Non-human Elements Research Articles

Placing Green Energy in the Sea: Offshore Wind Farms, Dolphins, Oysters, and the Territorial Politics of the Intertidal Zone in Taiwan

The development of offshore wind farms has been a way for the state to repackage national development projects using green energy discourses. In Taiwan, where the further development of nuclear power is suspended due to public antinuclear sentiment, offshore wind farms have been heavily promoted as a way of meeting electricity demand. The planned site for offshore wind farms, mainly the intertidal zone along the coast of Changhua County, overlaps with both oyster farms and the habitat of Taiwanese humpbacked dolphins, categorized as a critically endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. This has resulted in a clash between conserving the oyster farming landscape, protecting an endangered species, and developing green energy. Facing this dilemma, pro–wind farm discourses that highlight concerns about global climate change have gradually supplanted those stressing the welfare of oysters and dolphins, even though the latter have been used successfully as local icons by movements opposing previous development projects on the intertidal zone. This article reconsiders the politics of territorialization implied by the “green” label affixed to offshore wind farm projects and other forms of green energy in general. As such, the meaning of offshore wind farms, as a newly discovered energy resource, is intertwined with the changing meanings of both dolphins and oyster farms, as rival nonhuman objects of resource exploitation and natural conservation. The territorialization of such resources in the emerging discursive space of green energy has proceeded via relational placemaking with nonlinear connections among multiple human and nonhuman elements. Key Words: conservation, intertidal zone, landscape, renewable resources, resource frontier.

Answering the world: young children’s running and rolling as more-than-human multimodal meaning making

This paper makes a case for a view of young children’s meaning-making in which human actants are not separate from, but deeply entwined in, a more-than-human world. In order to interrogate the more-than-human processes through which multimodal meaning-making emerges, we focus on meaning-making through running and rolling that we have observed in early childhood settings in Finland and the UK. In doing so, we rethink the process of bringing-into-relation that underpin multimodal literacy practices. Ingold’s notion of correspondence is offered as a generative way to conceptualize the interplay between human and nonhuman elements as they ‘make themselves intelligible to each other’ (p.97). We show how posthuman theory offers the possibility for reconceptualising emergence and intentionality, within young children’s meaning-making.

Out of place, out of time: towards a more-than-human rhythmanalysis of smoking

Geography has in the last two decades showed an increasing interest in smoking and while mainly within the purview of health geographies, some have also utilised Foucauldian concepts of ‘governmentality’ and Goffman’s notion of ‘stigma’ to study smoking’s spatial exclusion and purification of public spaces. More recently, cultural geographers have started to investigate the more embodied, sensory as well as affective elements of smoking. Notwithstanding recent developments, the temporalities of smoking have largely remained unaccounted for, while the more-than-human in smoking has received little sustained attention. This article aims to fill this gap and in doing so intervenes in this body of critical work by developing a framework that can account for the pharmacological and habitual affordances of smoking, without descending into the pathologisation of smoking bodies that has characterised a public health focus on the addictive qualities of nicotine. To develop this framework, the article brings theories of the more-than-human into dialogue with rhythmanalysis, in order to examine the messy human–nonhuman ties through which everyday rhythms of smoking are enacted, embodied and performed. By focusing on the spatio-temporal patterns of two nonhuman elements, nicotine and the cigarette, the aim is to dislodge the human body from the centre of analysis. This conceptual more-than-human rethinking of smoking offers a means to account for the agency and affects of nonhumans in relation to smoking, and addiction more broadly, without slipping back into deterministic, public health understandings of the body.

Ecojustice education and communitarianism: Exploring the possibility for African eco-communitarianism

In this article, we explore the concept of African communitarianism and reflect on its potential value for ecojustice education as a localised response to the wider ecological crises that impacts on African communities. We argue for an African eco-communitarian perspective and propose that this perspective extends ecojustice education. Such extension occurs firstly through foregrounding and emphasising the establishment of harmonious and co-constitutive relationships that is characterised by intersubjectivity and secondly, by extending community to beyond humans (and ancestors) to be inclusive of the more-than human world. We contend that ecojustice education, framed within an African eco-communitarianism, constitutes a localised response to the ecological crises in the form of critical place-based education, that it enables co-constitutive dialogue and interaction between the human and non-human elements of an eco-community and is an ethico-political praxis characterised by an African environmental ethic.

Negotiating the complexity of teaching: a rhizomatic consideration of pre-service teachers’ school placement experiences

ABSTRACTBackground and purpose: Acknowledging that it is critical that researchers design and implement studies that examine teaching as a complex phenomenon (Strom and Martin [2017]. Becoming-teacher: A Rhizomatic Look at First-year Teaching. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers), the objective of this study was to examine pre-service teachers’ (PSTs’) experience of teaching a specific content (i.e. Sport Education) in various school contexts (i.e. diverse PSTs, contexts, students, and the SE model). Using the rhizomatic (Deleuze and Guattari [1987]. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) concept of assemblage, this study was guided by the question, ‘How do PSTs negotiate their Sport Education physical education teacher education learning experience during school placement?’Research setting and participants: Grounded in post-qualitative methodology, this study involved twenty-one PSTs undertaking their school placement as part of a three-year physical education teacher education (PETE) programme in Norway. School placement was composed of two three-week periods in upper secondary school in which the PSTs taught SE to the same class each week. The PSTs participated in a university SE-PETE unit prior to school placement.Data collection and analysis: Three focus group interviews were conducted with three PST groups: (i) end of the SE-PETE unit and prior to school placement; (ii) between school placement blocks; and, (iii) end of school placement. Also, PST coursework was collected on completion of the PETE unit (completed in groups) and on completion of school placement (individual coursework). The nonlinear analysis process included data walking, rhizomatic mapping, situational analysis, and memo writing.Findings and discussion: This study highlighted how particular characteristics of various human and non-human elements (that is, the PSTs themselves, their contexts, their students, the features of SE) influenced and shaped PSTs’ teaching and learning. Recognizing that it is not possible to be true to the myriad of elements influencing each PST, we provide a detailed consideration of two selected PSTs and show how interactions between human and non-human elements created two different teaching practices and learning experiences. We discuss the concept of assemblage in relation to the findings and introduce the notion of ‘translating’. In ‘translating’, as highlighted by the PSTs in this study, PSTs make sense of their PETE learning within a specific setting and a set of circumstances.Conclusion: We contend that non-linear conceptual and methodologic frameworks, such as those featured in this study, can assist the PETE community to push beyond linear and simple ways of studying practice and instead encourage more complex conceptualizations of teaching and learning. Hence, we advocate for an ontological turn (Lather and St. Pierre [2013]. “Post-qualitative Research.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26 (6): 629–633) in PETE research that focuses on the processes of teaching and learning rather than the outcomes alone.

More-than-human government and the Tbilisi zoo flood

On 17 June 2015, an unprecedented series of rain events caused a wall of water to tear through an affluent urban neighborhood in the Georgian capital Tbilisi. The flood damaged 700 homes, displaced 67 families, killed 19 people, left 3 more unaccounted for – while also leaving nearly 300 animals either drowned or killed as the flood destroyed the Soviet-era Tbilisi Zoo. Deadly and headline grabbing interactions among humans and non-humans continued surprising those in Tbilisi as diverse actors tried to control the precarious situation unfolding in this post-Soviet urban landscape, and survivors of all sorts roamed the streets. I illustrate these relationships by analyzing news coverage, government statements, technical reports, archival resources, and my own experiences as a participant observer within the events surrounding the flood. In doing so I extend arguments by Foucault and his interlocuters to present a case of more-than-human government, requiring the arrangement of non-human elements to maintain the life of a political population such as the Tbilisi citizenry. As I demonstrate, such governmental practices require not only calculations of what life to protect and what to destroy via sovereignty, discipline, and biopolitics, but also a constellation of other powers, including historically embedded regimes of truth and authority. From this perspective, the security of a human population may at times rely on its imbrication with the government of animals and infrastructure alike, and vice versa – by securing, disciplining, knowing, and at times destroying our material environments and companion species, however we may be related.

Learning from Rivers

Learning from Rivers

Understanding the affects in street children’s lives in Pelotas, Brazil

ABSTRACT This longitudinal qualitative research explores the significance of affects in the lives of children and young people on the streets of Pelotas, Brazil. Affects have not previously been examined in depth in a street context, despite their impact on the experiences and behaviour of street children. Street affects emerge in and through encounters between the human and non-human elements of the urban environment. When a set of affects arise and endure through time, street dwellers may experience them as affective atmospheres and respond in particular ways. They may also try to manipulate affects and to thereby change affective atmospheres, and yet the success of such efforts can never be guaranteed. This article shows that manipulating affect on the streets of Pelotas is a way to obtain and wield power, and that power hierarchies on the streets are partly based on successful affect manipulation. I argue that future geographical research ought to focus on situations in which particular affective atmospheres, such as those characterized by fear, are subject to contestation and challenge.

Embracing Uncertainty: Primo Levi's Politics of the Human

This article analyses the concept of the human in Primo Levi's works, as well as his use of the animal as way of characterizing the nonhuman element inside the human. To disclose the implicit assumptions and far-reaching implications of Levi's thought, the article reads his writings through the lens of Roberto Esposito's work on the category of the person and the philosophy of the impersonal. The article is divided into three parts: the first gives an overview of Esposito work on the notion of the person; the second shows how Levi's Holocaust texts deploy the dispositif of the person; and the third looks at the ‘impersonal’ aspects of Levi's writings. The conclusion discusses the tensions that arise from these counter-narratives, arguing that, far from being accidental, they suggest that being human is primarily a political and ethical issue rather than a cognitive one.

Interpreter assemblages: Caring for immigrant and refugee patients in US hospitals

US hospitals have developed a variety of strategies to meet federal requirements and provide culturally and linguistically appropriate health care for people who report limited English proficiency. A key strategy is the use of healthcare interpreters who may be physically present in the room or in the room via telephone or video conference. This paper analyzes the contingent and unstable combinations of heterogeneous human and nonhuman elements that form and disperse during visits to the hospital when healthcare interpreters are used. It draws its analysis from 9 months of fieldwork in 2012 that included following 69 adult immigrant and refugee patients in one hospital in Maine and observing encounters with interpreters and clinic staff. It introduces the concept of interpreter assemblage to make sense of the transnational mixes of people, technologies, and ideas that bring multilingual hospital care to life and give it a character of its own.

Student-Led Improvement Science Projects: a praxiographic, actor-network theory study

ABSTRACTImprovement science methodology is promoted in the National Health Service (NHS) in Scotland for implementing rapid change in hospital practices. Student-Led Improvement Science Projects (SLISPs) have been developed as a result of this, where medical students work with clinical teams to identify, implement and monitor quality improvements in the workplace. Working with improvement science in real-life working practices in a hospital environment presents opportunities for different ways to conceptualise learning, for both educators and students. This paper draws from ethnographic and praxiographic methods combined with the sociomaterial approach of actor-network theory (ANT) to investigate the pedagogies of improvement science. The research concludes with three implications for medical education and education in general: (1) conceptualising learning as a network effect can guide educators and students towards a broader range of pedagogies for improvement science; (2) treating human and non-human elements of the network equally can lead to noticing details of practice that might otherwise be overlooked; (3), instead of collapsing improvement science into a singular meaning, multiple worlds allows for different enactments of improvement science to co-exist.

Toxic landfills, survivor trees, and dust cloud memories: More-than-human ecologies of 9/11 memory

The symbolic power of grass, trees, flowers, stones, water, and other everyday objects to evoke more-than-human experiences is a cornerstone of memorial practice. As survivors of traumatic events, nonhuman elements have long been preserved in, even added to, memorial landscapes for their representational capacities to “say what cannot be said.” Beyond their mobilization as passive symbols, the plants themselves also exert a “creative presence” that equally shapes memorial sites, wherein ecologies of memory are negotiated and coconstituted through human and nonhuman lives. In foregrounding ecologies of “9/11” memory and memorialization, this essay draws on more-than-human approaches that emphasize how both human and nonhuman matter and memory emerge from and transform each other in and around lower Manhattan. At the World Trade Center, both human and nonhuman experiences of violence and violation are implicated in the “ecologies of memory” preserved and curated at the site. Focusing on ecologies of 9/11 commemoration, we argue that spatially fixed narratives of trauma obfuscate the environmentally diffuse human victims of the September 11th terror attacks, as well as how nonhuman actors coconstitute, contradict, and transform these memorial spaces. We argue that these memorial spaces employ the affective power of nonhuman actors to reproduce exclusionary narratives of cultural trauma, while obscuring very real environmentally diffuse human victims and ongoing harms, domestically and abroad. As a result of these negotiations, divergent forms of “slow violence” are rendered visible within the memorial landscape.

“Mossification”: Subverting the Human-Centric Portrait with a More-Than-Human Triptych

Abstract Motivated by a sense of ethical obligation and environmental urgency, I commissioned a Toronto-based artist to take a portrait of a “more-than-human” me that embodied nonhuman elements. The aim of this artistic endeavor was to re-evaluate humans' impact on and relationship with the organic and non-organic beings and stuff with which we are entangled. My aim with the resulting portrait, “Mossification,” was three-fold: to visually represent a more-than-human (multiple-singular) self; to subvert the human-centric portrait by giving moss and lichen more visual space and symbolic agency; finally, to suggest, through movement in the form of a triptych, that if we do not change, humans will end up buried under by nature. This short essay is broken down in three parts. In the first two, I provide philosophical context then synthesize a brief history of portraiture with the aim of showing how “Mossification” subverts the genre. In the final part, I demonstrate how “Mossification” might be positively received but nonetheless fails to embody transcorporeality because of its entanglement with neoliberal systems that instrumentalize and objectify nature. I conclude that even though “Mossification” is problematic, it remains a productive visual experiment because of its generative capacity to destabilize human-centric representative traditions and symbolic codes.

Erasure, discovery and emergence

A serene little walking track graces the hillside along Mons Road between Buderim and the Bruce Highway. It marks a significant piece of state heritage: the Buderim–Palmwoods Tramway. Behind it lies a story of community driving discovery, emergence, conservation and use. This article tells of the emergence of the walking track using Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage concept to explore the ‘becoming’ of the walking track. Assemblages provide an understanding of heritage as a process rather than a fixed entity, examining the re-territorialisation of the tramway track and the ways in which its boundaries are constantly challenged by human and non-human elements. The continuums of territorialisation/deterritorialisation and materiality/expression offer insights into heritage management. Analysis of the tramway as a heritage assemblage reveals the ongoing process of caring for heritage: it shows the strengths of clear boundaries, and permeable ones, and the importance of both material and expressive roles of the components comprising a heritage place. An assemblage view moves conservation beyond the fabric, the architectural and aesthetic to the interplay of the atmospheric, the emotional and the expressive, recognising the action and agency of heritage components and their ability to affect and be affected.

Parliament of things and enactment of third entities: object-subject/subject-object encounters from cuban urban gardens to United States’ robotic labs

ABSTRACTThings/objects/materials/nonhumans are integral components of everyday material ecology of humans. The nonhuman elements contribute to sociality, socialization and configuration of political subjectivities. We explore the dynamics of subject-object relationships via ethnographies of urban gardens and robotic labs. We trace the dynamics of man-plant relationships in urban gardens of Cuba and engineer-humanoid relationships in the United States to highlight how these relationships inform the politics and ethical complexity of human-centred ecologies. This collaborative effort offers two different case studies to broaden the notions of materiality while critiquing the relationality bound between subjects and objects instead of exploring the emergent properties of their relationship. Our ethnographies are a form of hands-on anthropology that outlines the third entity that emerges from the subject-object relationship and configures the material ecology of everyday lives. Our discussion contributes to the complexities of politics of everyday life and to the challenges of our contemporary era by highlighting the importance of details of everyday lives and how we craft relationships with nonhuman people.

Case studies on transport infrastructure projects in belt and road initiative: An actor network theory perspective

This article is a new attempt to apply the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as a qualitative analytical framework for examining the possible roles played by multilateral platforms in facilitating cross-border transport infrastructural projects at regional/continental scale. Given its magnitude, diversity and uniqueness, the Belt and Road (B&R) Initiative, as a multi-country platform along the contemporary Eurasia trade routes, underpins our diagnoses. The Chinese government posited B&R Initiative as an economic prescription which is premised on the provision of infrastructural connectivity across the Eurasia continent. By treating human and non-human elements symmetrically, ANT possesses wide scope elasticity that helps describe the dynamic interrelationships among various actors/actants, including the ways how government and state-controlled actors rationalized cross-border infrastructure projects by anchoring discourses about the thriving B&R network. Based on the analyses of three case studies, we argue that B&R Initiative has been a catalyst and obligatory passage point (OPP) for facilitating transnational transport infrastructure projects in garnering required resources and supports, though its efficacy might be subdued by other factors such as political contentions.

Situating Border Control: Unpacking Spain's SIVE border surveillance assemblage

This article builds on the ‘practice turn’ in border studies by critically engaging assemblage theory as a means of unboxing European maritime surveillance. Through a case study of Spain's SIVE (Sistema Integrado de Vigilancia del Exterior) surveillance system, I tease apart the Guardia Civil's technocratic claims of omni-voyance by focusing on the daily interactions between border guards, vision technologies, rescue services, Moroccan forces, and the lively materials of the borderspace itself. I employ a literary narrative in order to expose the daily breaches of control as the guards and technologies contend with the non-human elements of the borderspace, as well as their own inability to remain vigilant. Far from offering unbroken control, therefore, I argue that the vision produced through SIVE is stuttered and fragmented through both human and technological flaws. I also draw on assemblage theory in order to trace the disparate actors being drawn into the border regime. I argue that these new actors are only ever partially encountered and incorporated, however, and that as a result the system's ability to incorporate also becomes its Achilles heel. The effect is a geography of the border that foregrounds the ‘little details’ of borderwork and the volatility of the borderspace itself – thus exposing the flaws behind a scopic narrative that claims unceasing vision and an unhindered reach.

Listening with young children: enchanted animism of trees, rocks, clouds (and other things)

This article introduces the notion of enchanted animism, contending that an enchanted re-animation of the world may be necessary for learning to live on a damaged planet. The paper draws on a project with young children which invited them to share what they thought was ‘good’ in the outdoor spaces at their early learning centre. These encounters revealed children’s relationship with nonhuman elements which seemed to be calling in and enchanting children. In particular, children’s playful animation of so-called inanimate things – trees, rocks, clouds – allowed an egalitarian view of the world in which both humans and nonhumans were seen to be engaged in intentional projects. The paper argues that enchanted animism kindles children’s sensitivity to Earthly processes, enabling them to listen to the Earth more attentively, with the awareness and responsiveness that a planetary crisis demands.

Eco-innovation for sustainable tourism transitions as a process of collaborative co-production: the case of a carbon management calculator for the Dutch travel industry

Eco-innovations that reduce carbon emissions help advance sustainability transitions in tourism. This article examines the analytical potential of actor-network theory (ANT) to study eco-innovation. ANT assumes that reality consists of actor-networks made of human and non-human elements that perform actors as network effects. We argue that, in a time when climate change is the simultaneous product and producer of human actions, eco-innovation is better understood when research gives the human and non-human elements that perform eco-innovations equal analytical treatment. We therefore develop an ANT-inspired framework, which we apply in a case study to investigate the development of a specific eco-innovation: CARMACAL, a web-based carbon management application in the Dutch travel industry. We find that technological novelty alone is insufficient to instigate transition. CARMACAL affords multiple new practices with opposite implications for socio-economic and environmental sustainability. The practices triggering most industry support are least effective in addressing tourism's climate impacts and vice versa. Examining eco-innovation through ANT helps us put eco-innovation in a different light. Seemingly contradictory practices may be mutually supportive: their individual strengths and weaknesses may help prevent the failure of eco-innovations. This new possibility opens the way for concerted policies strengthening the contribution of eco-innovations to sustainability transitions.

Following the moving and changing attachments and assemblages of ‘addiction’: Applying the actor network approach to autobiographies

The article applies actor network theory (ANT) to autobiographical data on alcohol dependence to explore what ANT can offer to the analysis of ‘addiction stories’. By defining ‘addiction’ as a relational achievement, as the effect of elements acting together as a configuration of human and non-human actors, the article demonstrates how the moving and changing attachments of addiction can be dynamically analyzed with concepts of ‘assemblage’, ‘mediator’, ‘tendency’, ‘translation’, ‘trajectory’, ‘immutable mobile’, ‘fluid’ and ‘bush fire’. The article shows how the reduction of alcohol dependence simply to genetic factors, neurobiological causes, personality disorders and self-medication constitutes an inadequate explanation. As ‘meta theories’, they illuminate addiction one-sidedly. Instead, as ANT pays attention to multiple heterogeneous mediators, it specifies in what way the causes identified in ‘meta theories’ may together with other actors participate in addiction assemblages. When following the development of addiction assemblages, we focus on situational sequences of action, in which human and non-human elements are linked to each other, and we trace how the relational shape of addiction changes from one sequence to another as a transforming assemblage of heterogeneous attachments that either maintain healthy subjectivities or destabilize them. The more attachments assemblages of addiction are able to make that are flexible and durable from one event to another, the stronger also the addiction-based subjectivities. Similarly, the fewer attachments that assemblages of addiction are able to keep in their various translations, the weaker the addiction-based subjectivities also become. An ANT-inspired analysis has a number of implications for the prevention and treatment of addiction: it suggests that in the prevention and treatment of addiction, the aim should hardly be to get rid of dependencies. Rather, the ambition should be the identification of attachments and relations that enable unhealthy practices and the development of harm as part of specific actor networks.