"Endangered"
In the special section titled “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Section,” Simon Pooley reflects on the decisions and implications of conferring the status of “endangered species” on animals.
In the special section titled “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Section,” Simon Pooley reflects on the decisions and implications of conferring the status of “endangered species” on animals.
In the “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Section” of Environmental Humanities, Maan Barua reveals encounters as spatializing and “ecologizing” politics in ways that are vital for the environmental humanities’ efforts to redistribute powers to act and to flourish.
In this introduction to the special issue on Multispecies Studies, Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster provide an overview of the emerging field of multispecies studies. Unsettling given notions of species, the article explores a broad terrain of possible modes of classifying, categorizing, and paying attention to the diverse ways of life that constitute worlds.
In this special issue on Multispecies Studies, Vinciane Despret and Michel Meuret discuss how humans and animals are making their own contributions to a new cosmoecology, creating cosmoecological connections and contributing to what Ghassan Hage has called alter-politics.
In this special issue on Multispecies Studies, Eben Kirksey, Dehlia Hannah, Charlie Lotterman, and Lisa Jean Moore conduct a performative experiment which blurs the boundaries between performance art, science, and ethnography. They conduct an outmoded pregnancy test with live Xenopus frogs to probe the contours of the gap between the biochemistry of being pregnant and the experience of recognizing oneself as pregnant.
In this special issue on Multispecies Studies, Celia Lowe and Ursula Münster present three open-ended stories of elephant care in times of death and loss: at places of confinement and elephant suffering like the zoos in Seattle and Zürich as well as in the conflict-ridden landscapes of South India, where the country’s last free-ranging elephants live. They call attention to the Asian elephant, a species that is currently facing extinction through the elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus.
Petra Tjitske Kalshoven combines ethnographic studies with ornithological testimonies to present the re-creation and reenactment of the extinct great auk, or garefowl. The author aims to achieve contiguity with lost species through expressions and shaping of human perceptions and imaginations of past, and eventually future, environmental disasters.
Looking at Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’s interactive documentary Bear 71 (2012), Katey Castellano shows how the environmental humanities can be employed to rearticulate scientific data as innovative multispecies stories.
The authors detail their experience of Puchuncavi, the largest, oldest, and most polluting industrial area in Chile. They approach it from a multidisciplinary viewpoint as an experience of the Anthropocene and advocate for an enhanced pedagogy of care born of our inherited pasts and of engagement, interest, and becoming as response-ability.
The authors analyze the portrayal in popular conservation discourse of the flowering plant Rhododendron ponticum as an invasive species in the British countryside, especially Scotland. They explore how its invasiveness is materially produced via the cultural and socioeconomic as well as vegetal relations within which it is entangled.