Our Books - Ideas That Shape Scholarship

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'Surrealism and Ecology' is the first volume to consider the intersections of these two fields. It addresses the contribution of the avant-gardes in thinking about the relationship of humans with their environment in the context of massive environmental upheaval in the twentieth century. This volume explores the significant role of Surrealist artists and writers within the history of critical thinking about nature and environment over the last hundred years. It approaches ecology both as a mode of thinking about the many interconnections of life and as a way of experiencing and knowing the world. The relationship of humans with their environment is of paramount significance within contemporary discourse, and the contribution of the historical avant-gardes to this topic remains largely underexplored. In addressing this gap, the book presents a diverse selection of analyses of the ways in which the Surrealists have thought about and represented nature and the human place within it. It emphasises how Surrealism’s interventions in connecting seemingly distinct domains of thought and phenomena can be understood as relevant to more recent developments in the practice of ecological thought. Surrealist practices and the academic field of Surrealism studies are broad in scope and include not only visual art, but also poetry and literature, film, philosophy, exhibition design, and experimental practice. This volume includes contributions from established and developing scholars working across disciplines and locations, who address such varied practices and engage with analyses from multiple perspectives. The international and trans-Atlantic history of Surrealism is well-represented in this book, with over half the texts exploring the work of European Surrealists in exile during the Second World War or the art and environmental and political activism of Surrealists in the Caribbean and throughout the Americas.

Motivated by the exigency of climate change, 'Cinematic Ecosystems: Screen Encounters with More-than-Humans in the Era of Environmental Crisis' takes cinema to be an audiovisual form whose creation and meaning are deeply connected to more-than-human worlds. As part of the third wave of ecocinema studies, this collection gathers contributions on multiple cinema forms from an international group of scholars and artists who offer diverse, critical perspectives that respond to the question: How does cinema help or hinder us in coming to know the more-than-human world? The collection homes in on the concept of the ecosystem as a biological and technological system that comprises a network of inter-relational living and their inanimate elemental affordances to explore encounters with cinema as a material object and practice, a spectatorial experience, and a representational text. The chapters cover environmental topics that span five continents and multiple histories. This book will be of special interest to film studies scholars and artists interested in cinema and climate change, environmental justice, and posthumanism.

This edited volume presents critical analyses of animism in the arts with a focus on the boundary practices of going feral. Reconsidering the question posed by Cecilia Alemani, Venice Biennale 2022 curator, authors explore ‘what would life look like without us?’, in a world activated by things and a post-humanist animism. These speculative discussions are developed in this volume, in which we consider how the process and practices of going feral might materialise through and across creative investigations. Going feral is a provocative call to untame, queer and radicalize feminist thought and practice, producing more-than-human, multispecies entanglements, and processes of dynamic resistance. The chapters critically analyse processes of going feral in artworks and art practices ranging from fine art, art history and performance to architecture, video games and poetry. They consider how going feral allows audiences to form meaningful relationships with spoiled landscapes, develop human and non-human communities, and to reimagine the domestic and the everyday through the prism of new animism. The creative practices discussed are geographically diverse, including examples from South Africa, Brazil, Ukraine, South Korea, Mexico, the Caribbean, Europe and North America. Through these wide-ranging approaches and case studies, the book asks, what are potential futures materialised through artworks that rethink the present as a world populated by things, a place where the sensibility of materials becomes carriers of agency? This edited volume argues that animism and ferality are vital tools for artists and creative professionals to describe and critique the increasing inequalities and continuous states of emergency that characterise late-stage capitalism. The concept of going feral is a critical framework to frame contemporary issues such as environmentalism, waste and discard studies, and speculate ways of decentring anthropomorphism.

'Entangled and Empowered: Agency in Multispecies Communities' is a collection that approaches the inevitable reality of entanglement between humans and other beings from a perspective of action and wonder. It argues that actors as diverse as bacteria, snakes, butterflies, ducks, and cacao trees can help us enact joy in fields as different as art, cinema, literature, and anthropology. While acknowledging the imminent reality of climate change, the sixth extinction, and other overwhelming threats to the Earth, this book argues that humans continue to live, and so do the beings whose lives are entwined with ours, for whom we can acknowledge and work to improve their existence. The nine essays in this volume trace that acknowledgment and work through three sections centered on visual media, queer and feminist readings of empowerment, and movements beyond the boundaries enacted by anthropocentric Western society. Drawing on theories such as new materialism, posthumanism, and ecofeminism, and with an international perspective from authors working at American, South Asian, and East Asian universities, 'Entangled and Empowered' finds hope in the shadow of despair. It engages with work by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing on entanglement, Donna Haraway on kin-making and multispecies communities, and Karen Barad on intra-actions, among others, while also showing how critiques of these ideas can make the world both more promising and more endangered. This collection will be useful for scholars working in all subfields of environmental humanities, especially those intersecting with the theories described above and as an archive of examples analyzing practical aspects of agency in diverse multispecies communities. Scholars studying texts as well-known as 'The Handmaid’s Tale' and as obscure as the codices of the Mopan Maya will find value in having both under one cover.

'Blue Crimes and International Criminal Law' is a multi-author volume which explores the connection between criminal law and water (including our oceans and other bodies of water). The volume seeks to contribute to evolving discourse around water rights and water justice around the world. This novel volume surveys topics such as climate justice and blue crimes, water governance, illegal, unregulated, and underreported fishing, Rights of Nature, and examines the utility of ocean treaties and justice and accountability mechanisms within international criminal law, 'Blue Crimes and International Criminal Law' is a companion volume to 'Green Crimes and International Criminal Law.'

With a focus on the transpacific and transnational relationship between North America and Asia, 'Emerging from the Rubble: Asian/American Writings on Disasters' explores Asian/Americans’ complex and nuanced involvement in disastrous events. Included in this purview of disaster are not only the damages and threats of current ongoing climate change but also the long-lasting ruining effects inflicted by imperialism, neo/colonialism, wars, and these historical components’ entanglement with global capitalism that have generated both spontaneous and slow and/or prolonged violent effects. Moreover, disasters can be acknowledged as manifestations of the Anthropocene — an epoch shaped by human activity — or what scholars like Jason W. Moore and Donna J. Harraway term the ‘Capitalocene,’ a paradigm where nature and capitalist society are deeply intertwined, co-creating an intricate web of life. Asian/American involvement in such a web has never been simple but convoluted: some of them have experienced tremendous losses, whereas others have perpetuated obfuscation of the truth and/or induced violence, often contingently with or without acknowledging the facts. When considering Asian migrants including refugees from Southeast Asia who had little option but to seek asylum in the U.S., and Asian Americans who have pursued their “happiness” under the U.S.’s capitalist premise of constant progress, protection of “human rights,” and freedom of “choice,” it is important to note that Asian migrants and Asian ‘Americans’ have become simultaneously active players and exploited individuals within the context of U.S. racial capitalism. Acknowledging the impossibility of clearly differentiating natural and human-made disasters, scholars who contribute to this volume note the reciprocal influences between nature and civilization. They examine how the entanglements of natural and human-made disasters lead to the acceleration and expansion of damage. This volume explores how Asian Americans’ connections with their ancestral origins along with their particular racial positions, social classes, and socio-historical backgrounds in North American societies force them to experience and witness disastrous events differently from the mainstream discourse on eco-crises.

Ethics – to put it concisely – is ‘mindful well-being’. It is a set of standards that guides how we treat ourselves, one another, and the environment. When we design things for public use, we also communicate an ethical perspective. When we use things designed for us, we adopt their ethics. This book synthesizes several different disciplines as they relate to design, ethics, and the built environment. Our objects, according to philosophers like Ihde, Verbeek, and Latour, mediate our experiences with the world around us. Through their designs (and, by extension, our perceived affordances), we largely comply with what our objects and spaces want us to do. At the micro-level, the phones in our pockets command our attentive processes in order to feed an attention economy. At the macro level, urban planning and infrastructure can both promote inclusivity and foment violence. We are deeply intertwined with the objects and spaces that have been designed for us. Baked into every object, process, system, and environment are the remnants of the designer’s morals, ethics, values, and biases. Importantly, this book seeks to cultivate mindfulness of the reader’s interactions with their surrounding world, providing them with a line of inquiry that questions areas of unethical design in their built environment and offers useful critiques and new solutions to these ethical dilemmas. We often have the power to reject those things that are irresponsibly designed and unethical in nature, and it is through this agency as users that we can demand better from designers, developers, and companies. It is imperative to understand our mediated relationships with the built environment that surrounds us and the objects within it; this can help explain our behaviors and empower us to make ethical decisions that serve future generations.

Most scholars and actors in civil society no longer deny the existence of a climate crisis. Very little is being done about it, however, which appears logically and rationally incomprehensible. To try and find a reason for this peculiar behavior, since it could be vital to the survival of our species, the hypothesis might be advanced that it is a symptom of a much greater misunderstanding of the world, which has biased and distorted our ways of creating knowledge. This book is mainly about putting forward new ideas and strategies to cope with climate change, in the shared conviction that a new understanding is crucial to stand a chance against its consequences and to be up to mending what has so far been broken. The authors focus on various facets of the complexity of the environmental issue, and their arguments enter a powerful resonance that shows their inner interconnectedness and how letting it flow achieves interesting and useful results. The book is composed of three parts: the first, ‘Perspectives’, contains chapters proposing alternative ways of understanding the environment and its dominant narrative. The authors are mostly committed to changing the reference frame through which the whole question is being addressed. The second part, ‘Propositions’, is focused on highlighting significant aspects of the environmental crisis that still need to be properly taken into account and on suggesting new policies and tools to cope with it. It has an ethical and strategic flavor. The third part, ‘Cases’, deals with the ‘real’ world, making use of field research and accurate analysis that illustrate the close link between what we are used to calling ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. You will find it easy to establish parallels and connections between the chapters. I hope you will enjoy it.