Non-human Forces Research Articles

An Eco-Decolonial Narrative: Toward a Dividual Self and Slow Wit(h)nessing in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea

This article focuses on the Kenyan novelist Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea (2019) and examines how dividuality as an eco-decolonial move is manifested in the novel. Dividuality, as I argue, derives from an ecodecolonial approach and challenges the human-nature dualism, and at the same time extends the Western-oriented, enlightened image of a firmly insular person into a less bounded and porous presence comprised of both human and nonhuman forces. From this vantage point, this article claims that the notion of the dividual in Owuor’s text helps us imagine the act of witnessing beyond European and Western thought with regard to being in the world, history, memory, and environment at large. Witnessing, as perceived in this article, is recognised as a mode of being in the world from an everyday perspective, be it individual, political, social, or environmental. In this way, The Dragonfly Sea, gestures toward what I call “slow wit(h)nessing” in this study as an open-ended and permeable act which is significantly constituted by slow and entangled interactions and exchanges among humans, animals, plants, seascapes, landscapes, matter, and spirits through transoceanic experiences in Kenya, China, and Turkey. This article draws from and builds on the theories of dividual personhood from McKim Marriott’s seminal work on Indian cultural material analysis to Marylin Strathern’s innovative Melanesian ethnography as well as Bracha Ettinger’s inspiring study on the collapse of boundaries between the “I” and the Other.

Putting tendencies and trajectories to work: useful tools for engaging with accounts of change and recovery?

Dominant understandings of recovery emphasise personal responsibility for initiating and sustaining changes in people's subjectivities and relationships to alcohol and other drugs. However, this potentially obscures the complexities and temporalities of change processes and the range of socio-material elements involved. Addressing this gap, critical drug studies scholars have productively employed the concepts of tendencies and trajectories to analyse how past events of drug consumption flow into current and future consumption events. Critiquing notions of personal responsibility within recovery processes, we apply the concepts of tendencies and trajectories to help explain recovery's emergence and continuities. Doing so helps decentre the individual as the agent responsible for improved capacity by broadening the perspective of developing health and wellbeing. In this paper, we provide a qualitative analysis of interviews with fourteen people with lived recovery experiences within an urban-rural setting in Melbourne, Australia. This analysis illustrates how recovery tendencies and trajectories are cultivated through repeated actions, habits, and practices over time. Applying the concept of trajectories to change narratives reveals how accumulated moments precede and follow turning points, supporting shifts in consumption patterns. These moments are not necessarily connected but, when considered collectively, contribute to a recovery trajectory and assemblage of health. In reflecting on the affordances of thinking, researching and doing with recovery tendencies and trajectories, we argue that analysing tendencies and trajectories illuminate opportunities where change lies within an endless combination of human and non-human forces. Applying these concepts to recovery research, practice, and policy engages with temporal and socio-material elements of recovery, offering a more emancipatory approach than is currently provided by common recovery theories and approaches that assume individuals are personally responsible for change.

Possession of Money

The relationship between humans and nature is inevitable, it is a direct cause-and-effect relationship. Natural human relationships are characterized by human-to-human communication. People are products of each other in communication, so human communication is free. Inevitability in natural relations becomes freedom in human communication. Freedom in human communication is creativity. Creativity makes people differentiate into subjects and products. Internal products correspond to standards, external products correspond to money. Human communication becomes the standard exchange, money is social. Social life is about buying and selling labor goods. Labor trading makes free communication mandatory, forced by standards and money. Having standards, not knowing how much money is enough, always feeling like it's lacking, and not knowing how to stop, that's the instinct and habits of playing the piano. When money is the exclusive object of human possession, buyers and sellers appear. The seller needs money, and the buyer has money. The money instinct appears, making life coerced by money. Freedom to care for and help each other becomes a service, serving money. Serving money becomes serving those who have money; without money, you cannot be served. Human discrimination appears. Eliminating discrimination is not the eradication of humans, it is the eradication of non-human forces.

Exploring Ecological Relationality Through Architectural Practice

This practice-led research article explores how post-humanist and eco-feminist perspectives of entanglement and relationality challenge human exceptionalism as a basis for making architecture in the process of the Alusta research pavilion. Multisensory spatial experience, material circulation and more-than-human temporalities are explored through building a temporary pavilion for multispecies encounters in an urban museum setting. Reflecting on the project, an architectural space is understood as a continuous process of becoming enacted by various human and nonhuman forces instead of as a stable object with a sole human author. Architecture is reimagined as part of the web of care sustaining all life.

Surrendering the Self

In his novel Annihilation, author Jeff Vandermeer provides a science-fiction narrative on nature as an unstoppable and uncontrollable environment where plants, animals, humans, and the land exist as a collective and connected entity of interactions. The novel utilizes Lovecraftian horror elements of an uncontrollable nature, human contamination, and an unknowable future controlled by nonhuman forces to portray both a multispecies environment and the posthuman future. Read through a multispecies lens and framed by Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, this essay is an analysis of how Annihilation’s setting—Area X—necessitates the removal of human-centered processes and the human concept of individualism for favor of a flourishing multispecies environment. Its analysis exemplifies the genre of science fiction as a method to expand the boundaries of our perceived human-centered world. The narrative and rhetorical structures utilized by Vandermeer in his representation of real-world environments and natural processes as uncanny horrors and an off-center reality accurately represent the unknown future beyond the human species.

The Screaming Thing: A Material Ecocritical Exploration of Trauma in Aleksandrs Pelēcis’s Poems

This article investigates the intersection of trauma studies and new materialism, offering a fresh perspective on human trauma through the prism of nonhuman forces. Drawing inspiration from material ecocriticism, a paradigm that evolved from materialist and posthumanist ideas and has not yet been brought into contact with trauma studies, the article underscores the significance of considering the embodiment of experience, thus arriving at an extended notion of trauma. This new theoretical framework is tested by examining the testimonial poetry of Latvian writer Aleksandrs Pelēcis, who was deported to Siberia by Soviet authorities in 1946. His poems employ inanimate objects and animals to create metonymical and metaphorical connections between human and nonhuman actors within the context of long exile. By illuminating a shared experiential space, Pelēcis manages to project and diffract traumatic feelings and memories, thus making them more comprehensible to his readers. This, in turn, places trauma studies on a trajectory away from the traditional conceptualisation of the inexpressible and the awkward.

Thinking Planetary About Global Futures: Posthuman Cosmopolitanism

Abstract The link between the global condition and planetary thinking is a crucial one when thinking about the future. Positing itself in the context of future-oriented history and posthumanist and planetary thinking, the essay reflects on a central concept of global thought such as cosmopolitanism, theorizing the possibility of a posthuman cosmopolitanism. Built on concepts such as multiple modernities and secularities, philosophical posthumanism, and non-anthropocentric history, posthuman cosmopolitanism is primarily future-focused, globally rooted, and planetary oriented. Specifically, by proposing as a case study of a sort a posthumanist approach to a rethinking of cosmopolitanism, the essay emphasizes how thinking planetary and in a posthumanist and post-anthropocentric way does not entail, as it may be assumed, a relativization and loss of relevance of “the human” per se, but a more complex web of intra-active relations. By building on the work of authors such as Braidotti, Domanska, Chakrabarty, Simon, and Latour, the essay proposes an original reflection, engaging with a crucial issue such as how to think about a global future that focuses on globality as the product of interconnected, multiple processes and constantly shifting interrelations between human and non-human forces.

Special issue introduction

This special issue examines Asian experiences of war and mass death in the previous century, with case studies from China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam (North and South, among its diaspora and across multiple generations). In this introduction we highlight several of the wider analytical interventions offered by the articles: (1) the spatiopolitical dynamics of war dead accounting in which forms of vernacular forensic expertise interact with and inform internationally honed, empirically grounded practices of exhumation and identification; (2) the complex hierarchy of authority over remains that structures programmes of war dead accounting; (3) the variegated (as opposed to monolithic) nature of war dead themselves; and (4) the material ecosystems of remains, graves, cemeteries and the non-human forces of decay acting upon them. Finally, the introduction highlights the issue’s comparative potential: that is, what these different cultural, religious and ideological modes of meaning-making reveal about why and how human remains matter in the aftermath of war – and not just according to Western notions of national memory politics in which the soldier stands in for the state and collective mourning animates the national imaginary.

Crowd Control and Mobilization with Nature in the China–Hong Kong Context

Abstract This essay examines how crowd empowerment and its control inscribe the agency of nonhuman nature in the social movement and the governmental strategy within the context of China–Hong Kong connections. Concerning the 2019 Hong Kong protest movement, it examines how the agency is dispersed among the interactions of human crowds and nonhuman forces in particular environments. Humans look to nature as a source of inspiration for their conduct, even if nature is never one thing. As the notions of nature are mediated by culturally specific prejudices, people only talk about their society's ideas about nature when they talk about “nature” and any appeals to nature are highly ideological. In the first part, the essay discusses the excessive use of tear gas to weaponize the atmosphere functions as a medium and message that articulates a communicative politics connecting the protesters and the larger community for interaffective attunement. The atmospheric change unravels an attunement to possibilities opening to some people who throw themselves to be affected and push a situation into an event. In the second part, the essay analyzes how the collective climbing of Lion Rock, a mountain symbolizing the ethos and values of the Hong Kong community, during the protest movement transcends the physical limitation of the protesters’ perception to an expanded view and a higher status beyond human to confront a changing and incommensurable world below.

Where have all the sediments gone? Reservoir silting and sedimentary justice in the lower Ebro River

At the intersection of natural and social sciences, interest in river sedimentary fluxes and their alteration by human activities is increasing in the context of general retreat of delta formations. Since the 1950s, the construction of large dams in the main course of rivers has produced, among other impacts, a radical decrease in sedimentary fluxes — a key factor in the worldwide sedimentary crisis. While sediment accumulates in reservoirs, the resulting sediment scarcity downstream contributes to land subsidence and coastal erosion, endangering livelihoods in low lying areas such as river deltas. Focusing on the case of the Ebro River and delta (Spain), this article builds on Katherine Dawson's notion of sedimentary justice to examine the articulation of a social demand to mobilise the sediments trapped in reservoirs to counter delta subsidence and coastal erosion. Using a historical perspective and paying attention to matters of both sediment quantity and quality, we show how this demand has developed hand in hand with the emergence of a scientific interpretation of the Ebro delta's origins that emphasises non-human forces and the importance of sedimentary fluxes before human interferences. Activists have taken up this argument to demand the restoration of sedimentary fluxes, exposing corporate hydropower interests and insisting on the mobilisation of sediment trapped in reservoirs. Overall, by scrutinizing the power relations embedded in the immobilization of river sediments, this article contributes to recent work that integrates the materiality of sediment to the hydrosocial framework of analysis and argues that sedimentary justice provides new avenues to incorporate the non-human world to the literature on environmental and water justice.

Encountering the Anthropocene: Reconfiguring human-nature relations on the North Norfolk Coast, UK

The Anthropocene, proposed as a new era in human-nonhuman relations, is potentially both profound and far-reaching. However, it has also been critiqued as a universalising concept detached from the realities of people’s day-to-day lives. The aim of this paper is to address this shortcoming by examining the situations of coastal communities on the ‘frontline’ of global environmental change in North Norfolk in the UK. In this region, sea defences that have protected towns and villages for decades are deteriorating and, consequently, the effects of coastal erosion on human settlements are becoming increasingly evident. Through the conceptual framework of ‘encountering’, I explore how human-nature relations are being reconfigured as a result and with what consequences for the actors involved. The findings show that coastal communities are becoming more and more aware of nonhuman forces as the unruly sea impinges upon daily life in various, multisensory ways. These effects not only cause people to ‘give way’ to the encroaching waters through relocation of homes and businesses but also attempt to ‘buy time’ with an active nature by extending the life of existing defences. The revitalisation of nature in coastal regions is also intersecting with long-held experiences of marginalisation and disempowerment to produce new, ‘bottom-up’ naturalcultural discourses concerning social justice. Overall, I demonstrate how an approach that emphasises encountering in the global era of the Anthropocene helps reveal rather than conceal the personal traumas and injustices experienced by different groups as well as the emergent conditions for more politically active, hopeful futures.

Reconceptualizing Women's Wellbeing During the Pandemic: Sport, Fitness and More-Than-Human Connection.

This paper explores the gendered, disruptive effects and affective intensities of COVID-19 and the ways that women working in the sport and fitness sector were prompted to establish more-than-human connection through technologies, the environment, and objects. Bringing together theoretical and embodied insights from object interviews with 17 women sport and fitness professionals (i.e., athletes, coaches, instructors) in Aotearoa New Zealand, this paper advances a relational understanding of the multiple human and nonhuman forces that shape and transform women's wellbeing during pandemic. Drawing upon particular feminist materialisms (i.e., Barad, Braidotti, Bennett), we reconceptualize wellbeing to move beyond biomedical formulations of health or illness. Through our analysis and discussion, we trace embodied ways of knowing that produce wellbeing as a more-than-human entanglement, a gendered phenomenon that can be understood as an ongoing negotiation of affective, material, cultural, technological and environmental forces during a period of disruption and uncertainty.

Invitation

Invitation

Review: Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization, by Rosalind Galt

Review: <i>Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization</i>, by Rosalind Galt

Bec(h)oming with Simon Whitehead: Practising a Logic of Sensation

Abstract In this text and image essay, I introduce a new concept to the environmental humanities; one which seeks to trouble metaphysical notions of dwelling by combining the idea of home (the oikos in ecology) with a notion of permanent becoming. In this way, home loses its conservative and reactionary connotations with atavistic origins and identities and instead is opened up to nonhuman forces and powers. As I explain in the opening section, bec(h)oming is a matter of affect; it depends upon the capacity of bodies to move beyond themselves, to be impressed and transformed by the environments which they move through, to tap what the philosopher Gilbert Simondon might see as the “pre-individual” energy that runs through all organisms. Humans are no exception; they, too, are caught in the flux and flow. By focusing on bodies, the essay not only looks to depart from conventional narrative-based notions of ecocriticism and theatre ecology, it aims to provide a lexicon, a new idiom for thinking through corporeal ecologies that are attuned to sensations, the virtual play of a cosmic Earth. To do that, the text provides the first detailed account of the work and practices of influential UK movement artist Simon Whitehead, whose Locator workshop has proved pivotal for so many dancers, choreographers, and artists over the past few decades. Integral to the paper is a desire to experiment with alternative modes of writing, a style that would express the enthusiasms of bec(h)omings and give some sense of its somatic potential.

Everyday Ethics at the Border: Normative Ethics for the 21st Century

This study uses examples from a case of everyday technical and professional communication (TPC) at a small multinational company on the Mexico–U.S. border to illustrate how coordinating analytical frameworks commonly used in TPC analyses—activity theory (AT) and actor-network theory (ANT)—can help TPC scholars and practitioners negotiate interpreting others’ asynchronous communication fairly and justly, even in complex, intercultural contexts. The examples illustrate why developing normative ethics for the 21st century requires attention to the ways that goal-oriented activity and the flat, networked interaction of the human, nonhuman, and black-boxed forces intersect in everyday TPC practitioners’ lives and work.

Covid-19 and Race: News Coverage of Structural Racism and The Role of John Henryism and Racial Weathering in Bame Covid-19 Deaths

In this article, I use media analysis and materialist theory to examine two overlooked factors that have emerged out of the startling statistics around race and Covid-19. These are 1. John Henryism and 2. racial weathering. I argue that missing from media coverage are the manifold confounding and unexplored ways in which race and racism are enacted by Covid wherein the disease itself is understood as existing within a network of interacting human and non-human forces and structures. My argument is that the tendency for the media to confine itself to focusing on how social determinants impact the health of racialised groups, while important, has meant that other, more granular enactments of race and injustice have been ignored.

Ethics and research with young children‐new perspectivesEdited byChristopher M.Schulte

Ethics and research with young children‐new perspectivesEdited byChristopher M.Schulte

Responsibility before the World: Cinema, Perspectivism and a Nonhuman Ethics of Individuation

The recent ‘nonhuman turn’ in the theoretical humanities and social sciences has highlighted the need to develop more ontological modes of theorising the ethical ‘responsibility’ of the human in its relational encounters with nonhuman bodies and materialities. However, there is a lingering sense in this literature that such an ethics remains centred on a transcendent subject that would pre-exist the encounters on which it is called to respond. In this essay, I explore how Gilles Deleuze's philosophy offers potential opening for a more ontogenetic thinking of a ‘nonhuman ethics’. Specifically, I focus on how his theory of ‘individuation’ – conceived as a creative event of emergence in response to immanent ontological problems – informs his rethinking of ethics beyond the subject, opening thought to nonhuman forces and relations. I argue that if cinema becomes a focus of Deleuze's ethical discussions in his later work it is because the images and signs it produces are expressive of these nonhuman forces and processes of individuation, generating modes of perception and duration without ontological mooring in the human subject. Through a discussion of Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's experimental film – Leviathan (2012) – I explore how the cinematic encounter dramatises different ethical worlds in which a multiplicity of nonhuman ‘points of view’ coexist without being reduced to a hierarchical or orienting centre that would unify and identify them. To conclude, I suggest that it is through the lens of an ethics of individuation that we can grasp the different sense of ‘responsibility’ alive in Deleuze's philosophy, one oriented not to the terms of the already-existing but rather to the nonhuman potential of what might yet come into being.

Democracy and Planetary Fragility in the Anthropocene: on William Connolly’s Political Ontology

As climate change rapidly intensifies, political theory urgently needs to respond to the shock of the Anthropocene and bring nature back to politics. William Connolly’s work is a paradigmatic example of such a theory that actively emphasizes the role nonhuman forces play in the social and political world and the discontinuity this emphasis brings to political theory. Connolly underscores fragile resonances between nature and culture and productively problematizes a human-centric vision of politics. However, while interrogating how contemporary political conjuncture catastrophically increases planetary fragility, he still insists on the continuity of his vision for democratic pluralism that this very conjuncture fundamentally puts in question. Thus, Connolly’s type of post-anthropocentric ontology remains rather inconsistently connected to explicitly political concerns. This article aims to clarify this connection. On the one hand, it shows how his brand of democratic politics that answers to the challenges of the Anthropocene presupposes a heightened degree of political negativism and universalism that used to be excluded from this politics. On the other, it demonstrates how the discontinuities in ontology must be simultaneously thought of as the discontinuities in established political theorizing and to continuously interrogate the very conjuncture that reveals the relevance of these ontological and political discontinuities.