what is the ontology of planets?Our access point to this question is the ontology of planet Earth. Although the presence of life marks planet Earth as special among other planets, Earth shares a basic commonality with them – namely, its material existence. We take this commonality as a point of departure for our reflections on the ontology of both planet Earth and other planets. In this chapter, we ask for the ontology of this materiality of planets. We consult the ontology (...) of planet Earth as I developed it in an earlier contribution (Blok, 2019), explore the ontology of planets as absolute boundary of the natural habitats on Earth, and reflect on the opportunities and limitations such ontology provides for future human colonies on other planets. (shrink)

How to participate proactively in a process of change and transformation, to shape our path within an uncertain future? With this publication, the State Of The Art Network marks a waypost on a journey which started in 2018, when like-minded Nordic and Baltic art organisations and professionals initiated this network as a multidisciplinary collaboration facing the Anthropocene. Over five years, ten organisations and around 80 practitioners from different disciplines, like the arts, natural sciences and humanities came together, online and in (...) person, for workshops, seminars and discussions. The aim was to find ways to create resilience and concrete actions on how to live through the change in culture, economy and the environment and to find concrete, hands-on methods to deal with the Anthropocene and the environmental crisis. As an outcome of this process, this publication takes a closer look at how we as practising artists, researchers and cultural actors can create elements for critical thinking and doing which can assist us in navigating the complexities of the present. -/- Edited for the State Of The Art Network by Erich Berger, Mari Keski-Korsu, Marietta Radomska and Line Thastum. -/- Produced and published by Bioart Society 2023. (shrink)

When we participate in political debate or protests, we are judged by how we look, which clothes we wear, by our skin colour, gender and body language. This results in exclusions and limits our freedom of expression. The Politics of Becoming explores radical democratic acts of disidentification to counter this problem. Anonymity in masked protest, graffiti, and online de-bate interrupts our everyday identities. This allows us to live our multiple selves. In the digital age, anonymity becomes an inherent part of (...) everyday communication. Through our smart devices we express our selves differently. As cyborgs, our identities are disrupted and reassembled. We curate self-representations on social media, create avatars, share selfies and choose the skin colour of our emojis. The Politics of Becoming encourages us to engage in a revolution of the self. Democratic pluralism is not only a matter of institutional design but also about how we express our identities. Inner revolutions change our personal realities and plant a seed for democratic futures. (shrink)

Eleven top Deleuze scholars reclaim Deleuzian philosophy as moral philosophy Ethics plays a crucial, if subtle, role in Gilles Deleuze's philosophical project. Michel Foucault claimed that Anti-Oedipus was `a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time'. But what is the nature of the immanent ethics that is developed in Deleuze's thought? How does it differ from previous conceptions of ethics? And what paths does it open for future thought, given (...) the ethical challenges facing humanity in so many domains? Each of the eleven essays in this collection explores the ethical dimension of Deleuze's thought along a new and singular trajectory, and in so doing, attempts to reclaim his philosophy as an ethical philosophy. (shrink)

In this chapter we argue for biophilosophy as a queerfeminist and posthumanities methodology that attends to the question of life by focusing on multiple differences and transformations, materiality and processuality, as well as relations, intra-actions, and disconnections. By combining both the ontological and ethical concerns that go beyond what is conventionally seen as “life”, biophilosophy offers a critical and innovative approach to the issues of death, extinction, (un) liveability, terminality, and toxicity, among others, which all form the backbone of the (...) environmental crises and changing conditions of life on Earth, often framed as the Anthropocene. In what follows, we first discuss select theorisations and implications of the “life/death” coupling as an ethico-political question; subsequently we elaborate the concept of biophilosophy as a methodology; and finally, we propose two examples where we test biophilosophy as a framework that allows us: (1) to engage with the enmeshment of life and death through the concept of the non/living, and (2) to explore the concept of toxic embodiment as an onto-ethical condition we all (human and non-human) are differentially immersed in. (shrink)

I Ville verdier oppfordrer Sigurd Hverven til å anerkjenne at planter, dyr, arter og naturområder på jorda i løpet av naturhistorien har oppnådd et mylder av verdier. I senere tid har mennesker fått makten til å ødelegge mange av disse naturverdiene. Det gir oss som lever nå et nytt ansvar for naturen. I boka undersøker Hverven hvordan mennesker kan erkjenne natur, hva natur er og om naturen har verdi i seg selv. Tankegangen munner ut i et historisk forankret imperativ: Tenkning (...) og praksis må innrettes slik at jordas verdifulle evne til å frembringe og opprettholde mangfold ikke skades ytterligere. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Affect Attunement in the Caregiver-Infant Relationship and Across SpeciesExpanding the Ethical Scope of ErosCynthia WillettCompelling glimpses into the ethical capacities of our animal kin reveal new possibilities for ethical relationships encompassing humans with other animal species. Consider the remarkable report of a female bonobo in a British zoo who assists a bird found in her cage by retrieving the fallen bird, and spreading its wings so that this fellow (...) creature might fly away to its freedom. Or the report of a cat in a nursing home who curls up around dying elderly patients, and remains steadily by their side as they, unbeknownst to the medical personnel, pass away.1 Or of a sacred moment of silence by a stream for baboons in East Africa.2 Or of the ethics that spontaneously emerges among wolves at play.3 On the basis of extensive studies, biologist Frans de Waal argues that such anecdotes are far from rare, and that some core elements of moral understanding and compassion occur among a significant range of nonhuman as well as the human animal species. Apes, monkeys, and perhaps all nonhuman animals fail to display a distinctly human capacity for abstract moral reasoning. As de Waal (2006) remarks, it is difficult to tell (173–75). But our furry and feathery kin do without a doubt demonstrate rich elements of ethical response, and they often enough extend their moral concern to creatures beyond their own species. Of course, they will also bite each other’s heads off or eat their own young as well. But this is just to say that animals are neither natural [End Page 111] innocents nor savage brutes. Like us, they belong to what post-Nietzschean philosophers might frame, somewhat ironically, as a postlapsarian world of good and evil.What kind of philosophical approach could account for these postlapsarian genealogies of ethics? Biologists, primatologists, and anthropologists are drawing upon investigations of prosocial behavior to remap the boundaries of ethics, as for example in Isabelle Stengers’s call for cosmopolitical ecologies of relationships (2010, 33). Such a cosmopolitics aims to encompass our kin and kind from diverse species within the ethical boundaries of common worlds. Donna Haraway discovers an opening for Stengers’s ecology of relationships in the intimate encounters among co-evolving species, especially those she calls companion species (2008, 83). She argues, following Derrida, that the abstract reasoning processes of Stoic and Kantian cosmopolitan ethics remain closed to the participation of nonhuman animals as anything more than dependents, failing to observe the ways in which they act as companions, if not moral subjects. But then, what normative force might bind together an ethically attuned biosocial sphere that we as humans co-inhabit with other animal species?To explore this question, this essay takes its cues from well-established research on the responsive, preverbal connection of the human infant and adult caregiver (Bateson 1979; Trevarthen 1984; Stern 1985, 2010; Gibbs 2001, 2010; Hansen 2004; Anderson 2006; Papoulias and Callard 2010; Willett 1995, 2001). To this research we can add new animal studies (Smuts 1999, 2001; Fudge 2002; de Waal 2006, 2009; Bekoff 2007; Molnar 2008; Haraway 2008). These animal studies provide a basis for extending an “ethics of eros” with roots in Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, Enrique Dussel, Africana feminism, Freudo-Marxist critical theory, and Plato (for discussions of this tradition, see Bergoffen 1997; Huffer 2009; Willett 2001)—but reconfigured in terms of social bonds across multiple animal species. In this tradition of ethics, the lack of a cognitive-based moral subjectivity that can translate into human terms does not consign nonhuman species to a mute moral status. On the contrary, some more primordial basis for relationship and meaning may weave thin but substantial threads of a postmoral ethics across regions of the biosphere.Given the diverse modes of subjectivity among animal species, and even the lack of what we call a moral subject altogether in many species, neither ordinary modes of empathy nor of moral understanding go very far in forging multispecies social bonds. For this reason, we turn to research on “the attunement of affects” in the infant-caregiver relationship (Stern 1985). As we shall see, this... (shrink)

This book promotes the research of present-day women working in ancient and medieval philosophy, with more than 60 women having contributed in some way to the volume in a fruitful collaboration. It contains 22 papers organized into ten distinct parts spanning the sixth century BCE to the fifteenth century CE. Each part has the same structure: it features, first, a paper which sets up the discussion, and then, one or two responses that open new perspectives and engage in further reflections. (...) Our authors’ contributions address pivotal moments and players in the history of philosophy: women philosophers in antiquity, Cleobulina of Rhodes, Plato, Lucretius, Bardaisan of Edessa, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Plotinus, Porphyry, Peter Abelard, Robert Kilwardby, William Ockham, John Buridan, and Isotta Nogarola. The result is a thought-provoking collection of papers that will be of interest to historians of philosophy from all horizons. Far from being an isolated effort, this book is a contribution to the ever-growing number of initiatives which endeavour to showcase the work of women in philosophy. (shrink)

In this article, we reflect on the conditions under which new technologies emerge in the Anthropocene and raise the question of how to conceptualize sustainable technologies therein. To this end, we explore an eco-centric approach to technology development, called biomimicry. We discuss opposing views on biomimetic technologies, ranging from a still anthropocentric orientation focusing on human management and control of Earth’s life-support systems, to a real eco-centric concept of nature, found in the responsive conativity of nature. This concept provides the (...) ontological and the epistemological condition for an eco-centric concept of biomimetic technologies in the Anthropocene. We distinguish five principles for this concept that can guide future technological developments. (shrink)

This article examines the conceptualisation of materialities in feminist theory through two paradigmatic examples: (French) materialist feminism and new materialisms. What can be interpreted as an opposition between different paradigms can also be disrupted as long as we define what matters as a relation or a process rather than a substance or a lost paradise to which we should return. New materialisms indeed help to investigate aspects such as corporeality, human/non-human interaction and textures, but the role of feminist materialism is (...) invaluable in highlighting the social structures of power relations; more than ever, it makes a decisive contribution to the understanding of domination, such as the social relations and hierarchies implied in femosecularism conceptualised in this article. Ultimately, the tool of hybridised materialisms aims to articulate the theoretical perspective of materialist feminism with that of the new materialisms – in order to avoid the binarism between materiality and culture. (shrink)

This article explores the relevance of ontological assumptions for justifications of agency and ethics. It critiques Kantian ethics for being based upon an ontological imaginary that starts from the substantialism of Newtonian physics. Substantialism shapes Western political philosophy’s view about who we are as subjects and how the world works. In this ontological imaginary, validation of ethics is based upon universality and abstractions. Furthermore, Kantian ethics underscores an anthropocentric and theocratic vision of how to govern societies. I argue Kantian criteria (...) are not only insufficient to make good choices but are also conducive to wrong ones, since they elicit self-appeasement in international intervention, and contribute to the conceptual repertoire of coloniality. I propose that an ontology of entanglements opens possibilities for overcoming the shortcomings of an ethos based upon abstractions and possibly for correcting some of its moral failures. In a quantum ontological imaginary, the validation of ethical choices relies instead upon the exploration of the apparatuses we deploy, as well as upon careful situational evaluation. Specific practices, rather than an abstract humanity, are the referents for devising such ethos. This position, I argue, resonates with the critical project of decoloniality and its acknowledgment of the political salience of ontological imaginaries. (shrink)

Jean-François Lyotard's work remains a largely untapped resource for film-philosophy. This article surveys four fundamental concepts which indicate the fecundity of this work for current studies and debates. While Lyotard was generally associated with the “theory” of the 1980s which privileged language, signs, and cultural representations, much of his work in fact resonates more strongly with the new materialisms and realisms currently taking centre stage. The concepts examined here indicate the relevance of Lyotard's work in four related contemporary contexts: the (...) renewed interest in the dispositif, new materialism, the affective turn, and speculative realism. The concept of the dispositif (or apparatus) is being rehabilitated in the contemporary context because it shows a way beyond the limiting notion of mise en scène which has dominated approaches to film, and Lyotard's prevalent use of this concept feeds into this renewal. While matter is not an explicit theme in Lyotard's writings on film, it is nevertheless one at the heart of his aesthetics, and it may be extended for application to film. Affect was an important theme for Lyotard in many contexts, including his approaches to film, where it appears to subvert film's “seductive” (ideological) effects. Finally, the Real emerges as a central concept in Lyotard's last essay on cinema, where, perhaps surprisingly, it intimates something close to a speculative realist aesthetics. Each of the fundamental concepts of Lyotard's film-philosophy are introduced in the context of the current fields and debates to which they are relevant, and are discussed with filmic examples, including Michael Snow's La Région centrale (1971), Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli (Stromboli, terra di Dio, 1950), Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), and neo-realist cinema. (shrink)

Whilst the concept of the subject has been called into question by many diverse approaches within contemporary political and social theory, there remains a focus upon agency, now attributable to reformulated subjectivities or assemblages. I query the persistence of this grammar of agency and ask whether politics can do without a ‘scene of the subject’. Spinoza’s philosophy, in particular, his conception of conatus, has inspired and offered some basis for rethinking agency. I examine two such prominent positions and argue that (...) ultimately neither captures the political promise of Spinoza’s philosophy. Configuring a concept of morphology to analyse this scene, my argument detaches the conatus from a narrow focus upon human desire, and focuses attention upon the scene of the subject as it folded into a wider complex body. My approach also returns a study of power to the discussion: the conatus is the power to persist, but it is also a differential force and site of conflict. By placing the spotlight on the scene of subjectivity in this way, the contemporary political theorist avoids the false antinomy between agency and structure, whilst continuing to track the production and composition of subjectivity in new political forms. (shrink)

Research often characterized as “new materialist” has staged a return/turn to nature in social and critical theory by bringing “matter” into the purview of our research. While this growing impetus to take nature seriously fosters new types of interdisciplinarity and thus new resources for knowing our nature-cultural worlds, its capacity to deal with power’s imbrication in how we understand “nature” is curtailed by its failures to engage substantively with the epistemological interventions of postcolonial feminist science studies. The citational practices of (...) many new materialist thinkers eschew the existence of what Sandra Harding has called “a world of sciences.” I argue that the “science” privileged and often conflated with matter in new materialist storytelling is the same science destabilized by postcolonial feminist science studies. This does not mean that new materialist feminisms and postcolonial feminist science studies are necessarily at odds, as new materialist storytelling and prevailing conceptualizations of the postcolonial seem to suggest. On the contrary, I suggest that thinking creatively, capaciously, pluralistically, and thus irreverently with respect to the rules of science––about the boundaries and meanings of matter, “life,” and “humanness”––could be understood as a central project for a postcolonial feminist science studies. (shrink)

Bruno Latour purports to transform political ecology by turning attention away from presumed damages to ‘nature’ and toward unproblematised scientific and social processes through which people and things stabilise their identities. He extends the categories of political representation to those processes in hopes of founding a ‘parliament of things’. Such an assembly would settle the terms of coexistence between people and things without undue deference to scientific knowledge claims and without a priori judgments about nature's value. This article challenges Latour's (...) reliance on the concept of representation on three grounds. First, his theory of subject-object ‘entanglements’ undermines traditional justifications of representation, and offers no convincing ethical limits to put in their place. Second, Latour describes environmental issues in ways that are inconsistent with representation by discrete spokespersons. Third, Latour's open-ended proceduralism provides no way of creating overarching, legitimate norms capable of resolving environmental disputes. Occasionally, however, Latour hints at constitutionally structured reforms that might help overcome these objections – provided that they drew lessons from theories of deliberative democracy. (shrink)

This is the first of two special issues and the articles are grouped according to two themes: This first issue will feature articles that share a theme we call Technologies and the Political, while the second issue will feature the theme Subjectivities. However, we could equally consider them exercises in provincialization in the (counter)factual register in the first issue, and by affective historiography as conceptual-empirical labor(atory) in the second issue. What we have generally asked of all authors is to consider (...) that the relation between science and society is often heavily influenced by and identified in the intermediary figurations portrayed in the genre of science fiction. (shrink)

This article explores the metabolic lives of whey powder, the most popular form of protein supplement in what has become a multibillion-dollar industry during the past two decades. Faced with the slippery and elusive properties latent to this multiplicitous substance, our approach is to follow whey powder from its mid-20th century emergence as a noxious byproduct of industrial dairy production, through the human and animal bodies unevenly tasked with its processing, and out into waterways, where its nitrogen density rematerializes as (...) a pollutant. We show how whey powder emerged as a solution to the environmental damage posed by whey pollution, how such damage is an effect of the systematic overproduction endemic to agrofood industries and how whey’s toxicity persists through processes of metabolism and consumption, despite attempts to process and profit from its vital capacities. Throughout, we argue that whey exemplifies ecological embodiment, understood as the co-constitutive relations between bodily matter and ecological life, and their entanglement with processes of commodification. (shrink)

This essay defines and critiques ‘methodocentrism’, the belief that predetermined research methods are the determining factor in the validity and importance of educational research. By examining research in science studies and posthumanism, the authors explain how this methodocentrism disenables research from taking account of problems and non-human actants that are presumed to be of no importance or value in existing social science research methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative. Building from a critique of these methods as profoundly anthropocentric, the authors examine (...) three crucial problematics in which methodocentrism functions in educational research: the institutionalization of graduate training, a wide-spread privileging of the visual, and the seeming necessity of ‘data’ in social scientific research methodologies. Ultimately, this article does not reject the necessity of particular studies having methods—rigorous, philosophically grounded approaches to problems in the world—but it argues that the belief that methods must be selected from existing options and assembled before approaching the ‘objects’ of study is not only a form of bad science, it is also deeply implicated in anthropocentric and colonialist politics. Instead, what research requires today is a thorough rethinking of the very distinction between subject and object and a renewed questioning of how agency functions in specific research settings. (shrink)

This article probes the philosophical and political significance of the relationships between wheelchair activists and their wheelchairs. Analyzing disability memoirs and the work of a professional wheelchair dancer, I argue that wheelers frequently experience complex relationality and queer kinships with their wheels. By bringing the artistry of disabled writers and dancers into conversation with the notions of human–material relations in the work of Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, and Mel Chen, I show how alternative animacies shape wheelers’ conceptions of (...) interdependence and movement. The sensuous pleasure they take in their wheels queers conventional conceptions of how humans should relate to things. New materialist philosophy has increasingly drawn attention to the porous boundaries between the human and material world. But where posthumanist philosophers have largely aimed to dethrone the sovereignty of the human, disability activists use alternative animacies to raise up a devalued and discounted portion of humanity: to emphasize the agency and capacity of those whose lives are often cast as pitiable and powerless, to express a queer feminist disability culture and politics, and to claim the transgressive vitality and vibrant artistry of life with disability. (shrink)

Electricity is hidden within wires and networks only revealing its quantity and flow when metered. The making of its properties into data is therefore particularly important to the relations that are formed around electricity as a produced and managed phenomenon. We propose approaching all metering as a situated activity, a form of quantification work in which data is made and becomes mobile in particular spatial and temporal terms, enabling its entry into data infrastructures and schemes of evaluation and value production. (...) We interrogate the transition from the pre-digital into the making of bigger, more spatiotemporally granular electricity data, through focusing on those actors selling and materialising new metering technologies, data infrastructures and services for larger businesses and public sector organisations in the UK. We examine the claims of truth and visibility that accompany these shifts and their enrolment into management techniques that serve to more precisely apportion responsibility for, and evaluate the status of, particular patterns and instances of electricity use. We argue that whilst through becoming Big Data electricity flow is now able to be known and given identity in significantly new terms, enabling new relations to be formed with the many heterogeneous entities implicated in making and managing energy demand, it is necessary to sustain some ambivalence as to the performative consequences that follow for energy governance. We consider the wider application of our conceptualisation of metering, reflecting on comparisons with the introduction of new metering systems in domestic settings and as part of other infrastructural networks. (shrink)

We investigate the rural resistance of one of the world’s largest social movements, La Via Campesina, as a powerful enactment of radical democracy in practice. More than this, the paper describes how the movement challenges the framework of radical democracy by pointing towards the ethical importance of recognizing the relationship of human dignity with nature and considering ethico-political values inherent in the peasants’ way of living. Their resistance is a rejection of depoliticizing silencing, and their everyday life is a commitment (...) to a “more than human” radical democracy in its most radical sense, as they are always already “in parliament with land”. We conclude by outlining a perspective which is both more than radical and more democratic, considering those who have not yet been heard but also that which, in the light of radical democracy, has never been counted as part of the political body at all: nature. (shrink)

This introduction charts several of rhythm's various returns as a way of laying out the theoretical and methodological field in which the articles of this special issue find their place. While Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis is perhaps familiar to many, rhythm has appeared in a wide repertoire of guises, in many disciplines over the decades and indeed the centuries. This introduction attends to the particular roles of rhythm in the formation of modernity ranging from the processes of industrialization and the proliferation (...) of new media technologies to film and literary aesthetics as well as conceptualizations of human psychology, social behaviour and physiology. These are some of the historical antecedents to the contemporary understandings of rhythm within body studies to which most of the contributions to this issue are devoted. In this respect, the introduction outlines recent approaches to rhythm as vibration, a force of the virtual, and an intensive excess outside consciousness. (shrink)

This paper draws on process philosophy to imagine “care” as a collective practice of children and the forest in the context of Finnish early childhood education. By locating care in movement rather than an individual, the author challenges the notion of caring subjectivity and employs postqualitative inquiry to conceptually focus on an impersonal production of care. The author shows how care emerges in the between of children and forest in an outdoor learning environment and highlights what it continually produces. She (...) concludes by discussing the need for a conceptual evolution of “care” in the philosophies of environmental and outdoor education. (shrink)

This article critically analyzes the assumption that land is becoming increasingly scarce and that, therefore, farmland values are bound to rise across the globe. It investigates the process of land value creation, as well as its flipside: value erosion and stagnation, looking at the various mechanisms involved in each. As such, it is a study of how the financialization of agriculture affects the process of land commoditization. I show that, for farmland to be turned into an asset, a whole range (...) of conditions have to be fulfilled, presenting a typology of asset making in the context of farmland. Asset making, like commoditization, is a process of assemblage, and it is less straightforward and less stable than generally assumed. Further, I argue that ‘asset making’ is not a one-way process. The article is based on an analysis of global data on land values and the case of farmland investment in post-Soviet farmland. (shrink)

This article looks at how imaginaries of land and climate play a role in farmland investment discourses and practices. Foreign farmland investors in the fertile black earth region of Russia and Ukraine have ‘celebrated’ soil fertility while largely ignoring climatic factors. The article shows a centuries-long history of outsiders coming to the region lured by the fertile soils, while grossly underestimating climate which has had disastrous implications for farm viability and the environment. Comparisons with historical and contemporary literature on other (...) regions suggest that the underestimation of climatic risks by newcomers is remarkably prevalent in resource frontiers. (shrink)

Self-cultivation—taking pedagogical action to educate oneself—is an integral part of non-formal adult education. Ever since Greek antiquity, it has been a central ingredient in the western philosophical and educational tradition. However, we argue that the global challenges that have emerged in the present era of the ecological crisis call for a new kind of understanding of this basic educational phenomenon. Based in particular on recent work in dark ecology and its central concept of the ‘uncanny’, we outline a few key (...) features of our time in relation to the contemporary challenge of self-cultivation. We then review extant literature on self-cultivation to ascertain whether the theoretical resources that have been used to conceptualise it in the past are capable of addressing these new aspects of self-cultivation. We conclude that each of the theoretical resources analysed here offer valuable insights into the novel challenges facing self-cultivation, though not all important questions can be answered. By specifying the contributions and limitations of these theoretical resources, we pave the way for future work on conceptualising self-cultivation for our times. (shrink)

Creatively operationalizing Claude Lévi-Strauss’ predicament that food is good to think with, I initiate a methodological conceptualization of food by exploring the ways in which it is apt to study Sri Lankan domestic and collective village life. Food is approached as an assemblage that is an emergent resultant of heterogeneous aspects with which it is deeply entangled and by way of which it turns into a potent agent shaping life. More specifically, I explore the vibrancy of these different components that (...) co-create the overall soundscape of food that as such becomes the conductor of Sri Lankan life. Food shapes domestic life by way of its preparation and consumption, and through its cultivation also conducts the collective rhythms at the village level. The conceptualization of food as an assemblage seeks to develop it as a methodology that opens up for a holistic integration and interdisciplinary collaboration. (shrink)

Rosi Braidotti's The Posthuman is intent on ‘updating critical theory for the third millennium’. Indeed, Braidotti repeatedly stresses that the aim of her book is to develop an affirmative form of posthumanist critical theory which, by providing creative alternatives to current arrangements, will allow us to better face various contemporary socio-political challenges. This review essay argues, however, that the philosophical position which Braidotti's book develops is unsustainable, and that it does not provide us with the kind of basis for affirmative (...) forms of critical theory and political practice which she suggests it does. Specifically, it argues that her philosophical framework results in persistent theory/praxis inconsistencies and is therefore lacking in ‘seriousness’. In addition, it will claim that these persistent theory/praxis inconsistencies reveal that her relation to ontological verticality remains unresolved. (shrink)

This article examines Catherine Malabou’s philosophical concept of plasticity as a new materialist methodology. Given that plasticity simultaneously maintains the ability to receive, give, and annihilate form, plasticity and plastic readings offer material-discursive possibilities for educational research. This article begins by discussing the evolution of plasticity, applications thereof, and its location within new materialist philosophy. To then demonstrate the possibilities of plasticity, this article takes the example of educational policy reform in relation to technology-centered models of education. A plastic reading (...) of ongoing policy discourses argues that conceptualizing policy, stakeholders, and technology as plastic contribute new scholarly understandings regarding the shape and movement of educational policy formation. Significantly, the methodology of plastic readings provides an ideal lens through which to approach educational policy development as a series of entangled ideas and interests. In addition, plastic readings enable the re-envisioned types of analysis and critique increasingly called for by qualitative methodologists and new materialist scholars. (shrink)

Comparing frameworks for AI development allows us to see trends and reflect on how we are conceptualizing, interacting with, and imagining futures for AI. Recent scholarship comparing a range of AI frameworks has often focused methodologically on consensus, which has led to problems in evaluating potentially ambiguous values. We contribute to this scholarship using a rhetorical perspective attuned to how frameworks shape people’s actions. This perspective allows us to develop the concept of an “AI mainstream” through an analysis of five (...) of the highest-profile frameworks, including Asimov’s Three Laws. We identify four features of this emerging AI mainstream shared by most/all of the frameworks: human-centered design focus, abstraction-oriented ethical reasoning, privileged authorship, and ahistorical regulatory justifications. Notably, each of these features permeates each framework, rather than being limited to a single principle. We then evaluate these shared features and offer scholarly alternatives to complement and improve them. (shrink)

Archival research can be described as preoccupied with the ontology of data formation and collection in relation to the speaking and writing subject. From its outset, it can be located in the humanistic tradition, which the archival and historical discipline has inherited. Thus, archival research can be described as preoccupied with the ontology of data formation and collection in relation to the speaking and writing subject. At the same time, the archival researcher—the human subject—is produced as the sole source of (...) subjective experiences, consciousness and feelings, and has become the central player in this tradition, embedded in debates over the concept of human autonomy in archival research. Archival researchers—human subjects—should be continually challenged by their own discipline, and by such arguably scientific methods, which often espouse rejecting their ethical commitments to idiosyncrasy, entanglements and the blurring of subject–object binaries. An approach that re-elevates these comm... (shrink)

In the United States, interest in urban agriculture has grown dramatically. While community gardens have sprouted across the landscape, home food gardens—arguably an ever-present, more durable form of urban agriculture—have been overlooked, understudied, and unsupported by government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and academics. In part a response to the invisibility of home gardens, this paper is a manifesto for their study in the Global North. It seeks to develop a multi-scalar and multidisciplinary research framework that acknowledges the garden’s social and ecological (...) or material dimensions. Given the lack of existing research, we draw on the more extensive literature on home gardens in the South and community gardens in the North to develop a set of hypotheses about the social-ecological effects of urban home food gardens in the North. These gardens, we hypothesize, contribute to food security, community development, cultural reproduction, and resilience at multiple scales; conserve agrobiodiversity; and support urban biodiversity. They may also have negative ecological effects, such as stormwater nutrient loading. Because of the entanglement of the social and the ecological or material in the garden, we review three theoretical perspectives—social ecological systems theory, actor-network theory, and assemblage theory—that have been or could be applied to the multi-scalar and multidisciplinary study of the garden. We also review sampling and analytic methods for conducting home garden research. The paper concludes with a discussion of opportunities to extend the research agenda beyond descriptive analysis, the primary focus of garden research to date. (shrink)

How can Deleuzians make his philosophy as accessible as possible to political theorists and democratic publics? This essay provides principles to enter Deleuze's political vision, namely, to research the etymology of words, to discover the image beneath concepts, to diagram schemata using rigid lines, supple lines and lines of flight, and to construct rules that balance experimentation and caution. The essay then employs this method to explicate a fecund sentence about politics in A Thousand Plateaus and presents a case why (...) Deleuze deserves greater visibility in the political theory canon. (shrink)