Non-human Things Research Articles

Color as a Vital Force: A Posthumanist Approach to the Color Narrative in John Hawkes’ Second Skin

This paper examines the color in Hawkes’ Second Skin as a subjectivity of zoe that possesses vitality and interacts dynamically with its environment and other entities through the lenses of posthumanism, especially a famous Neterland posthumanities theorist Braidotti’s zoe theory. Color is not a lifeless tool used by authors to embellish the text but an active force that interacts with the characters, predicting or influencing their actions. It guides readers in understanding the plot and themes while fostering an anti-anthropocentric worldview that challenges traditional distinctions between life and non-life. Thus, color in Second Skin embodies Rosi Braidotti’s concept of zoe. This new thinking mode expands human understanding of non-human things and facilitates the construction of non-anthropocentric standpoints.

Women’s Corporeality and Slime in Shakespeare: Staging the Anthropocene

Women’s Corporeality and Slime in Shakespeare: Staging the Anthropocene

Bleaching and drifting

This article describes the possibilities of art workshops which have been conducted in Fukushima Prefecture that were affected by the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant accident on March 11, 2011. In coastal areas, many people experienced unexpected domestic migrations/relocations and unwelcome changes in their lives due to the disaster, moving multiple times and living in a state akin to drifting. In these workshops, participants recalled their history and context, created artwork as their navigational chart of life while rebraiding individual narratives with images, memories, and recollections that associated with objects as a part of hyperobjects of tsunami and nuclear disasters. For their complicated situation after the disaster, the workshops provided the opportunities to negotiate with objects as non-human things which have a longer lifespan than humans. It became the activities supporting peoples who lost the continuity of their lives with their hometown. These recovery and support programs through art workshops will be an ecosophic approach based on non-discursive, aesthetic, and ethic means to change the human-centric dominant paradigm.

Humanist Missteps, A Black Studies Critique of Posthumanist Archaeologies

Posthumanist archaeologies have attempted to move beyond humanist conceptions of the human for over a decade. But they have done so by primarily focusing on the ontological split between humans and non-human things. This only addresses one part of humanism, as Black studies scholars have long argued that it also equates humanity writ large with white, economically privileged, cis-gendered, heterosexual men, thereby excluding everyone else from the category of the human. They further argue that the violence and oppression inflicted on those excluded from humanism's definition of the human allows this ontological category to come into being. This article introduces Black studies’ critiques of humanism and applies them to posthumanist archaeologies. Ultimately, it argues that by not attending to the critiques raised by Black studies scholars, posthumanist archaeologies have inadvertently made humanist missteps wherein they continue using elements of humanism's definition of the human in their attempts to move beyond humanism.

Trans-Disciplinary Communication: Context and Semantics

Science is split into subject-oriented disciplines that are grounded on varying shades of the scientific method. Being a social activity, communication lays at the creative core of the sciencebuilding process of facts and explanations. To communicate means, in its most seminal sense, to bring something in common between distinct parts or to transfer something from one part to another. This 'commonality,' or what lays in common to the parts, can occur not just among persons but also among persons and nature or persons and non-human things. This article starts discussing communication at the human scale from the very beginning, widening the scope from its inner kernel in individuals towards social interactions in the scientific community. The perspectives, concepts, and guidelines unveiled by this exercise are applied in the article's text itself.

The dimension of care in American woodshop class and wood play in schools

This article posits that within American woodworking and wood play school curriculum—across time periods and age ranges—there is a hidden-in-plain-site dimension of care toward non-human things, like tools and wood. Analyzing American teacher guidebooks, curriculum descriptions, educational research journals, technical education magazines, newsletters, school textbooks, and other sources, this study describes how the dimension of care is revealed, despite not being named as an explicit educational purpose. An ethics of care is theorized in this study as quotidian habits of maintenance and reverence toward non-human things. Emphasizing this style of care provides a new way of seeing American wood shop class, and related lessons, away from their vocational backdrop, and provides current educators with inspiration on how woodworking and wood play could be integrated into curriculum concerned with promoting a less anthropocentric ethics in the classroom.

Directions for Anarchist Studies

Anarchism is a fertile site for nurturing the sorts of encounters that feminists have called intersectionality. Anarchism and intersectionality share the goal of critically examining familiar as well as emergent flows of power and meaning, and understanding their relations to one another. This paper focuses on three compelling directions for anarchist studies: Indigenous anarchism, anarchism developing with new materialism, and anarchism emergent in radical book arts. Each thread has established roots while also moving in new directions. Anarchist encounters with Indigeneity, new materialism, and book arts resonate with each other: they can foster “a commitment to the particular” through which we can immerse ourselves in rich and dense worlds where specific Indigenous theories and practices, detailed encounters with non-human things, and particular artistic + intellectual productions of materials can emerge.

Displacing the State of Nature: A Disagreement with Graeber and Wengrow

David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything offers a salutary corrective to modern political theory, with its choice between two forms of the “state of nature”: Hobbes’s negative vision of bloodthirsty humans held in check only by the violent power of the sovereign, and Rousseau’s apparently more positive vision of naturally equal humans corrupted by the introduction of agriculture and metallurgy. However, the alternative Graeber and Wengrow offer –a world of imaginative and experimental humans freely choosing different forms of society– excessively downplays the political mediating role of non-human things. This move, in turn, is overly dependent on a modernist ontology that opposes free human thought to mechanically deterministic things. Drawing on the insights of Actor-Network Theory in particular, this article argues for the central role of inanimate objects in the political sphere.

Practising geography in/with technical worlds

Over the past decade, geographical scholarship has grown steadily enamoured with all things technical. In some ways, such a focus is an outflow of the recent philosophical turn towards critical realism, which has encouraged a keener eye on more-than-human worlds. It demands careful delineations and understandings of the multi-stranded relationships between humans, technical objects, organisms, energies, and artificial intelligences that exceed anthropocentric epistemologies. This commentary seeks to address the challenges of studying the ‘technical’ in relation to the futures of geographical thought and praxis by proposing three strategies that might be developed in geographical research. These are, namely, the acquisition of a stronger grasp of technoscience expertise, care in following non-human things over time, and openness to interdisciplinary research. As more geographers enter into the fold of investigating ‘technical’ things, developing these skills would be invaluable to producing innovative spatial knowledge about these cryptic worlds.

Reimagining Social Medicine from the South by Abigail H. Neely

Reviewed by: Reimagining Social Medicine from the South by Abigail H. Neely Kwaku Nti Neely, Abigail H. Reimagining Social Medicine from the South. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Foregrounded in social medicine (a branch in the medical field that focuses on demographic determinants of health and the biology of disease, as well as community-oriented primary care [COPC] that influenced the World Health Organization [WHO]–led primary health care for all), this book upholds the Pholela Community Health Center (PCHC) "unbecoming role." Significantly, yet, the author derives her ideas from the experiences of the proximate community—that is "the homes, landscapes, and lives—the worlds of Pholela residents" (xv). Abigail Neely, essentially, reiterates that it is conceptually impracticable to fully comprehend the global story of social medicine without the lives of the residents of Pholela, their homesteads, health, and words, since these elements proffer the possibilities and limitations of this field, and equally pushes for a more-than-human understanding of social life in illness and wellness. Arguably, in the cast of Charles van Onselen, who did a social history of the industrialized gold mining sector of the economy of South Africa and shifted the glorious attention from the mine owners to the underground miners and others in that category, Neely de-emphasizes "laudatory narratives of white male doctors who practice medicine to fight for social justice" (4) and centers Pholela residents as the people who lived in the community and made different worlds amid the vagaries of illness and wellness. She, therefore, juxtaposes the sacrosanct scientific study of PCHC with the understandings and interventions borne out of the worlds in which the Pholela people lived. Neely avers, and justifiably so, that these local and cultural understandings and interventions forged "health outcomes in ways social medicine could not always understand and treat" because "for all its many successes, the PCHC was haunted by its own faith in [End Page 220] science, both biomedical and social, as well as by broader political and economic forces at work in South Africa" (4). Elaborating on the limitations of the PCHC program, Neely discusses its inability to consider the role of the people in the development of the practice, disregard of the sociality of nonhuman things that remain integral to it, and the lack of understanding of Pholela-specific social relationships giving a deep "vision of social life in which individual actors disappear and health and illness emerge as the product of entanglements" (5). Connected to the foregoing factor is the idea of "ontological coordination"; for the residents of Pholela, "ontologies are multiple, relational, and overlapping" (4), a kind of multiplicity that reveals yet another limitation to the social medicine practiced in the Pholela vicinity. Finally, the political ecology inflected by the scholarship on racial capitalism also illuminates some of the limits of social medicine practiced in Pholela. Although the health center could assist with modifications of the homesteads of the residents in addition to offering clinical care, it hardly could change the overarching structures of racial capitalism that heavily impacted livelihoods, illness, and wellness. Neely points out that to the extent that the political economy of South Africa was stratified by race, scholarship on racial capitalism is particularly valuable for a political-ecology analysis in Pholela. According to these scholars, capitalism, as well as capital accumulation, predicated a racial hierarchy that both government policy and industrial practices reinforced. The policies and practices culminated in Apartheid ensuring astronomical profit for whites at the expense of the well-being of African laborers. Reimagining Social Medicine from the South essentially consists of four chapters that are bookended by the introduction and conclusion. In chapter 1, Neely discusses her sources that mainly include archival documents, PCHC publications, and regional ethnographies of the Nguni people. While not discounting the biases and problems of these various sources, she affirms that in varying degrees, they are helpful for understanding the vision of social medicine that the PCHC practiced. She uses these sources to tell the story of the beginnings and operations of the PCHC and concludes that "seeing like a health center meant making certain aspects of health center practice visible to the outside world, all while recognizing how...

A New Method to Bridge New Materialism and Emotional Mapping: Spatio-Emotional Experiences in Disaster-Affected Brazilian Favelas

Within the field of emotional mapping, and mapping more broadly, nonhuman things are often understood as mere instruments - they have utility but not agency to shape meaning-making. In this paper we experiment with a new method that aims to challenge the dualism between human and non-human things by bridging new materialism and participatory emotional mapping. We experimented with this “new materialist methodology” during a one-day workshop to explore residents’ spatio-emotional experiences in a disaster-affected favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Reflecting on this one-day workshop, we argue that materials with diverse colors, textures, shapes, densities, weights, and smells are key collaborators in emotional mapping. Materials have agency to invoke and evoke diverse emotions with past, present, and future temporalities, and which fall within and beyond the positive-negative emotion binary. Materials can facilitate conviviality and discussion amongst mapping participants, which enables participants to speak about their emotional-spatial experiences with more nuance and complexity.

Review: The Materiality of Architecture and Metamorphism: Material Change in Architecture

Review: <i>The Materiality of Architecture</i> and <i>Metamorphism: Material Change in Architecture</i>

Review of Foucault’s New Materialism: A Review of Thomas Lemke’s The Government of Things

IFIRST WROTE ON Foucault as a complexity materialist in the 1990s and have continued to write on the subject (see Olssen 1996, 1999, 2008, 2015, 2017, 2021). In that Thomas Lemke’s book, The Government of Things: Foucault and the New Materialisms (New York University Press, 2021), supports my view for a materialist reading of Foucault, it constitutes a welcome addition to the literature. Lemke firstly outlines and critiques three “new” materialist approaches: that of Graham Harman’s Object Orientated Ontology (OOO); Jane Bennett’s “Vital Materialism,” and finally, Karen Barad’s “agential realism.” All three share a concern with “the productivity and dynamism of matter” (p. 4). Lemke’s criticisms of these approaches are insightful. OOO is seen as inadequate for representing nonhuman objects in isolation which translates into “an extreme form of subjectivism” (p. 14) and “essentialism” (p. 8) incapable of resolving the “theoretical tension between relationalism and foundationalism” (p. 8. Jane Bennett’s “vibrancy of matter” thesis is unsatisfactory for failing to theoretically articulate the ways in which matter is “vibrant,” or “active” (see Lemke, Chap. 2). This relates to what Bennett refers to as “thing-power,” to “nonhuman things,” and the “force of things” (Bennett 2010). It is unclear whether such a “force” is postulated as internal to “things” or as emerging from contingent relations in historically engendered configurations.

Geographies of the event? Rethinking time and power through digital interfaces

This paper examines work in cultural and human geography that theorises temporality in terms of events. Moving from humanist phenomenology, to non-representational and assemblage theories and current geographies of encounter, it suggests these accounts of events tend to analyse the past and future through the lens of the present. Building upon these literatures and the work of Tristan Garcia, the paper argues for an expanded notion of the event, where past and future events can be considered as both distinct from, and linked to, the present moment. Here, time comes to be defined as the ordering and stacking of events, where events are understood as sites of comprehension, in which entities are differentiated. The paper suggests this position is useful in order to trace temporal causality across and between entities and events. Tracing the causality of entities and their ordering and stacking across events enables a closer analysis of what the paper terms the temporal power of non-human things. To illustrate this argument, examples from an ESRC project on digital gaming and in-game purchasing are analysed.

Globalisation, cultural knowledges and sociomateriality in Middle Eastern education: how the global and local influence classroom practices?

ABSTRACT This article examines how local, social and cultural knowledges were disrupted by global flows of human and non-human things in an international private Middle Eastern school. The study examined how the interplay of local and globally transient knowledges recursively influenced the sociomaterial actions of teachers in classroom learning. Critical ethnography was employed over three years using participant observation and interviews analysed from a critical orientation. The study’s findings confirm that educational global flows must not be taken as neutral and that their use is recontextualised within a local–global nexus. These findings are significant in our current global world of cultural unrest and dynamic and morphing local–national–global relations, and document social relations of learning in an early childhood context, not previously given much attention in globalisation and education research.

The Interaction/Intra-action of People and Things in Different Spaces in Lawrence’s &amp;lt;i&amp;gt;Lady Chatterley’s Lover&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt;

D. H. Lawrence has always been a controversial writer in literary area when it comes to the modernity, for he was active in the transitional era between realism and modernism. But it is almost accepted that he is more of a modernist writer. When talking about the way he demonstrates his sharp resistance against industrial civilization, the resolution he offers to recover the loss of humanity in his novel <i>Lady Chatterley’s Lover</i>, we cannot bypass the perspectives of symbolism, imagery and metaphors which have been widely discussed by the academic field. Different from other contemporary writers, Lawrence emphasizes the depiction of interactions between human beings and non-human materials, and gives an exquisite description on various spaces in this novel. As a result, this paper intends to analyze the characterization and Lawrence’s vision of modernity from the perspective of New Materialism, focusing on the writing of non-human things, especially the interaction/intra-action between people and things in different spaces, in order to prove how the space changes and how the characters’ interactions with things actively influence or even determine the hero and heroine’s choices, and further result in their alienation and emancipation respectively. By employing the theory of Spatial narrative and thing theory, this paper is going to make it be more plausible that D. H. Lawrence is a great modernist and holds a critical view on industrial civilization, and call for more attention and studies on how non-human things influence and mould human beings and how the plot and theme of novel are driven by the interactions between people and things.

Speedy Detection Module for Abandoned Belongings in Airport Using Improved Image Processing Technique

Recently, in computer vision and video surveillance applications, moving object recognition and tracking have become more popular and are hard research issues. When an item is left unattended in a video surveillance system for an extended period of time, it is considered abandoned. Detecting abandoned or removed things from complex surveillance recordings is challenging owing to various variables, including occlusion, rapid illumination changes, and so forth. Background subtraction used in conjunction with object tracking are often used in an automated abandoned item identification system, to check for certain pre-set patterns of activity that occur when an item is abandoned. An upgraded form of image processing is used in the preprocessing stage to remove foreground items. In subsequent frames with extended duration periods, static items are recognized by utilizing the contour characteristics of foreground objects. The edge-based object identification approach is used to classify the identified static items into human and nonhuman things. An alert is activated at a specific distance from the item, depending on the analysis of the stationary object. There is evidence that the suggested system has a fast reaction time and is useful for monitoring in real time. The aim of this study is to discover abandoned items in public settings in a timely manner.

Festa, Lynn. Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture.

Festa, Lynn. <i>Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture</i>.

ABJECT WITHDRAWAL?

Despite exerting considerable influence on other academic disciplines and mainstream environmental thought, object-oriented ontology has attracted little critical engagement from academic philosophers as a philosophy in its own right. Here, I address one aspect of this oversight by exploring Timothy Morton’s claim that “being ecological” – cultivating the anticolonial and nonanthropocentric mindset to disrupt environmental crises – requires an object-oriented purview. Working against the backdrop of the Anthropocene, I firstly reconstruct Morton’s two main arguments for the power and ecological promise of object-oriented ontology. With some help from (eco)feminist theory, I then argue that, despite its radically nonanthropocentric façade, object-oriented ontology retains some problematic aspects of the dualistic thinking that it rightly pits itself against. More specifically, because object-oriented ontology retains the absence/presence binary of the subject/object dualism as one of its basic metaphysical commitments, it appears destined to perpetuate an insidious anthropocentrism by either fetishizing or collapsing the alterity of the nonhuman things it aims to rethink. Object-oriented ontology seems, therefore, poorly suited to the task that Morton sets for it.

인류세 시대의 어둠의 생태학-비이원론의 관점에서

In this paper, I examined dark ecology by Timothy Morton with the concepts of ecology without nature, the ecological thought, and hyperobjects to bring modern dualistic thinking to an end. Morton specifically invented the term, hyperobjects to describe objects that are so massively distributed in time and space, such as global warming, styrofoam, and radioactive plutonium that are really exist but we can feel and know only a part of them. Morton suggests that the ecology in the Anthropocene should be ambiguous and dark, dark-depressing and dark-uncanny, and could also be sweet and kind, while entwined and interconnected as a form of mesh in networks with human and nonhuman things. He insists we never know what exactly a hyperobject is but absolutely here as you can feel and acknowledge. In Ceremony, Silko shows how the hyperobject works and makes us feel and celebrate without following the line dualism has already drawn. This is what dark ecology and hyperobjects are for; the end of the dualism.