Human-Nonhuman Assemblages

Birds featured in many aspects of medieval people's lives, not least in their poetry. But despite their familiar presence in literary culture, it is still often assumed that these representations have little to do with the real natural world. By attending to the ways in which birds were actually observed and experienced, this book aims to offer new perspectives on how and why they were meaningful in five major poems -- The Seafarer, the Exeter Book Riddles, The Owl and the Nightingale, The Parliament of Fowls and Confessio Amantis. In a consideration of sources from Isidore of Seville and Anglo-Saxon place-names to animal-sound word lists and Bartholomew the Englishman, the author shows how ornithological truth and knowledge are integral to our understandings of his chosen poems. Birds, he argues, are relevant to the medieval mind because their unique properties align them with important religious and secular themes: seabirds that inspire the forlorn Anglo-Saxon pilgrim; unnamed species that confound riddling taxonomies; a belligerent owl who speaks out against unflattering literary portraits. In these poems, human actions and perceptions are deeply affected by the remarkable flights and voices of birds.

The article tries to trace the formation, transformation, and deconstruction of the image of the author’s studied object. At the same time, it is proposed to consider the movement of the subject in the ethnographic space, that is, a temporal and geographically unified space that includes field research, presentations, conversations with colleagues, writing the text of an article, etc. The concept of imaginaries, which is central to the representation of the object, is considered in comparison with tourism practices, where the image is a central element, which gives a better understanding of the practices of both. It is argued that when deconstructing an image, the researcher’s position on the object and the ethnographic space change. The method of self-ethnography and mobility as a concept metaphor serve as tools for deconstructing the image. The main result of such a deconstruction is the ethical conclusions of the relationship of the subject to the object, as well as the performative effect of auto–ethnography. The author at the same time tries to find a solution to establish a reciprocity in relation to the object, as a kind of mandatory ethical action. One of the possible solutions seems to be the use of anthropological knowledge in the commodification of the object’s culture in its economic interests.

Through an ethnography of the C4 Rice Project's sorghum experiment in the Philippines, this article analyzes particular practices in experimental rice fields and how rice researchers understand their work through specific material practices and engagements with the plants. Returning to the critiques of disembodied science, the author looks at the particular, situated, and subjective labor that researchers do in the fields to argue that these relationships offer different and richer ways to understand scientific knowledge production and practices. Drawing out a distinction between working on plants (the human as producer and plant as passive raw material) and working with plants (a process of humans and plants working together in a situated and particular relationship), the article offers an different approach to Marx's concept of labor by incorporating nonhumans as active and relational actors in the labor process. Labor, then, can be seen as a creative relationship between humans and nonhumans situated in particular times and places.

Although sometimes thought of as peripheral to the ‘centres’ of economic geography in the Anglo-American ‘North’, Australian and New Zealand geographers have already made important contributions to global economic geography. In this commentary of Wray et al’s (2013) piece, I interpret their Antipodean economic geography project as a performative intervention that works to queer economic geography. I extend their project through asking what an Antipodean economic geography might become, and how we might extend its usefulness in this era of anthropogenic climate change.

Ce chapitre cherche à rendre compte de l’émergence, puis du développement, de la catégorie de « non-humain » dans l’anthropologie et la sociologie contemporaines, entendu comme une alternative à la dichotomie nature/culture. Dans une première partie, nous tentons de recenser l’ensemble des travaux qui ont cherché à accorder un mode d’existence social spécifique aux objets en tentant d’échapper au double écueil du naturalisme réductionniste et du constructiviste culturaliste. Dans une deuxième partie, nous nous focalisons plus précisément sur le cas des acteurs « naturels » ou « environnementaux » pour souligner les théories de l’action et de l’acteur qui y sont liées : l’enjeu est alors de dessiner les contours d’une science sociale non-anthropocentrée. Enfin, dans une troisième partie, nous discutons plus spécifiquement la notion de « collectif », adoptée par Bruno Latour, Philippe Descola ou Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, pour désigner les assemblages sociaux d’humains et de non-humains : nous tentons en conclusion d’interroger les enjeux politiques d’une telle notion.

"A suggestive Mix of Divinity and Bestiality". Friedrich Schlegel's Concept of the (Un-)Human. The mix of "divinity" and "bestiality" as the embodiment of mankind conceived as "infinitely opposed" in Friedrich Schlegel's (1772-1829) earlier essays has eventually been represented as a "harmonious composition" (KFSA 1: 230) in his novel Lucinde (1799). The present paper investigates the extent to which Friedrich Schlegel's narrative transposition of "divinity" and "bestiality" proves itself as relevant for the reflection upon anthropological concepts around 1800 as well as its continuities. Keywords: Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde, divinity, bestiality, mix.

The Library of Nonhuman Books centres around a custom-made reading-machine which uses machine-learning to abridge and ‘artificially illuminate’ physical books through a combination of algorithmic interpretation and digital palimpsest. Newly illuminated texts are offered as alternative futures of the book. The project speculates on the book to come, where a post-literate society defers its reading to nonhuman counterparts.

This chapter, “Becoming-instrument: Thinking with Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects”, considers first-person narration and empathic enactment of fictional experience from posthumanist and enactivist perspectives. It introduces a new methodological device called “becoming-instrument”, which opens the reader’s experience to nonhuman influences. Building on Marco Caracciolo’s (2014) claims about empathic engagement with first-person narratives and Merja Polvinen’s (2012) notion of self-aware readerly engagement, the chapter’s author Kaisa Kortekallio argues that engagement with estranging first-person narratives, such as Annihilation and Hyperobjects, can work toward dissolving the certainty of the human subject and develop in its stead a model of subjectivity as “multiple and always-in-progress” (Sherryl Vint 2005).

Annihilation (2014) and Hyperobjects (2013) both invite the reader to enact the affective experientiality of their first-person narrators, but they also foreground the fictionality of those narrators. The chapter argues that affective experientiality and awareness of fictionality can intertwine in the readerly experience, and that the combination of affectivity and self-referentiality is characteristic of the “dark” or “weird” ecology VanderMeer and Morton advance in their texts. Finally, Kortekallio suggests that the dynamic of enactment applies not only to explicitly fictional narrative techniques but also to the rhetorical devices employed in non-fiction texts – such as the rhetorical “I” in Hyperobjects.

The Government of Beans is about the rough edges of environmental regulation, where tenuous state power and blunt governmental instruments encounter ecological destruction and social injustice. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Paraguay was undergoing dramatic economic, political, and environmental change due to a boom in the global demand for soybeans. Although the country's massive new soy monocrop brought wealth, it also brought deforestation, biodiversity loss, rising inequality, and violence. Kregg Hetherington traces well-meaning attempts by bureaucrats and activists to regulate the destructive force of monocrops that resulted in the discovery that the tools of modern government are at best inadequate to deal with the complex harms of modern agriculture and at worst exacerbate them. The book simultaneously tells a local story of people, plants, and government; a regional story of the rise and fall of Latin America's new left; and a story of the Anthropocene writ large, about the long-term, paradoxical consequences of destroying ecosystems in the name of human welfare.

Introduction available online at Duke University Press

This text comprises a critical discussion of assemblage theory and its application to burial studies. In recent research, burials have been viewed as fluid and indeterminate assemblages that 'become' in varied ways depending on different perceptions (concepts and ideas) and apparatuses (e.g. excavation tools and measuring instruments). The past and the present are thus mixed in potentially ever-new configurations which run the risk of replacing epistemological relativism with ontological fluidity. It is argued here that the hypothetical mutability of burial assemblages can be reduced significantly by addressing the varying speed and degree of the involved processes of integration and disintegration. By doing this, the main focus is shifted to the animacy of such processes and how they may have been understood and utilized in burials. Using both general and specific examples, it is argued that cremation burials can be studied as carefully compiled amalgamations that utilize the properties and animacies of different materialities to deal with death, corpses and the afterlife.

This is a proof, you can find the final version here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774320000116
It is Open Access.

On the book: Obsolescence is fundamental to the experience of modernity, not simply one dimension of an economic system. The contributors to this book investigate obsolescence as a historical phenomenon, an aesthetic practice, and an affective mode. Because obsolescence depends upon the supersession and disappearance of what is old and outmoded, this volume sheds light on what usually remains unseen or overlooked. Calling attention to the fact that obsolescence can structure everything from the self to the skyscraper, Cultures of Obsolescence asks readers to rethink existing relationships between the old and the new. Moreover, the essays in this volume argue for the paradoxical ways in which subjects and their concepts of the human, of newness, and of the future are constituted by a relationship to the obsolete.

Two independent technical developments have transformed the metal mining industry in considerable ways: the increasing share of waste materials in the feedstock of metallurgical operations has partially transformed metal extraction into a recycling industry, and the employment of microorganisms in the extraction of metals from mineral ores has rendered metals mining a biologically based industry. Increasing industrial interest and research activity in the application of biotechnologies to the extraction of metals from waste, particularly electronic waste, intimate a potential intersection of those two processes, destabilizing further the analytical distinctions between extraction and manufacturing, biologically based and nonbiologically based production, waste and resources. This combined deterritorialization of metal extraction requires a theoretical deterritorialization: rethinking extraction beyond extractive industry narrowly defined and the role that nonhuman forms of life play in the production of value in nonbiologically based (extractive) industries. This article is a first step toward outlining the effects of such developments on understanding extraction. It begins by reflecting on the effects of recycling on the spatiality and materiality of the mine and then it proceeds to examine the productive role of microorganisms in mining, the limits of biomining, and the biotechnologies that have developed to transcend those limits. The conclusion draws out theoretical implications of those ongoing lines of deterritorialization and their combination on understanding the spatiotemporality of extraction and the active involvement of nonhuman nature in the production of value.


两项独立的技术发展, 大幅改变了金属採矿业: 冶金作业原料中逐渐增加的废弃物质比例, 已将部分的金属萃取转变成回收产业, 从矿种萃取金属的过程中运用微生物, 则使得金属採矿成为以生物学为基础的产业。对于将生物科技应用至从废弃物、特别是电子废弃物中萃取出金属, 有着逐渐增加的产业兴趣及研究活动, 提示了上述两个过程的互动潜力, 并进一步挑战了萃取与製造、根据生物与非生物的生产, 以及废弃物与资源之间的分析区别。此般金属萃取的联合去领域化, 同时需要理论的去领域化: 在狭隘定义的冶金工业之外重新思考冶金, 以及非人类的生命形式在以非生物为基础的 (冶金) 工业的价值生产中所扮演的角色。本文是迈向概论此般发展对于理解冶金之影响的第一步。本文首先反思回收对于矿场的物质性及空间性的影响, 接着检视微生物在採矿中的生产性角色、生物採矿的限制, 以及克服上述限制的生物科技发展。研究结论部分, 从上述持续进行中的去领域化路径与路径的结合中汲取理论意涵, 以理解冶金的时空性和积极参与至价值生产的非人类本质 。


La industria minera de metales ha sido transformada de manera considerable por dos desarrollos técnicos independientes: la proporción en aumento de elementos de desecho en los materiales con los que se alimentan las operaciones metalúrgicas ha transformado parcialmente la extracción de metales en una industria de reciclaje, y el empleo de microorganismos en la extracción de metales de rocas que albergan el mineral ha convertido la minería de metales en una industria apoyada biológicamente. El creciente interés industrial y la actividad investigativa para la aplicación de biotecnologías en la extracción de los metales contenidos en desechos, en particular en la basura electrónica, permiten entrever una interacción potencial de los dos procesos, desestabilizando aun más las distinciones analíticas entre los procesos de extracción y manufactura, la producción de base biológica y la abiótica, residuos y recursos. Esta desterritorialización combinada de extracción de metales demanda una desterritorialización teórica: repensar la extracción más allá de la industria extractiva definida con estrechez y el papel que juegan formas de vida no humana en la producción de valor en industrias (extractivas) que no están biológicamente basadas. El presente artículo es un paso inicial hacia el enunciado de los efectos de tales desarrollos en el entendimiento de la extracción. El artículo empieza con una reflexión sobre los efectos del reciclaje sobre la espacialidad y materialidad de la mina y luego se procede a examinar el papel productivo de los microorganismos en minería, los límites de biominería y las biotecnologías que han sido desarrolladas para trascender aquellos límites. La conclusión extrae implicaciones teóricas de aquella líneas de desterritorialización y su combinación para tratar de entender la espacio-temporalidad de la extracción y la activa participación de la naturaleza no humana en la producción de valor.

From the biblical Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II, who roamed for seven years as an ox, to the shapeshifting witches that abound in Early Modern trial records, accounts of humans behaving like other animals, tales and testimonies of those who could shift form, and stories of people who did not identify as part of mankind, have been present in history. After their death certificate had been issued by an Enlightenment proud of leaving behind all irrational obscurities, people who belonged to a kind other than the human sprung from the blind spots of modernity, and have grown strong and visible for the last four decades.  In fact, with postmodernity the narratives of those who share the rejection of their full humanity and an entangled sympathy with other beings have taken a new critical role: they pose a simply, uncomfortable question: what does it mean to be human?

The author aims at presenting examples of literary descriptions of Odra flooding (especially in the context of the most recent in 1997 and 2010) and the river regions in the perspective of aquacriticism. This approach belongs to a wider concept of ecocriticism which perceives the river as a key part of environment. The question being posed is what kind of influence can be traced in literary texts representing floods and how does literature influence perception of aquatic catastrophes such as floods. Since flood belongs to the catastrophe discourse, it blurs anthropocentric knowledge on rivers and indicates aquacentric modes of recognition. The ecoparadigmatic role of Odra is indicated by Silesian authors (in the collection Wie die Oder rauscht) and writers biographically connected with the river (Tokarczuk). The environmental function of the river can be better acknowledged through literary fiction that “gives voice to the river”.

What can the creation of artificial habitats to replace old-growth forests tell us about the process, value and future of design? This chapter takes a concrete and provocative example and uses it to rethink design as a gradual, ecological action. To illustrate this understanding, the chapter begins with a description of a proposal to provide artificial habitats for wild animals such as birds, bats and invertebrates. The controversial idea to replace rapidly disappearing old-growth trees with artificial structures puts in doubt habitual assumptions about the clients, procedures and goals of design. This example is of relevance to all design because the need to provide artificial habitats to nonhumans will be increasingly common under the influence of such phenomena as global warming or urbanisation. … The invention of artificial structures in place of natural habitats is described in this chapter as an incitement that highlights the need for further research into values, participants and methods of design. This discussion concludes with a proposal for an attitude of modesty in the face of increasingly overwhelming volumes of information as well as in the presence of an even greater ignorance about the futures of nondeterministic, volatile and incompletely controllable natural systems. The dilemma of design in these conditions is in the tension between its remit to act and the uncertainty that inescapably underlies any creative endeavour.

A well-known definition of music states that what we understand with this term may be subsumed under "humanly organized sound:" This was formulated by John Blacking (1973, 3) in his celebrated book "How Musical is Man?" His proposal, however, was not uncontested, and many authors have tried to complement, contradict, or reaffirm this idea of how the phenomenon music could be framed. What is of interest here is the adverb "humanly," because it limits musical action and appreciation to processes that are essentially human, thereby excluding non-human agency. In this chapter, I will explore how far "the human" can be essentialized in relation to music and in which sense agency beyond the human could be, or even has to be, acknowledged within this context.

Canadian video game developer BioWare’s critically acclaimed Mass Effect video game series has been called the most important science fiction universe of a generation. Whether or not one is inclined to agree, it cannot be denied that Mass Effect matters. It matters not only because of its brilliant narrative and the difficult questions it asks, but also because, as bioethicist Kyle Munkittrick writes, it reflects society as a whole. Mass Effect is a sci-fi epic in the truest sense, spanning over years and across hundreds of planets tucked away in the darkest corners of the galaxy, populated with dozens of species with their own histories, beliefs, cultures, and technologies. Academics and dedicated fans have explored the numerous facets of the game, from its philosophy to time and temporality, fandom ethnographies, and ethics. This article proposes to explore the boundaries of alien sex and the desire for alien others as represented in sci-fi role playing games, and their reinterpretation by fans. Science fiction role playing games in particular enable the production of sexual modalities outside of the constraints of heterosexual norms. Alien sex, animal sex, or monstrous sex are common tropes in fantasy and sci-fi media—the vampire, the werewolf, and monstrous non/in-humans are eroticized and construed conduits of a mainly female sexual desire. However, the example I would like to approach is slightly more radical, both in terms of execution and in terms of media audience response: examples of “alien sex” as illustrated in the Mass Effect video game series, whose canonical representation of alien-human romances invite some interesting questions about either the potential exacerbation, or the rendering-unintelligible of sexual difference, as well as about cross-species desire and about the ontology of the natural and the artificial.

This dissertation explores the dolphin release project of South Korea to discuss how the nonhuman agency of dolphins as implicated in biolpolitics, related bodily practices and the meaning of space. Jedol, along with two further Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins, captured illegally and performing dolphin shows, were returned to their home-range, the Jeju Islands, through an extensive rehabilitation programme in 2013. This dissertation stands at juncture of scholarly approaches to human-animal relations, employing theories of Foucauldian biopolitics, relational assemblages and performance studies. Based on ethnographic research employing participant observation of scientific dolphin population surveys, dolphin watching tourism and dolphin shows, and interviews with key players involved in the dolphin release project, it examines agency of the dolphins that crossed over the contradictory spaces of dolphinaria and open sea. Critically observing changing embodied performances of dolphins, dolphin trainers, scientists in both the captive and the wild, it explores how humans materially affect dolphins and conversely how dolphins respond to human biopolitics and sometimes overturn it. This dissertation then presents the 'assemblage of captivity' and the 'assemblage of the wild' that exercise in an emergent way whilst human-dolphin relations are continuously (re)negotiated.

As urban development in Asia has accelerated, cities in the region have become central to skateboarding culture, livelihoods, and consumption. Asia's urban landscapes are desired for their endless supply of 'spots'. Spots are not built for skateboarding; they are accidents of urban planning and commercial activity; glitches in the urban machine. Skateboarders and filmers chase these spots to make skate video, skateboarding's primary cultural artefact. Once captured, skate video circulates rapidly through digital platforms to millions of viewers, enrolling spots from Shenzhen to Ramallah into an alternative cartography of Asia. This book explores this way of desiring and consuming urban Asia, and the implications for relational and comparative hierarchies of urban development.

From ubiquitous surveillance to drone strikes that put “warheads onto foreheads,” we live in a world of globalized, individualized targeting. The perils are great. In The Eye of War, Antoine Bousquet provides both a sweeping historical overview of military perception technologies and a disquieting lens on a world that is, increasingly, one in which anything or anyone that can be perceived can be destroyed—in which to see is to destroy.

Arguing that modern-day global targeting is dissolving the conventionally bounded spaces of armed conflict, Bousquet shows that over several centuries, a logistical order of militarized perception has come into ascendancy, bringing perception and annihilation into ever-closer alignment. The efforts deployed to evade this deadly visibility have correspondingly intensified, yielding practices of radical concealment that presage a wholesale disappearance of the customary space of the battlefield. Beginning with the Renaissance’s fateful discovery of linear perspective, The Eye of War discloses the entanglement of the sciences and techniques of perception, representation, and localization in the modern era amid the perpetual quest for military superiority. In a survey that ranges from the telescope, aerial photograph, and gridded map to radar, digital imaging, and the geographic information system, Bousquet shows how successive technological systems have profoundly shaped the history of warfare and the experience of soldiering.

A work of grand historical sweep and remarkable analytical power, The Eye of War explores the implications of militarized perception for the character of war in the twenty-first century and the place of human subjects within its increasingly technical armature.

Collating Tadeusz Różewicz’s poetry with Jacques Derrida’s critique of logocentrism and John D. Caputo’s so­‍‑called poetics of obligation, this article ponders upon the ethical relation to non­‍‑human animals – particularly livestock – in the aforementioned literary project. Although Różewicz’s volumes published early after the end of the war seem to drift towards negative anthropology, they tend to benefit from more modern interpretative codes, for instance Giorgio Agamben’s anthropological machine or Caputo’s poetics of obligation. With regard to the means of the latter one, it is argued that Różewicz’s poetry endeavours to rethink animal as the absolute Other, contributing to the ethical relation which has been previously restricted entirely to Human­‍‑Other. Such poems as "Walentynki", "Świniobicie", "Ucieczka świnek dwóch (z  obozu zagłady – rzeźni)", "Buty i wiersze" or "Unde malum?" confirm Różewicz’s sensitivity to animal suffering. Moreover, they often anticipate the ethical and philosophical debates upon the human/animal dyad, and their practical political and economic implications.

This paper analyses the way Richard Powers portrays plant life in his 2018 novel The Overstory. Unlike in traditional literary depictions of botany, trees are presented as actors and not passive objects. By undermining the mind/ matter, human/nonhuman distinctions Powers reduces the gap separating his human protagonists and trees. The latter have agency, intentionality and the ability to communicate. Powers also attempts to find a new way to give his vegetal life voice. Instead of anthropomorphizing them, plants talk in their own material way. This paper draws from posthumanist writings by, among others, Donna Haraway Anna Tsing, Lowenhaupt, Mark Jackson, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and also from Michael Marder’s and Serpil Opperman’s ideas on plant language and storytelling.

Stare into the Caffenol to Reveal your Future is a blueprint for an ecological future for photography, inspired by London Alt Photo Collective's sustainable darkroom residencies. Featuring interviews from analogue photographers, the paper proposes an alternative vision for photography to be tried and tested worldwide.

This study stages an analysis of religious politics in Dar es Salaam and Tanzania from below. At its heart is an original account of Muslim political mobilisation in Tanzania that foregrounds the everyday lives of urban actors in Kariakoo, a super-dense market district at the centre of Dar es Salaam.

Under British colonial rule, Kariakoo was Dar es Salaam‟s principal African residential neighbourhood; the beating heart of the city's lively cultural scene and the cradle of Tanganyika‟s African nationalist movement. Today, Kariakoo has grown into one of the most important commercial districts in the East African region. In 2012 and 2013, it was also the site of episodes of Muslim mobilisation which led to clashes with state police and armed forces.

Drawing on rich data derived from fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the neighbourhood, I ask what the everyday life of Kariakoo reveals about religious politics in Tanzania. More specifically, I use it to investigate the intersections between Muslim mobilisation, informal livelihood practices developed by urban users in response to escalating conditions of economic precarity, and popular discontent concerning entrenched inequalities and uneven development along religious lines.

By drawing together several innovative research trajectories in the fields of religious and urban studies, I am able to hold together the notions of the religious and the urban in a manner that spotlights just how integral religion is to Kariakoo as an urban ecology. The subsequent discussion reveals the remarkable dynamism of Muslim social practices and modes of affiliation when considered as numbering among the everyday livelihood practices that are employed by urban users in Kariakoo.

This study brings a more nuanced explanatory frame to bear on the contemporary realities of Muslim activism and religious politics in Tanzania and beyond than those that prevail in much academic and media commentary.

The authors of this edition propose a novel and inspiring research approach to the subject of plants, which – being a form of life that is different, yet akin to us – is a constant source of nourishment and metaphors, decoration and obsessions. The articles included in this thematic block on plants enter into lively ongoing debates on genetics, feminism, ecology and plant ontology. They are excellent examples of the fact that in Polish philosophical and cultural reflection there was an understanding very early on of the challenges that posthumanism poses to our anthropocentric intellectual habits. Foreign readers will recognize in these Polish reflections a bold willingness to ask ethical and aesthetic questions of great relevance to the modern world that go far beyond the safe, though most likely imagined, limits of what it is to be human.

Framed in a critique of digital and new media studies, this dissertation returns to the roots of the study of communication and interaction in rhetoric, linguistics, semiotics, information theory, and cybernetics to develop a philosophy and theory of communication anchored in a pre-symbolic concept of gesture. This reevaluation of communication processes allows for the articulation of communication as dynamic interaction in spacetime, which allows attention to communicative agency and the relations among communicators, communications technologies, and the environments and ecologies in which they are necessarily situated. This, in turn, while drawing from assemblage theory, affect theory, embodied and distributed cognition, interactional sociology, and relational psychology, provides a novel conceptualization of agency in human and non-human forms, as well as the relations among them. The foregoing is anchored in a relational ontology that critiques many of the contemporary, taken-for-granted assumptions about character of ‘information’.

"This article argues for a specifically Darwinian etiology of the image of the monstrous plant, so ubiquitous in the modern genres of speculative fiction. In the profusion of such narratives in the late 19th century, we can identify a collective anxiety about the implications of universal common descent: acknowledging a shared evolutionary heritage for plants and animals threatens the boundary between the two kingdoms that had always permitted the purely instrumentalist and exploitative relationship between humans and plants. Evolutionary anxiety projected onto the figure of the man-eating plant only multiplied in the early pulp magazines, and continued on through John Wyndham's triffids and beyond. Considering the many monstrous plants of early speculative fiction in this way can help expand the purview of the critical formation known as animal studies: while this paper does not advocate for the development of a "plant studies," it invites further thinking about the implications of taking the word "species" in animal studies a little more literally, as the word so often seems to mean “mammal species" or "animal species."

The book presents a socio-material analysis of the British milk industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It traces the dramatic development of the milk trade from a cottage industry into a modernised and integrated system of production and distribution, examining the social, economic and political factors underpinning this transformation, and also tracing the important roles played by various nonhumans, such as microbes, refrigeration technologies, diseases of cattle, and even cows themselves. The book also examines the emergence of milk inspection, showing how the commodification of milk and the growth of the large dairy corporations was made possible by the earlier work of local health officials, milk inspectors, veterinarians and medical officers of health. The analysis draws upon actor network theory in order to present a sustained critique of modern knowledge-practices, and particularly of the humanist discourse which assumes that human beings inhabit a unique domain incommensurable with the nonhuman world. This is systematically challenged by tracing how the separation of humans and nonhumans is continually accomplished and reproduced in everyday life, so that the book represents a critique of modernity worked through milk itself.

In short, this essay does for the concept of the assemblage what Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben did for Foucault in their essays on the dispositif: it extracts from a large body of work the core formal features of its operative methodology or logic.

There remains in popular culture a persistent appetite for adaptation, something particularly evident in the various retellings of fairy tales in literature and film. While the market is, it seems, saturated with these retellings, a change in the perspective of the original tale is evident in the most successful stories. These innovative retellings re-position the antagonist from marginalised other to the main focus of the narrative. It is a vital component of this new form of fairy tale in which the appeal is not aspiring to beautiful, demure perfection as in the Disney adaptations, but the identification of the audience with the ostracised individual who is not accepted by society. At the centre of these narratives lies the questions of what it is to be human, or what it is to be a person and how the two are not always necessarily one and the same thing. Drawing on the existing framework in fantasy, myth and fairy tale, author Gregory Maguire expands on such common tropes as talking animals to highlight the blurring of these boundaries between the human and the non-human to draw our attention to the insubstantiality of these categories. While this aspect of both Maguire’s Wicked series of novels and the Broadway musical inspired by them has been well discussed, his other works based on more traditionally canonical fairy tales have hitherto been largely overlooked in critical discourse. This paper proposes to begin to redress this imbalance by examining the non/human in Mirror Mirror, Maguire’s re-envisioning of Snow White. It will pay particular attention to the intertextual practices used by Maguire in the reforming of the familiar, both in terms of the narrative and the construction of the human within it.

This thesis uses the philosophy of deep ecology as a theoretical framework to explore ecospiritual themes as a key feature of increasing discourse around the ayahuasca phenomenon. The broad objective of the research is to use contemporary ayahuasca discourse to reveal the way cross-cultural seekers engage with and discuss shamanic practices that inform a postmodern ecosophical ontology and deep ecological praxis. Three convergent discourses inform this research; the transcultural ayahuasca phenomenon, nature-based spiritualities of the New Age and the philosophy of deep ecology. Threading through these discourses are ecological and spiritual themes that capture a web of meanings for contextualising the transcultural emergence of ayahuasca spirituality. A key paradigmatic shift suggested by contemporary ayahuasca discourse is a shift in human consciousness toward a non-dualistic ontology regarding humanity’s place in nature. An ecocultural studies approach provides theoretical support for interpreting how the elements of this paradigmatic shift are discussed, understood and practised. As the internet functions as a superlative site for discursive formations of ayahuasca, a thematic content analysis of selected discussion forums within the Ayahuasca.com website was conducted using a multiparadigmatic, deductive and inductive approach. Naess and Sessions’ (1984) eight platform principles of deep ecology were used as a framework to deductively locate textual articulations of the philosophy. Further inductive analysis revealed not only embedded deep ecological themes but also articulations of an ecocentric praxis arising from experiences of unitary consciousness and plant sentience. The deep ecology articulated in contemporary ayahuasca discourse further raised an explicit challenge to hegemonic anthropocentricism through expressions of an expanded sense of self that accentuates the countercultural bearings of entheogenic informed ecospirituality.

I argue that contradictions between contemporary urban Hindutva and more rural and subaltern Bengali Hindu and Muslim religious practices highlight not just deep-seated ideas about caste and community but also reveal a particularly distinct relation to the nonhuman.

This PhD dissertation explores how private security companies co-constitute political order in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as a case through which broader questions regarding the relationship between security governance and political order can be investigated. The thesis explores the spatial distribution of private security companies in Congo, and investigates their predominant entanglement with internationalized governance processes.
Furthermore, it explores how this contemporary instance of the relationship between security governance and political order resonates with and reproduces longer-standing patterns of internationalized political ordering in Congo.
This thesis raises questions around how it may be possible to theorize the relationship between security governance and political order to capture the historical ways in which that relationship has been articulated in Congolese history. Specifically, it asks whether broadening our conception of political order to encompass both security governance and the infrastructural arrangements underpinning modern political order might bring into view durable patterns of political ordering that otherwise remain hidden—patterns of extraversion, where key domestic ordering processes in Congo are reproduced as the properties of international power relations.

This dissertation examines the social relationships of material objects (including, but not limited to, humans and things) and idea objects (including, but not limited to, broad cultural and social forces) that constitute the world.  In particular, this dissertation focuses on the relationship among humans and nonhumans, and the material and the non-material in the creation of digital art and design.
This project is therefore indebted to various recent movements in the social sciences and the humanities that have begun to take more seriously the ways in which "things" impact human life.  The "ontological Turn" in philosophy, the "material turn" in anthropological and sociological sciences, the "posthuman" moment in the humanities, and the "Cognitive Archaeology" movement in cognitive science, among others, all share a common thread of critiquing the anthropocentrism of the humanities and social theory. 
I will forward, then, three major arguments:
1.) That it is often the case, particularly in the social sciences, that scholars look not at non-human objects, but instead at the ways those objects are perceived and labeled by humans/society.  Scholars of materiality, then, often miss the mark, and study the conceptualizations of objects at the expense of the objects in of themselves.
2.) That it is theoretically and empirically possible to examine objects in of themselves, and that it is important to do so, as both material and non-material objects contain causal powers that impact history and society independent of the human recognition or conceptualization of these powers.
3.) That objects are also subjects, and engage in intersubjective meaning-making both with humans and other objects.  Objects, then, should not be theorized as having various mechanical impacts upon human communities that they interact with, but should instead be theorized as members of the community in of themselves.  Non-human entities, in other words, are themselves social beings.

More so than in any other sphere of social existence, the brute physicality of war confronts us with the pervasive role that material objects occupy in the life (and death) of human collectives. But while the rapid and dramatic changes in the practices of warfare experienced in the modern era can be directly correlated to the evolutions of technique, we should be wary of simplified linear accounts that all too hastily read developments on the battlefield as incipient to the character of specific technical objects. It is only when these are related back to the wider sociotechnical assemblages in which they are embedded that we can begin to draw out the complex interdependencies and co-constitutive interactions that make up the war machine. Such an intellectual endeavour can contribute to developing more sober and nuanced appreciations of the transformative potential of technological developments than those which have animated RMA enthusiasts and at times intoxicated policy-makers.

Publicado na revista Lugar Comum, nº 52:
http://uninomade.net/lugarcomum/52/

Imaginando  com  o  cinema  de  ficção  científica  um  cenário  de  expansão  da  precarização da  vida  humana  e  o  esgotamento  das  expectativas  de  transformação  desta  condição,  a bricolagem  se  apresenta  em  diversas  discussões  recentes  enquanto  uma  prática  de criação  de  novas  possibilidades  a  partir  de  situações  limites.  Este  ensaio  busca  traçar uma  imagem  do  pensamento  bricoleur,  mostrando  o  seu  modo  criativo  de  racionalidade e  interação  com  o  mundo.  Faço  aqui  uma  genealogia  do  conceito  de  bricolagem  a  partir da  arte,  passando  por  uma  leitura  de  textos  do  Lévi-Strauss  e  confrontando  esta  leitura com  textos  de  Eduardo  Viveiros  de  Castro  e  Isabelle  Stengers.  O  que  busco  propor  aqui é  um  conceito de  bricolagem  enquanto  prática  de  pensamento relacional com um  mundo em constante variação  e  um universo de  afecção  mútua  entre  seus componentes.

W tekście podjęto próbę  takiego myślenia o edukacji, które stara się przekroczyć dystynkcję kultura- natura. Rozwinięto tezę, że edukacja nie jest wyłącznie sprawą ludzi, a pedagogika stoi wobec wyzwania teoretycznej perspektywy, programów badań i polityki edukacyjnej ujmującej jej nie-ludzkich aktorów.

W: Ryzyko jako warunek rozwoju. Transformatywne aspekty hermeneutyki edukacji, (red.) Klaudia Węc, Andrzej Wierciński Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, Toruń 2016;

Several regions in Britain saw the construction of large, linear earthworks of banks and ditches during the later Bronze Age and in the Iron Age, often extending for many tens of kilometres. In the light of recent theoretical discussions of materiality and relational agency within archaeology and other social sciences, and through an avowedly discursive poetics of place, examples of these earthworks are re-assessed as actants, material constructions capable of affecting and directing the lives of people, animals, and plants. These linear earthworks were not static monuments, but rather were active assemblages or meshworks of materiality, movement, and memory. They later influenced the deposition of several Romano-British coin hoards.

The thesis argues that much of the discussion about animism and totemism (ethnographic entry points of extrahuman agencies in anthropology), rather than including and discussing such an issue, has eventually deactivated it.
Other strands, however, has been offering analytical tools and ideas capable of conferring on them both conceptual citizenships and proper modes of existence.
The common question addressed to the works and their authors (who also play here the role of actors) seeks to grasp what they would have to say about the notion of extrahuman agency – which is the guiding thread of this study.