. (2018). Media, communication, and the environment in precarious times. Journal of Communication, 68(2), 267–277.
  • Delanty, G. (2012). Introduction: The emerging field of cosmopolitanism studies. In G. Delanty (ed.), Routledge handbook of cosmopolitanism studies. (pp. 20–27). London: Routledge.
  • Peters, J. D. (2015). The marvelous clouds: Toward a philosophy of elemental media. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
  • Kant, I. (1970). Perpetual peace: A philosophical sketch(Vol. 1991). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Lamb, R. (2014). The liberal cosmopolitanism of Thomas Paine. The Journal of Politics, 76(3), 636–648.
  • Mitgang, H. (1981). Cosmopolitan in tradition of Goethe. New York Times, 16 October. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/16/books/cosmopolitan-in-tradition-of-goethe.html
  • Paine, T. (2003). Common Sense and Other Writings, ed. Gordon S. Wood (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), xxi–xxii.
    Parikka, J. (2012). New materialism as media theory: Medianatures and dirty matter. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 9(1), 95–100.
  • Robertson, A. (2019). Media Cultures and Cosmopolitan Connection. In G. Delanty (ed.), Routledge handbook of cosmopolitanism studies. London and New York: Routledge.
  • Schiller, H. I. (1991). Not yet the post-imperialist era. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 8(1), 13–28.
  • Schiller, H. I. (1976). Communication and cultural domination. White Plains: International Arts and Sciences Press.
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Categories:

Opinion

Why we need feminist posthumanities for a more-than-human world

, 2019-08-23

by: Cecilia Åsberg and Marietta Radomska

Today, the environment is in us, and we humans are fully in the environment. That much is clear in this new planetary era of uncertainty some call the Anthropocene. This new geological period, the environmental Age of Man, is often defined by unparalleled human disturbance of the earth’s ecosystems, climate, and biological systems. For instance, half of the wildlife on Earth has been lost in the past forty years, but we have also soon perhaps made more lab-created species, synthetic biologies or artificial intelligences than we asked for. It seems, philosophically, that in the age of the Anthropocene, humans have become a ‘force of nature’, making nature in its classical sense over. Yet, then so is also the notion of the human reaching its limits. Actually, both in terms of planetary sustainability and in terms of how we have gotten used to thinking the human as some kind of Universal Man, a bounded individual, safely zipped up in a white skin of his own, guided by only rational thought (rather than desires) and, so to speak, living on top of things—as the world (nature/the planet) seems to be his oyster.

Emerging now in Anthropocene discourse and in diverse planetary struggles are the many embodied subjects we thought were less-than-human, nonhuman, or ahuman. They range from subalterns living (and dying) on wastelands of richer people’s making, insects subject to mass extinction rates, whole new media ecologies, to the crip and the queer in all of us discovered by biologists, or to, for instance, CRISPR Cas9 technologies, or everyday algorithms that reproduce and multiply our cultural biases on a global scale. They all call for attention. The “death of nature” (a notion from the trail-blazing feminist environmental historian Carolyn Merchant) mirrors the “death of Man” (a poststructuralist theory notion) in the Anthropocene, in eerie and unsettling ways. It also evokes curiosity over the postnatural and the posthuman forms of life now available to us, in these days of need to rethink our categories and our options for the present and the future as the past comes back to haunt us. In such a dire situation, what are now the available arts “of living on a damaged planet” for us? (See Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt 2017).

If the humanities and the arts can be said to be broadly concerned with the self-reflection and understanding of the human species, the posthumanities comes about when we recognise the relationships between the multiple planetary alterations that go sometimes under the name the Anthropocene. We have drastic ecological changes to air, soil and biological reproduction, we have rapid species extinction rates, ubiquitous toxic embodiment and environmental health concerns, and non-sustainable climate changes ahead. Posthumanities also comes about with growing computational systems, security terrors, new biomedical ways of life, re-arranged life forms and synthetic biologies, amongst many many many things. All this impel us to recognise the wider forms and constituents of the condition that is no longer nameable simply as humanity. The world is not the same, now more humanised than ever (perhaps even all too human?), so why should the thinking habits and concepts we live our life by be the same? In fact, especially as it seems those old categories or thinking habits have not done us justice or any good in the past.

The troublesome “universalisation of humanity” into the figure of Universal Man, denying sexual differences and social inequities following along the lines of race, gender, bodily ability, age and other historical norms have long been a pinnacle of feminist critique. Longstanding feminist theory-practices of decolonizing the domains of the Universal Man-idea thus mark a particularly critical and creative source for the planetary forms of posthumanities we claim is needed now. Feminist analytics deal with changes, with what constitutive relations make a specific society or situated formation possible. It basically ask who gets to suffer, prosper or die, who gets to live and play, and to the benefit of whom (cui bono)? Furthermore, recent feminist theory is drawing attention not only to creativity and potentiality of bodies, but also to that which delimits or wounds conditions of life on earth at large—especially within hybrid fields such as feminist environmental humanities. And importantly, it asks how we may learn to live with those wounds and limitations with some grace together. Mutualism and symbiont ethics, biophilosophy and eco-humanities, companion species or cyborg connections for earthly survival (following Donna J. Haraway’s rich oeuvre) are keywords for such feminist posthumanities.

Postdisciplinary practices and situated knowledges (Haraway again!) are of course especially salient in this regard: a brute necessity. The planet knows no disciplinary borders, it does not separate between nature and culture. Our planetary issues can not be solved by demarcations where sciences do nature and humanities do culture. In truth, our Anthropocene predicament belies the whole classical distinction between nature and culture! The needed efficacy of such postdisciplinary work is evidenced in many new, old and déja vu fields like feminist science studies and networked new materialisms, in bio-art and eco-art, in somatechnics, new media studies, post-continental philosophy, in anthropocene studies or transcorporeal theory, in multispecies- and medical humanities, in transgender studies, xenofeminism, cyborg- or techno-humanities, ecological or environmental humanities, queer death studies, critical veganism, and a mounting range of posthumanisms, inhumanisms and ahumanisms. Yes, critical and creative scholars in and around the humanities have not been lazy in the face of the many issues that face us today. Feminist posthumanities cover or converse with such postdisciplinary practices. It labels a wide-spread, multi-sited, evolving and growing effort to rework the role of the humanities and their relation to science, technology, art and contemporary society on the basis that our idea of the human is fundamentally reaching its limits, and changing. Feminist posthumanities thus responds to the need for more-than-human humanities.

Accordingly, the feminist posthumanities of the postconventional research group The Posthumanities Hub at the Division for History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH Institute of Technology in Stockholm (and Linköping University), focuses on critique and creativity of such planetary arts, on issues of technological and environmental embodiment, on relational ecologies of death and environmental health, on infrastructures of waste and deep time ethics of sustainability, on contemporary technocultures, science communication and popular media cultures but, especially, also on multispecies relations as crucial points of empirical interventions, methodological inventions and theoretical innovations.

The assumption behind this bold mission is that feminist and other kindred forms of the posthumanities are in fact already creating institutional changes, providing novel insights for researchers and civic society, and new sets of post- or trans-disciplinary practices. Take the environmental humanities as a case in point! The research we do has already changed narratives about, for instance, the role of gender and climate change, the importance of thinking with the nonhumans of the planet, and the extent of toxic embodiment in daily life, along with the impact of science, communication as well as digital mediation on our social practices and ideas of ourselves (and others) in society. Luckily, we have been able to convince research funding bodies in Sweden, the North, Europe and Canada, in spite of (or thanks to?) our postdisciplinarity and our use of the f-word. Moreover, new research in our international networks and in our own ranks explores the global infrastructures of technological surveillance and security issues of today; the multiplex processes of translation characteristic of new media; and, last but not least, process ontologies (“world-makings”) at work in both the life sciences, in the creative arts, and in philosophies of subjectivity.

At large, the feminist posthumanities of The Posthumanities Hub aims to map out and chart, but also provide deep insight into, pursue and develop a partly novel and inventive agenda, which stems from, but is not limited to, either humanism or anthropocentrism, feminism or environmentalism. We represent an intervention in contemporary research practices and habits of thought. For our research and for our problems, we need at least a more-than-human approach. At present, there are a plethora of new research initiatives and individual scholars testifying to effervescent activities of a new field coming of age. Just check out the work on biophilosophy and eco-/bioart by Marietta Radomska, or the community building soil art by Janna Holmstedt, or the plant theory put in practice by Lauren LaFauci, the science- and art infused environmental humanities of Vera Weetzel, the Baltic Sea research of Jesse Peterson, the deep time insights and more-than-human sustainability ethics developed by Christina Fredengren and Cecilia Åsberg, or the emerging insights from all the students of the KTH module Gender & Technology (AK2202)! This embarrassment of riches that we are developing from KTH is evidenced all over the academic landscape with new networks and research groups, and art-science communities popping up like mushrooms in the soil on a rainy autumn. The Posthumanities Hub as a postconventional research group anno 2008, one of the first of its kind in the world, supports the establishment of new scholar-activists, new research environments, and explores novel collaborative practices and bold postdisciplinary methodologies, sustainably. For the long run. We believe that it is only through strategic and curious alliances—across differences—that we can survive, in academic settings as on the planet.

Philosophically, the question of the posthuman was pioneered by feminist scholars such as N. Katherine Hayles, Donna J. Haraway and Rosi Braidotti. The postnatural and posthuman ideas we use and develop today follow on the realisation that we were never human to begin with in the double sense of a) not part of the Universal Man club of society, and b) not biologically even purely human but rather a multi-species assemblage in ecological relationships with other companion species, like bacteria or other organisms that moderate our embodied and environed existence. These ideas derive from both advanced cultural critique and science. Posthuman theory, explored in wildly diverse empirical studies and projects, as we deploy it within our research, is not an issue of technologically enhancing the human for the future but of realising how vulnerable we are as socio-biological assemblages on an all too humanised planet. Technofixes, history tells us, have a tendency of solving some problems and creating new, bigger ones in turn. Clearly, we take our clues and insights from, and work in close collaborations with, scientists, engineers, artists and social communicators, and we contribute to research fields like environmental humanities, medical humanities, continental philosophy, intersectional gender studies, queer theory, feminist cultural studies, science and technology studies (STS), art and design practices, societal activism and insights for the decolonial option, software studies, cognitive and educational sciences, animal behavior science and epigenetics research as well as critical animal studies. To this effect, we emphasise the multi-species ecology and (somewhat unacademic) kindness of humankind (following on recent work by Timothy Morton). A longstanding concern for us have been how to analytically bridge the arts and sciences, and how to help engineering and natural science and get humanities’ involvement with the aforementioned and other life-sciences recognised. We are currently witnessing a genuine proliferation of new feminist or pro-feminist work on the posthumanities, in art and research in Sweden and all over the world. Perhaps because of this wealth of options (even “embarrassment of riches” as Braidotti would say), there is, however, no consensus either in terms of terminology or key-concepts in the field of posthumanities. That is ok. Different words for a different world. We let a thousand flowers flower, so to make available thoughts and practices (thinking, theory and practice is tightly linked after all in our daily lives) that can be useful for our pressing planetary issues and “thousand tiny anthropocene” situations.

With the critical, creative and curious activities of The Posthumanities Hub, we underline that this situation does not constitute a crisis for the humanities. Quite the contrary. Feminist and other critical posthumanities  constitute an opportunity for the arts and humanities. Feminist posthumanities entails really the reinvention of the humanities, making it societally salient. It generates new ideas pointing in the direction of the overcoming of anthropocentrism, eurocentrism, androcentrism, etc, on a planet modestly described as “naturecultural” in character, while reimagining the legacy and sophistication of previous work in the humanities, in history, philosophy, gender studies, science and technology studies, and other fields. Our motto is that it is crucial for the contemporary posthumanities to generate the networked communities, literacies and the methodological schemes needed to establish productive dialogues with these new developments, and with predecessor imperatives of “oppositional consciousness” as Chela Sandoval would call it, within the arts and sciences. Building on the historical emphases of the humanities, we want to keep questions germane to (embodied and environed) subjectivity (personhood) and its sociability. However, we must also always ask what the status of the subject and of subjectivity is today with the change of relations between technology, institutions, and society. After all, the historical context we work in is also one in which now both democracy and human rights are anything but given issues any longer (if they ever were). In our research, questions of knowledge production and world-making fuse with those of power, politics and ethics. Such overarching themes also impel the renewed questions of social responsibility and societal relevance of the arts and the humanities at large. Feminist posthumanities, like art and science, have the ability to expand our much too limited humanist imagination in society, and to explore best-practices of planetary conviviality across societies of both human and nonhuman kinds.

In our empirically diverse research we ask: what (and whom) gets to count as natural, as human, as animal, and to the detriment of benefit of whom? And of course, how could it be different? Such queries drives this postconventional research group but also some seriously humorous feminist creativity and desires to make (for) better connections in the world. The postdisciplinary challenge of the planetary situation today requires simply radical new forms of human and more-than-human humanities. And we are here to meet up.

Follow the seminars and public sessions of The Posthumanities Hub here: https://posthumanities.net/ or on Facebook.

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Opinion, Posthumanities Hub

Is there life on Mars?

Sofia Jonsson , 2017-10-30
“Rising Green”. Painting in acrylic on canvas by German sci-fi artist Frank Lewecke

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ) recently granted the Divisions Sabine Höhler’s application Life on Mars: The Science and Fiction of Terraforming and the Future of Planet Earth. The project will start in the beginnig of 2018 and run for three years.

A procjet page is coming up, but in the meantime please read the applicatoin abstract for more information on this project:

The Anthropocene, the geological age of humanity, is associated with a key feature: the power of technoscientific intervention into the Earth’s environment. This transformative potential became apparent in the second half of the twentieth century when the science and the fiction of “terraforming”, of turning extreme or extraterrestrial into Earth-like environments, gained traction. Hopes of venturing into Space became as pervasive as perceptions of humans overexploiting and polluting the Earth. The popular vision of settling sustainable communities on Mars saw an upswing in the recent decade of anthropogenic global environmental
change.

This project explores the science and fiction of Mars settlement with the help of terraforming as a creation of new environments in Space as well as blueprints for the technological reconstruction of the Earth’s environment. The aim is to describe the Anthropocene not simply as an epoch that endangers the Earth but primarily as an epoch that essentially transformed the understanding of life to a minimalist principle of survival through infinite metabolic conversion and technological substitution. This understanding conjoined images of recreation and creation, of paradisiacal pasts and eco-technological futures. The question whether ‘postplanetary’ life, life that is not tied to a specific planet but transcends planetary boundaries, will be possible and desirable may become one of the most challenging questions of our future.

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Sofia Jonsson

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Research