Tag: Publications

New publication: Environmental Violence and Postnatural Oceans: Low-Trophic Theory in the Registers of Feminist Posthumanities

It is my great pleasure to say that the chapter “Environmental Violence and Postnatural Oceans: Low-Trophic Theory in the Registers of Feminist Posthumanities” , written by Cecilia Åsberg and myself, has just been published as part of the exciting volume “Violence, Gender and Affect”, edited by Marita Husso, Sanna Karkulehto, Tuija Saresma, Aarno Laitila, Jari Eilola and Heli Siltala.

The book came out in the series Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology.

More on our contribution:

“Environmental Violence and Postnatural Oceans: Low-Trophic Theory in the Registers of Feminist Posthumanities” by Cecilia Åsberg and Marietta Radomska

Abstract:

Environmental violence takes form of both ‘spectacular’ events, like ecological disasters usually recognised by the general public, and ‘slow violence’, a type of violence that occurs gradually, out of sight and on a long-term scale. Planetary seas and oceans, loaded with cultural meanings of that which ‘hides’ and ‘allows to forget’, are the spaces where such attritional violence unfolds unseen and ‘out of mind’. Simultaneously, conventional concepts of nature and culture, as dichotomous entities, become obsolete. We all inhabit and embody the world differently, as variously situated people, divided by national, sexual, bodily and economic status, and as very variously situated nonhumans in an increasingly anthropogenic world. This chapter focuses on subtle ‘slow violence’ unfolding through the instances of submerged chemical weapons, so-called dead zones, invasive species and high- and low-trophic mariculture in the Baltic and North Sea regions. It zooms in on the select cases of such ‘environed bodies’, their stories of excruciating slow violence and yet also on unexpected encounters with care and hospitality. The aim is to unfold a low–trophic theory for the naturecultural research on violence and care within environmental humanities, and to engage a coexistential ethics of environmental adaptability informed by feminist posthumanities.

Keywords:

Environmental violence; Seas and oceans; Low-trophic theory; Feminist posthumanities 

Åsberg C., Radomska M. (2021) Environmental Violence and Postnatural Oceans: Low-Trophic Theory in the Registers of Feminist Posthumanities. In: Husso M., Karkulehto S., Saresma T., Laitila A., Eilola J., Siltala H. (eds) Violence, Gender and Affect. Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56930-3_13

You may also check out this short clip posted on The Seed Box A Mistra Formas Environmental Humanities Collaboratory website/YouTube channel:

New Publication: Methodologies of Kelp

Last month the book The Kelp Congress (in English) / Tangboka (in Norwegian), edited by Hilde Mehti, Neal Cahoon and Annette Wolfsberger, was published by NNKS Press (Nordnorsk kunstnersenter). The volume contains contributions by the participants of the Kelp Congress, an event forming part of Lofoten International Art Festival, which took place in September 2019. Among many brilliant chapters by artists and researchers you may also find an essay by Cecilia Åsberg, Janna Holmstedt and myself, entitled ‘Methodologies of Kelp: On Feminist Posthumanities, Transversal Knowledge Production and Multispecies Ethics in an Age of Entanglement’.

For more info on how to order the book, see The Kelp Congress website.

More on the book itself:

Assembled from a collection of Nordic, international, and multispecies perspectives, The Kelp Congress is a gathering of writings and artworks that contribute to the recent interest in kelp and seaweed within contemporary art and thinking. The book forages for the insights that emerge through spending time together with these ecologies, revealing their inherent and entangled values.

Contributors: Aoife Casby, Devil’s Apron, Robin Everett, Tiina Arjukka Hirvonen, Janna Holmstedt, Øyvind Novak Jenssen, Signe Johannessen, Signe Lidén, Julia Lohmann, Janice McEwen, Arjen Mulder, Astrida Neimanis, Michael Pantalos, Julia Parks, Viktor Pedersen, Marietta Radomska, Francisco Trento, Danni Zuvela and Cecilia Åsberg.

And a little bit more on our contribution:

C. Åsberg, J. Holmstedt and M. Radomska, 2020. Methodologies of Kelp: On Feminist Posthumanities, Transversal Knowledge Production and Multispecies Ethics in an Age of Entanglement. In: The Kelp Congress, edited by H. Mehti, N. Cahoon, and A. Wolfsberger, Svolvær: NNKS Press, pp. 11-23.

Abstract:

This chapter takes departure in the experience gathered through our participation in two workshops: Kelp Curing and Coast, Line, forming part of the Kelp Congress, as well as our daily research and art practices. We take kelp as material entities immersed in a multitude of relations with other creatures (for whom kelp serves as both nourishment and shelter) and inorganic elements of the milieu it resides in, on the one hand, and as a figuration: a material-semiotic “map of contestable worlds” that encompasses entangled threads of “knowledge, practice and power” (Haraway 1997, 11) in its local and global sense, on the other. While drawing on our field notes from the congress and feminist posthumanities and environmental humanities literatures (e.g. Alaimo 2016; Åsberg & Braidotti 2018; Sandilands & Erickson 2010; Iovino & Opperman 2014) – with a special focus on the so-called blue humanities/oceanic humanities (e.g. DeLoughrey 2019) – that unpack human/nonhuman relations in the context of the current environmental crisis and the accompanying “slow violence” (Nixon 2011), we mobilise a reflection on and make a proposal for “thinking with kelp” as a multi-faceted methodology of transversal and transdisciplinary knowledge production and practices: situated (Haraway 1988), enfleshed, transcorporeal (Alaimo 2010), collaborative, and committed to an ethics of multispecies response-ability (Haraway 2008).

You may read it HERE.

AFS’s special issue on ‘Feminist Technoecologies’ is out now!

The special issue of Australian Feminist Studies focused on the topic of ‘Feminist Technoecologies’ (vol. 32, no 94) and edited by fantastic Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer, Pat Treusch and Xin Liu has just been published!

Here’s a little snippet from the introduction by the editors:

‘This special issue of Australian Feminist Studies is a collective effort to think with and through the notion of ‘feminist technoecologies’. One of the shared starting points of the contributions is that the term is not simply the conjoining, but a simultaneous reworking, of ‘technologies’ and ‘ecologies’, from various feminist perspectives. The articles provide critical responses to the contemporary challenges of environmental degradation, refugee crises and digital technologisation by asking how the boundary is drawn between the technological and the ecological, and how these distinctions are informed by implicit and explicit investments in the exceptional status of the human condition. They share the view that technology is not simply a neutral tool for management and advancement, any more than ecology is merely the environment, whose harmonious organisation becomes disturbed by human enterprises and technological interventions.’

(Lorenz-Meyer, Treusch & Xin Liu 2018: 351)

In the issue you can also find my my text ‘Non/living Matter, Bioscientific Imaginaries and Feminist Technoecologies of Bioart’ – available in OPEN ACCESS here.

 

 

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