“Infection”
For the special section “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities,” Celia Lowe reflects on the meanings of “infection” and the problems these pose for the Environmental Humanities.
For the special section “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities,” Celia Lowe reflects on the meanings of “infection” and the problems these pose for the Environmental Humanities.
In his article for the special section “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities,” Tom Bristow unpacks the concept of memory and the idea of the archive.
Through a case study of the “invasive alien species” (IAS) narrative in South Africa, Susanna Lidström, Simon West, Tania Katzschner, M. Isabel Pérez-Ramos, and Hedley Twidle suggest that IAS oversimplifies the webs of ecological, biological, economic, and cultural relations to a simple “good” versus “bad” battle between easily discernible “natural” and “nonnatural” identities.
Owain Jones raises questions about the relationships between self, time, memory, materiality, and place, using a non-representational creative approach based on image and textual collage.
Andrew Whitehouse considers the semiotics of listening to birds in the Anthropocene by drawing on Kohn’s recent arguments on the semiotics of more-than-human relations and Ingold’s understanding of the world as a meshwork, and comparing the work of Bernie Krause with responses to the the Listening to Birds project.
Anna Svenson considers the epistemological implications of the digitization of the Directors’ Correspondence (DC) collection (1841-1928) at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She concludes that care is needed to avoid replicating the invisible losses of extractive approaches to knowledge production, particularly in the context of collection-based biodiversity conservation.
In this commentary piece, Donna Haraway calls for the stretching and recomposition of kin and kinship, as all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense. She feels it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages (not species one at a time).
In this commentary piece, the six authors attempt to “reboot” or reinstitute a concept close to the heart of the Moderns, namely the assumption that the traditional concept of nature, as developed through modern European history, would no longer be adequate to a future beset by environmental crises.
James Hatley’s article for the ‘Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities’ section discusses the horizon of the ‘Aion’ (as formulated in the four geological eons), and the fact that every species is linked in genetic kinship.
Jennifer Hamilton’s article for the “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities” section rethinks “labor” as a useful concept for the Environmental Humanities, by troubling the spectacle of the skyline of Sydney’s Central Business District: a sublime image of late Capitalist growth.