Details

ISBN-10: 1517902371
ISBN-13: 9781517902377
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Publish Date: 05/30/2017
Dimensions: 8.90" L, 5.40" W, 1.10" H

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene

Editor: Nils Bubandt
Editor: Elaine Gan
Editor: Heather Anne Swanson

Paperback

Price: $27.95

Overview

Living on a damaged planet challenges who we are and where we live. This timely anthology calls on twenty eminent humanists and scientists to revitalize curiosity, observation, and transdisciplinary conversation about life on earth.

As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent “arts of living.” Included are essays by scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics who posit critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. The essays are organized around two key figures that also serve as the publication’s two openings: Ghosts, or landscapes haunted by the violences of modernity; and Monsters, or interspecies and intraspecies sociality. Ghosts and Monsters are tentacular, windy, and arboreal arts that invite readers to encounter ants, lichen, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste–in short, the wonders and terrors of an unintended epoch.

Contributors: Karen Barad, U of California, Santa Cruz; Kate Brown, U of Maryland, Baltimore; Carla Freccero, U of California, Santa Cruz; Peter Funch, Aarhus U; Scott F. Gilbert, Swarthmore College; Deborah M. Gordon, Stanford U; Donna J. Haraway, U of California, Santa Cruz; Andreas Hejnol, U of Bergen, Norway; Ursula K. Le Guin; Marianne Elisabeth Lien, U of Oslo; Andrew Mathews, U of California, Santa Cruz; Margaret McFall-Ngai, U of Hawaii, Manoa; Ingrid M. Parker, U of California, Santa Cruz; Mary Louise Pratt, NYU; Anne Pringle, U of Wisconsin, Madison; Deborah Bird Rose, U of New South Wales, Sydney; Dorion Sagan; Lesley Stern, U of California, San Diego; Jens-Christian Svenning, Aarhus U.

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Reviews

"Calling a book 'mandatory reading' usually feels hyperbolic, but it's justified in the case of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. A stunning collection of essays from scientists, writers and artists on humankind's impact on the planet, and how we all can survive it."–Shelf Awareness

"This vibrant, moving, and philosophical two-sided essay collection reminds us of all the ways that human beings and the natural world are interconnected. Deborah Bird Rose's piece on the "shimmer of life" alone makes the book worth reading."–Chicago Review of Books

"There's a poetry in facts. And as this book reveals, there is an increasing amount of courage and acceptance to be found in understanding even the most destructive changes in plant and wildlife that the overheated Anthropocene will bring us."–Santa Fe New Mexican

"Well worth reading: a frank, luminous set of dispatches from future worlds and fractured pasts."–Full Stop

"Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet is a strikingly aesthetic object, carefully curated at the level of form as well as content. It makes a convincing case for the relevance of 'hard science' to art and politics."–Glasgow Review of Books

"The Anthropocene is characterised by extreme and irreversible changes to the environment, resulting in an exponential scarcity of living beings and threats to most life systems on earth. In response to this precarity, the editors and contributors to Arts suggest that we must collectively observe and study the world around us to attune our co-existence more authentically to these ecologies, through increased knowledge about both the impacts of past actions and our embeddedness in multispecies webs."–Environmental Values

"By focusing on entanglement and haunting in this double-sided book, the contributors in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet demand a reconceptualisation of what it means to be active participants in the Anthropocene. They also want us to recognise that our standing is not at all separate from nature, time, or matter."–Gothic Nature Journal

"The editors of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet set out to illustrate through storytelling the ambivalent entanglements of ghosts and monsters in the Anthropocene as a practical means toward broadening our knowledge-creation of the challenges of a world in the making. If the scientific community takes to heart their offering (and the offerings of those who came before them), the scientific paradigm-shift (that started with feminist science studies, the civil rights movement, and environmentalism) from objectivity to subjectivity might just take hold as a dominant epistemology."–Hypatia Reviews

"Arts of Living is a provocative dispatch from the edges of humanity's new condition."–Sedimenta

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Details

ISBN-10: 1517902371
ISBN-13: 9781517902377
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Publish Date: 05/30/2017
Dimensions: 8.90" L, 5.40" W, 1.10" H
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