Deborah Bird Rose Research Articles

Knowledges “In the Land”? A Process Phenomenological Reading of Deborah Bird Rose’s “Exploring an Aboriginal Land Ethic”

Abstract Inspired by a (process) phenomenological reading of Deborah Bird Rose’s 1988 article “Exploring an Aboriginal Land Ethic,” and drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s claim that knowledge is “in the hands,” this paper explores the intersection of Merleau-Ponty’s embodied, process phenomenology and Indigenous Australian place-based ontologies. Rather than the moral demands or consequences of adopting an “Aboriginal land ethic,” the present paper is concerned with the ontological and epistemological – or, broadly speaking, the phenomenological – underpinnings of such a land ethic. Contra Rose’s claim that, in the Western tradition, we “have very little idea of what a non-human-centred cosmos looks like and how it can be thought to work,” it is argued that Merleau-Ponty’s fundamental thought provides us with a viable pathway towards a non-human-centred phenomenological ontology that, somewhat paradoxically, is nevertheless grounded in the lived body. It is suggested that such an approach is compatible with, and complimentary to, the traditional Indigenous Australian ways of being and knowing outlined by Rose.

Parables for planetary crisis: storytelling and multispecies migration in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Throughout his oeuvre, Amitav Ghosh deals with storytelling and migration. Exploring legacies of empire and entanglements between the human and non-human world, his writing is driven by an ethical imperative to excavate “forgotten” stories, and, especially in his later texts, to find new forms of storytelling suited to capture pasts, presents, and futures shaped by a growing sense of planetary crisis. Gun Island (2019), a generic mix of personal quest narrative, thriller, romance, and folk tale, depicts a world disrupted by different forms of multispecies migration. Linking the Indian subcontinent, the US, and Europe, it chronicles voluntary and forced journeys of humans and animals between the Global North and South, intertwining refugee and climate crises in the Mediterranean and Bangladesh with the morally charged legend of the gun merchant, a seventeenth-century world traveller. The text brings current and historical links between migration and climate change, which are comparatively rarely treated in literary fiction, into sharp focus. As this essay argues, it highlights specifically the need to broaden the notion of migration literature and its subgenres to include both human and animal migration and the impact of globalization and current realities of climate change. Exploring genre and poetics in Gun Island, this essay reads the novel against the broader aesthetic and cultural-historical arguments made in Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2016) and The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021). To explore Ghosh’s poetics, which fuse everyday realism with the uncanny, the improbable, and the mythical, this essay also draws on Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose’s notions of “ethography”. It argues that Gun Island, as a multispecies climate migration novel, responds to the author’s call for a rediscovery of storytelling beyond Western-style realism or SF, as a means to capture human and non-human subjectivities and to undo demarcations between rationality and spirituality.

Is Long-Term Thinking a Trap?

This provocation critiques the notion of long-term thinking and the claims of its proponents that it will help address failures in dominant conceptions of time, particularly in regard to environmental crises. Drawing on analyses of the Clock of the Long Now and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, the article suggests that we be more wary of the concept’s use in what we might call chronowashing. Like the more familiar greenwashing, where environmental issues are hidden by claims to be addressing the problem, the article explores how these examples of long-term thinking distract from extractivism, racism, and environmental injustice, making it harder to address the complexities involved. In particular, the article discusses examples where long-term thinking provides a veneer of environmental concern that actually disconnects from the work of building more equitable forms of relation. As a contrast, the article’s author asks: What is lost when we diagnose a problem as arising due to short-term thinking and propose long-term thinking as the solution? Against chronowashed environmental time, the author argues for more complex approaches that explicitly take into account the temporalities of inequality, political organization, ethical responsibilities and much else. The article engages with approaches to time that foreground the work needed to create time and move ethically within it, including Charles W. Mills’s white time and Kyle Powys Whyte’s kinship time. The author suggests that a stronger emphasis on the temporality of community, solidarity, and coalition—versus what James Hatley and Deborah Bird Rose have described as temporal narcissism—can better foreground the kinds of work that needs to be done, particularly by those with privilege.

Water's Ethical Time: The Art of Deindustrialising Human‐Water Relationships

AbstractI explore by way of a thought experiment the temporality of waterways in the context of restorative art interventions. As a substance that moves and gives form, and as a medium that retains and discharges, connects and divides, water that flows can make tangible the experiential flow of return and anticipation. Arguably, this bi‐directional structuring of time is pivotal to transformative and reparative action. If restoration means ‘going back’ to memories of ecologies and places, it does so with a generative thrust forward. This is the life‐enabling orientation of recuperation that I discern connects diverse phenomenological concepts: Deborah Bird Rose's ‘multispecies knots of ethical time’, the idea of ‘afterness’ as developed by Gerhard Richter, Gaston Bachelard's ‘rhythmic time’, and Gerald Vizenor's ‘survivance’. I bring these concepts to: (a) artistic water restoration projects that make imaginable, palpable, and real sustainable human‐water relationships, with a focus on the public works in Sydney by Turpin + Crawford Studio; (b) perspectives on water and time that Australian Indigenous thinkers have shared during my ethnographic research; and (c) the re‐naturalization of a river in Germany's postindustrial Ruhr region. I propose that thinking with water ethically and recognizing its temporal diversity opens up perspectives on the deindustrialisation of rivers and other bodies of water.

Garihma (to Care for)

Garihma (to Care for)

Thom van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew (eds.), Kin: Thinking with Deborah Bird Rose

Kin: Thinking with Deborah Bird Rose. 2022. Edited by Thom van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 248pp. $102.95 (hardcover), $26.95 (paperback).

Moving Beyond a Strange Spectatorship

What can nonhuman road trauma, more commonly referred to as ‘roadkill’, teach us about ecological crises and human culpability? Incidents of nonhuman road trauma could be described as strange encounters, revealing the shared trauma of the nonhumans and humans involved while simultaneously highlighting the supposed inevitability of such events. I argue that the choice to check the rearview mirror – to exhibit attentiveness and care in self-reflection – is an act of radical correspondence with the more-than-human. Such correspondence functions as a kind of non-spoken letter to both nonhumans and other human drivers; a letter calling for acts of care and attentiveness that acknowledge the nonhuman experience, mourn losses, and possibly instigate radical change when it comes to how nonhuman road trauma is thought about now and hopefully avoided in future. In her work on the ‘Anthropocene noir’, Deborah Bird Rose speaks of ‘the Anthropocene parallel’ in which humans are spectators of the suffering of nonhumans, and also spectators of a suffering that is our own. Written as both an essay and a personal log of my own experiences with nonhuman road trauma, this work draws on Rose’s idea in an attempt to reconcile the concept of what I term a ‘strange spectatorship’, in which humans observe, are implicated in, and turn away from the phenomenon of nonhuman road trauma and what such trauma reveals about human-nonhuman relations, particularly for settler-colonial Australians. Reflecting on anecdotal experiences as well as the representation of roadkill in Australian literature, I explore the strangeness perceived in how settler-colonial Australians are both actors and spectators in nonhuman road trauma. I grapple with the idea of such trauma as a means of better understanding the settler-colonial impact on Australian natural environments, and the consequences for both humans and nonhumans if we do not better address the ethical and ecological consequences of our modern road infrastructure.

Unmaking the Feral

Domesticated pigs (Sus scrofa) were introduced as livestock in Australia by European settlers, and now a large population is living wild. Rather than interrogate the settler pig as co-colonizer and destroyer of Australian ecologies, this article employs Deborah Bird Rose’s concept of “unmaking”—a process that fractures relationality in service of control—to articulate the relational violence done to the free-living pig by naming it a feral animal. An examination of the nonhuman’s historical entanglement with Anglo-Australian settlers in New South Wales will trace the free-living pigs’ shifting agency and identity. Introduced pigs were modern English breeds, domesticates in nascent capitalist stages of unmaking. Yet, these animals were made anew in Australia, living largely unmediated and demonstrating remarkable adaptability to novel environments. This article analyzes how porcine bodies and identities took shape in connection to a hunting culture and wild pork economy, a practice that encouraged Sus scrofa’s transformative ability to move between wild and domestic domains. Then, in the 1950s, how farmers, veterinarians, and government actors with converging motivations sought to reductively read the free-living pig as toxic and illegitimate, and to rebrand the “wild” pig as “feral.” To be feral in Australia is to be part of a systematic process that institutes strict limitations on an animal’s relational possibilities. By problematizing all life-sustaining connections the nonhuman being has with their environment, this process endeavors to radically unmake the socio-ecologies that constitute their being. Unmaking the feral targets the relational knots that make existence possible.

Animals squawking their mysteries

Abstract Scholarship on literature’s engagement with the climate crisis has frequently highlighted the limitations of the realist novel vis-à-vis the scale and wide-ranging ramifications of climate change. This article reads Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (2020) as a powerful example of how the cross-fertilization of narrative and poetic forms can expand the imaginative reach of the novel. Through the plot device of a pandemic that enables human-nonhuman communication, McKay’s novel explores the fragility of nonhuman life in a world shaped by the violence of advanced capitalist societies. The poetic nature of the animals’ utterances complicates interpretation and draws attention to the complexities of human-nonhuman entanglement, echoing – and performing through literary form – the ethical position formulated by Deborah Bird Rose under the rubric of “ecological existentialism.”

Deep Time and Domestication in Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo’s ‘Dog or Wolf’

Abstract In this short article, I read Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo’s lyric poem ‘Dog or Wolf’ as an illustration of how a poem can encompass the deep time of co-evolution and speciation (the process whereby species diverge). According to Jonathan Culler, there is a “special now” of lyric poetry: we encounter any poem in a perpetual present, but one with an open temporal horizon. Drawing on Deborah Bird Rose’s concept of ethical time, I suggest that the “gentle howling” of Capildeo’s ambiguous canid, which echoes Rose’s suggestion that other species call us into being, shows how poetry can also be a means of marking very deep time.

Tender Places

Tender Places is a creative research project engaging the settler body in reflexive dialogue with theory in and through place, to explore moral responsibilities of settler descended peoples in the time of ecological breakdown. The entanglement of severance and extraction with ecological and social violence poses a provocation to settler descended peoples. Working with the Ilparpa Claypans, a site of personal significance on the outskirts of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, my creative research uses Deborah Bird Rose’s provocation of “Taking Notice,” sensual language and presencing the co-existence of love and violence in order to mobilise the body in the act of physical translation of ideas with/in place through walking, writing and digital photography. The research acknowledges and activates trans-local relationships through the creation and sending of postcards that document, translate and disseminate field notes to and through an international network of artist peers. The postcard is presented as a queering material medium; an appropriated artefact of outsider privilege, a public/ private artwork for an audience of one, and a material item that crosses political and geographical borders to link places and people through space and time. My paper locates this practice of (trans)local place-based inquiry into ecological crisis within broader decolonising, feminist and creative inquiries into the Anthropocene. Postcards and other creative research artefacts will be shared to demonstrate the methodology in action, and I reflect on the decolonising potential of reflexive and embodied engagement with place in relation to settler identity.

L'environnementalisme dans les collines de Darjeeling : une enquête

This article focuses on the discourse on environmentalism in the Darjeeling hills, which has been hidden and/or overshadowed by factors such as ethnicity, nationalism and state-making. Centring on what I call the ‘environmentalism of the hills’, this article examines the history of environmentalism in the Indian Himalayas that was shaped by how British colonialism controlled territories, resources and subjects. I show how colonialism resulted in a distinct separation between humans and nature as suggested by Deborah Bird Rose (2013). Identifying the Darjeeling hills as one of the important locations for Himalayan scholarship, I conceptualise the ‘environmentalism of the hills’ as one of the possible ways of rethinking the debate on environmentalism in the Himalayas. In this article, I develop a framework that encourages an exchange of views on different varieties of environmentalism in academic scholarship, taking into account specific local histories and cultural contexts, and how these are embedded in and shaped by more encompassing larger ideational frameworks.

Shimmering Practices in a Kaleidoscope World: Affective, Embodied and Sensorial Modes of Filmmaking

Abstract This article explores a series of non-linear films produced in an undergraduate digital arts course. Drawing on Deleuze’s (1989) concept of the time-image, the researcher theorizes how filmmaking produces events of duration (Deleuze, 1991) for which bodies, living and nonliving, are actively engaged in processes of becoming. She makes connections with what Deborah Bird Rose (2017) calls shimmer with practices of immediation (Manning, 2019) a brilliance that brings us into “the experience of being part of a vibrant and vibrating world” (Rose, 2017, p. 53). The researcher argues that filmmaking is a shimmering practice in a kaleidoscope world – capable of generating affective, embodied, and sensorial events – practices-in-the-making. Thus the article aligns with the goal of this special topic: to analyze affective and somatic modes of filmmaking and their potential to create virtual openings in the ubiquitous quality of sensation in the city (Thain, 2019).

SCARRED TREES AND BECOMING-WITNESS

What happens when the landscape looks back? How is it that the landscape sees? This essay goes in search of material-semiotic signs of Australian Indigenous Country, overlooked and actively unseen through the history and enduring violence of European invasion. Whether in the form of eel traps, fishing weirs, remnants of stone huts, scarred trees, or else discovered in the notebook sketches of early explorers who wondered at the park-like composition of the landscape they were newly encountering, such evidence offers testimony to an Indigenous environmental knowledge we are in great need of today, grappling as we are with the concatenating effects of the climate crisis. The acknowledgement of sites of Indigenous significance across Australia, often threatened by mining interests and infrastructural projects, is discussed here in relation to the cultural and ritual artefact that is the scarred tree. This article explores the entangled act of witnessing via the more-than-human becomings of the landscape, or what Indigenous custodians call “Country,” and through the protean figure of the becoming-witness. Drawing on the theories of feminist ethnographers and philosophers while paying crucial heed to the voices of Indigenous scholars, I situate myself as a non-Indigenous scholar between the fields of architecture and philosophy. Venturing into the deceptively mundane suburban hinterlands of Melbourne, Australia in search of scarred trees, I attempt to broach a careful dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous modes of what Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren call “Storying” as a process of learning with Country.

Performing the Bounds of Responsibility

This paper investigates border-making dynamics in the two political arenas where my subjectivity is most acutely implicated across time—the Jewish Holocaust (as an intergenerational victim) and the Aboriginal genocide (as an unwitting beneficiary). Albeit that there are many differences between the drivers of antisemitism and racism against Indigenous Australians, I investigate both of these racist structures through the lens of border-thinking as theorised by Walter Mignolo as a method of decolonisation (2006). The article has been formatted as an example of discursive border-crossing by juxtaposing theoretical ideas (particularly inspired by Zygmunt Bauman and Deborah Bird Rose) with interjections from my personal journal. I explore my own performative storytelling as a means for me to take responsibility to question power structures, acknowledge injustice, and to enact the potential for ethical dialogue between myself and others. This responsibility gestures to the possibility of border crossing as an ‘act of liberation’ that resides in the acknowledgement of historical injustices and their continued impact on both the beneficiaries and the victims of coloniality in the present.

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the AnthropoceneAfter Extinction

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the AnthropoceneAfter Extinction

Obituary: Deborah Bird Rose (1946–2018)

Deborah (Debbie) Bird Rose taught that life usually offers an intergenerational gift with death. Ecological communities—associations of predators and prey, omnivorous scavengers, parasites and host...

"A Few Good Seasons Will Restore Prosperity to the Land": Louisa Atkinson's Depictions of Drought

"A Few Good Seasons Will Restore Prosperity to the Land":Louisa Atkinson's Depictions of Drought Grace Moore (bio) drought has always been a way of life in Australia, but the importation of European farming techniques and animals exacerbated the land's aridity in the nineteenth century and continues to do so today.1 The 1860s were, as the state's official statistician, T.A. Coghlan, expressed it, a period of "distress and acute suffering" in New South Wales (448). A La Niña event between 1860 and 1864 saw the weather oscillate between periods of extreme dryness and flooding, with New South Wales hit particularly badly. As climate historian Julia Miller notes, the period from 1855 to 1870 was particularly cool and mild, and this enabled a significant agricultural expansion (23). Looking back at the end of the century, Coghlan remarked that "truly remarkable vicissitudes of climate were very great, and the destruction of property was in many instances accompanied by loss of life" (448). These climatic extremes formed a backdrop to much of Australian novelist Louisa Atkinson's writing, which captures the unsettled conditions of life in New South Wales and Queensland in the 1860s and early 1870s. A novelist, nature writer, illustrator, taxidermist, and botanist, Atkinson was the first Australian-born woman to publish a novel, Gertrude the Emigrant (1857), a work remarkable for its attentiveness to the landscape and climate. In addition to her fiction, Atkinson was renowned in her lifetime for her botanical discoveries and writing. She penned a weekly column for the Sydney Morning Herald from 1860 until her death in 1872, and her work offers an affective and insightful understanding of the interactions between settler land management and weather systems in her home state of New South Wales. Biographer Patricia Clarke notes that from a very early age, Atkinson was both curious and knowledgeable regarding the plant and animal life of the Australian bush (25–35). As her newspaper columns demonstrate, Atkinson held Indigenous knowledge in high regard, and she learned a great deal about her surroundings from the Indigenous men and women she knew personally.2 She would certainly have understood that the seasons in Australia do not divide neatly into four, as they do in the northern hemisphere, but rather into six. As Deborah Bird Rose observes, "the very act of mapping seasons suggests a standard or norm" to which the Australian climate was resistant (38). Rose comments that Indigenous meteorology works by making connections between weather, creatures, and environment, and she notes the "simultaneity" of seasonal events, remarking "When the march flies start biting, the crocodiles are laying their eggs. When the Jangarla tree … flowers, the barramundi are biting" (39). We can see something of this interconnectedness, or, as Rose puts it, "sequence and co-occurrence," (38) in Atkinson's accounts of drought, which are sensitive to the responses of birds [End Page 5] who relocate their nesting sites in response to extreme temperatures (see L.C. Atkinson).3 While many settler families struggled to contend with the intense heat of Australian summers and the strangeness of their new country's flora and fauna, Atkinson was much more accepting. Having been born and raised in New South Wales, she resists settler nostalgia for the green fields of England and takes delight in introducing readers to the difference of their environment. As the historian Jill Ker Conway notes, the British colonial experience "represents life in Australia as a battle with harsh elements" (52). Atkinson's fiction follows this pattern to a degree, although she emphasizes that lack of climatic understanding is all too often the root cause of settler struggles. Whether narrating the catastrophic consequences of a careless gold digger leaving a campfire in the bush to smoulder, as in her short story "The Burning Forest" (1853), or describing the "sultry season" that leads to fire on the "parched" land of Gertrude the Emigrant, Atkinson sought to educate her readers regarding the dangers of a dry landscape.4 It is in her newspaper columns that Atkinson was most outspoken about colonial culture's effect on the land. She begins an article, "Hanging Rock on the Great Southern Road" (1871), with a...

Whale Falls, Suspended Ground, and Extinctions Never Known

AbstractThis article contributes to work within extinction studies by asking how one might “story” extinctions of creatures that have been, and will remain, unknown. It grapples with losses that have been unrecorded, unmissed, and unrecognizable via the “lively ethography” approach to storying extinction. This approach, developed by Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren, seeks to draw readers into imaginative encounters with embodied, specific, and lively creatures to support situated ethical responses. While at first this approach might seem antithetical to exploring unknown extinctions, this article argues that it can provide an important stimulus for developing a situated approach to losses that are often thought of in terms of undifferentiated masses. The article’s focus is on the recently discovered ecosystems of creatures that live on the remnants of dead whales on the sea floor, which are known as “whale falls.” It reads these ecosystems via a notion of “suspended ground,” which brings together philosopher Mick Smith’s rethinking of an ethics of encounter with unknown soil extinctions and Stacy Alaimo’s concept of “suspension.” The article argues that engaging with ethographic writing from this perspective enables one to weave a more explicit account of the mysterious and the unknown into the approach.

Shimmering with Deborah Rose: Posthuman theory-making with feminist ecophilosophers and social ecologists

AbstractDrawing on a posthuman lens we walk — with Deborah Bird Rose and her conceptual framing ofshimmer. We explore shimmering as incorporating a sensorial richness, as beauty and grandeur, as constantly in flux, moving between past, future and back again. Shimmering has potentiality in a posthuman context in its encompassing of spiritual and ancestral energies and illumination of the human (settler) story of exceptionalism. By theorising shimmer with this posthuman lens, we acknowledge and honour the eco-ethico consciousness raised by Australian ecophilosophers and ecofeminists such as Deborah Bird Rose and Val Plumwood, and the social ecologists who have continued to walk with them. In order to disrupt anthropocentricism and present a moral wake-up call that glows from dull to brilliance in these precarious times, we bring to environmental education the potential of holding the shimmering past tracings of theory along with us on our journeys.