Trees belong to humanity’s heritage, but they are more than that. Their loss, through catastrophic fires or under business-as-usual, is devastating to many forms of life. Moved by this fact, we begin with an assertion that heritage can have an active role in the design of future places. Written from within the field of architecture, this article focuses on structures that house life. Habitat features of trees and artificial replacement habitats for arboreal wildlife serve as concrete examples. Designs (...) of such habitats need to reflect behaviours, traditions and cultures of birds, bats, and other animals. Our narrative highlights the nonhuman aspect of heritage, seeking to understand how nonhuman stakeholders can act as users and consumers of heritage and not only as its constituents. Our working definition states that more-than-human heritage encompasses tangible and intangible outcomes of historical processes that are of value to human as well as nonhuman stakeholders. From this basis, the article asks how the established notions of heritage can extend to include nonhuman concerns, artefacts, behaviours and cultures. As a possible answer to this question, the hypothesis tested here is that digital information can (1) contribute to the preservation of more-than-human heritage; and (2) illuminate its characteristics for future study and use. This article assesses the potential of three imaging technologies and considers the resulting data within the conceptual framework of more-than-human heritage, illuminating some of its concrete aspects and challenges. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 14.1 (2004) 47-54 [Access article in PDF] Ethical Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research*(A Recommended Manuscript) Adopted on 16 October 2001Revised on 20 August 2002 Ethics Committee of the Chinese National Human Genome Center at Shanghai, Shanghai 201203 Human embryonic stem cell (ES) research is a great project in the frontier of biomedical science for the twenty-first century. Be- cause (...) the research involves the use of human embryos, it triggers serious debate on ethical issues. Opponents consider the embryo to be an early form of human life that should be respected and not destroyed. However, the majority of scientists support embryonic stem cell research, believing that it offers good prospects for the treatment of diseases that have remained incurable until now and so will benefit humankind. The Ethics Committee of the Department of Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of the Chinese National Human Genome Center at Shanghai seriously discussed the ethical debate initiated by embryonic stem cell research. We concluded that we should support the scientists of our country in actively carrying out human embryonic stem cell research for the noble cause of "medicine being a beneficent art." For the healthy and orderly development of human embryonic stem cell research in our country, we put forward the following recommended Ethical Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research as a reference for leaders, administrative departments, and related scientists. Preface Article 1. Human embryonic stem cells are the primitive cells that play the main role in the growth and development of a human body. These [End Page 47] primitive cells have the potential for infinite proliferation, self-renewal, and multi-directional differentiation. If scientists can discover the mechanism of differentiation of human embryonic stem cells, it will be possible to induce differentiation of human embryonic stem cells to form various types of human cells for clinical cell therapy. If human embryonic stem cell research can be integrated with modern biomedical engineering techniques, it also will be possible to make repair and replacement of human tissues and organs a reality. Article 2. There are two ways to classify human embryonic stem cells. One way is to classify them according to their potential for differentiation. There could be three kinds of stem cells: totipotent stem cells, pluripotent stem cells, and unipotent stem cells.A totipotent stem cell has the potential to develop into a whole individual. It can differentiate into the more than 200 cell types in the whole body, construct any tissue or organ of the body, and finally develop into a whole individual. The fertilized egg and the cleavage cells at the very early stage of embryonic development are totipotent stem cells.A pluripotent stem cell has the potential to differentiate into many cell types derived from the three embryonic layers. However, it has lost the capacity to develop into a complete organism.A unipotent stem cell is derived from the further differentiation of the pluripotent stem cell. It can differentiate only into one cell type such as a hematopoietic stem cell, neural stem cell, and others.The other way is to classify human stem cells according to their source. There could be two kinds of human stem cells: embryonic stem cells and tissue stem cells (also called adult stem cells). The former involves experimentation with embryos, which has serious ethical implications. Ethical issues associated with the latter are mainly expressed in the various opinions regarding the allocation of health resources. Article 3. Human embryonic stem cells are the group of cells called the blastocyst inner cell mass during the early stage of embryonic development. They are the main source of totipotent stem cells, and hence the focal and hot point in stem cell research. Studies on the clinical application of embryonic stem cells probably will involve use of the somatic cell nucleus transfer (SCNT) technique, which destroys the early human embryo. At present, the ethical and moral debate is very serious in human embryonic stem cell research regarding whether the research will develop... (shrink)

Health research has increased during the last decade, which has enhanced the importance of research ethics. However, little is known regarding the knowledge, awareness, attitudes, and practices of investigators in Myanmar. To assess awareness, knowledge, and attitudes of post-graduates regarding research ethics and research ethics committees (RECs) and their informed consent practices and to determine the association between their responses and certain independent factors. We conducted a cross-sectional study using a questionnaire that was distributed to a convenience sample of post-graduates (...) at the Defence Services Medical Academy in Myanmar. We used descriptive, t test, and chi-square statistics to analyze the data. Significance was set at p < 0.05. We obtained surveys from 204 participants, which included 177 MSc and 27 PhDs of whom 63.6% had performed research and 86.5% had prior ethics training. Regarding awareness, 92.2% were aware of an REC at their academy, but only 47.1% were “fully aware” of the functions of an REC and only 52.9% stated they were familiar with ethical principles that govern human subject research. More than 90% thought that research involving human subjects should be submitted to an REC and that post-graduates should have training on research ethics. However, several of their attitudes were sub-optimal; for example, 20.2% said that informed consent is only necessary from the community leader of a village rather than from the individual, 32.8% agreed it is acceptable to fabricate research data, and 33.0% believed that ethical review of research should be restricted to international collaborative research. Calculated mean total attitude scores were statistically significantly higher in post-graduates with PhDs compared with those with MSc and higher in those with knowledge of research ethics principles compared with those lacking such knowledge. Significant gaps exist among post-graduates regarding their knowledge, awareness, and attitudes regarding research ethics and RECs. We recommend that post-graduates receive further training in research ethics to ensure the ethical conduct of research. Further studies should be performed to determine the generalizability of our findings to other institutions in Myanmar. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Digital health technologies are often advocated as a way of helping people monitor, promote and manage their health, care for others and reduce the burden on healthcare systems. Yet these technologies have also been subject to criticism for limiting human flourishing and exacerbating socioeconomic disadvantage. Bioethical appraisals of digital health technologies tend to take a conventional risk‐benefit approach, positioning the human subject as a rational, autonomous agent who is acted on by technologies. In this paper, I present a (...) case for adopting an alternative more‐than‐human perspective on bioethics. A more‐than‐human approach considers human‐technological assemblages and agencies as distributed, relational, situated and emergent. To illustrate the insights that this perspective can offer, I draw on the findings of four empirical projects I have conducted on people’s use of digital devices and platforms used for health‐related purposes, including social media groups and online forums, mobile apps and wearable devices. I conclude with the argument that a more‐than‐human approach to bioethics can begin to incorporate a new ‘zoë ethics’ that can acknowledge and address the deeper affective, multisensory and relational dimensions of humans’ encounters with and enactments of material things and nonhuman creatures. (shrink)

Two foundational ethicists of care, Nel Noddings and Eva Feder Kittay, limit the moral community of care to humans. Noddings claims that the reciprocity required for her care ethic cannot be universally present in human relationships with non-humans. Kittay advances that her care ethic requires the cared-for’s assent, or “taking up” of the care, in response to the carer’s actions, which she claims is impossible with non-human cared-fors. But these claims can be disputed. I offer a few examples (...) to contend that ethically meaningful reciprocity is possible in some human relationships with more-than-human entities and that some non-human cared-fors can assent to carers’ actions. Following from the work of Mary Anne Warren and others on moral personhood, “humans” and “persons” can refer to different things: biological organisms and a designation of moral status respectively. There can be persons that are not humans (e.g., legal persons like corporations and chimpanzees, and moral persons like whales and dolphins). Because the concerns of Noddings and Kittay can be addressed and there are non-human persons, I argue that we should reject the human restriction within care ethics. Humans have morally significant relationships with non-human persons and we need to open the realm of care ethics to legitimize and enhance these other relationships in our rich communities. (shrink)

The 'More-than-Human' reader brings together texts by writers across a wide array of disciplines that reflect on the state of post-anthropocentric thinking today. Focusing on the ecologies and technologies of climate injustice and inequalities, as well as the destructive structures lurking within anthropocentrism, More-than-Human proposes complex entanglements, frictions, and reparative attention across species and beings. Thinking past the centrality of the human subject, the texts that compose this reader begin to imagine networks of (...) ethics and responsibility emerging not from the ideologies of old, but from the messy and complex liveliness around us, and underfoot. (shrink)

In this short essay, I sketch the contours of critical new materialist and posthumanist interventions in memory studies & critical theory via the more-than-human Memorial 22/3.

Emmanuel Levinas’s writings militate against an ontological way of thinking that he claims dominates the history of European philosophy. In their drive towards truth and knowledge, Levinas argues that thinkers like Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger efface the alterity of the Other, the Other’s “otherness,” by appropriating alterity as a moment of self-consciousness or Being. This ontological thinking, Levinas argues, attempts to violently reduce the unthematizable excess of the Other by systematically assimilating the Other in the concepts of totalizing thought. Levinas (...) articulates his opposition to this tradition at length in Totality & Infinity by insisting upon an irreducible heteronomy: an Other who remains radically outside of any relationship that I might have with them. (shrink)

The article examines work by contemporary American artist Kiki Smith, who proposes a future in which human and nonhuman bodily borders merge. The artist’s contribution to the more-than-human artistic entanglements is juxtaposed with Joseph Beuys’s artistic manifesto from 1974 which proposes, among other things, an attempt to get outside of the represented human towards the asignified ahuman. In Kiki’s sculpture, both human and nonhuman animals undergo constant morphogenesis, becoming hybrid forms far beyond the (...) class='Hi'>human-social paradigm, implying that the human and nonhuman binary, due to the exchange of affective entanglements, is no longer valid in the heyday of techno-scientific development. The analyzed work shows that both human and nonhuman bodies are raw materials not separated from one another but always interconnected with the world and its ongoing material processes. Thus, the article emphasizes that it is only through the transgression of the human and nonhuman border that one can acknowledge the more ethical and political ways of cooperation needed for the appreciation of the multispecies dimension of our world and its survival. (shrink)

Dogs are here to live with, not just to think with. In this autoethnographic essay, I share my experience of loneliness and more-than-human kinship while being in lockdown with my dog, Frank, in our small flat in Edinburgh due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I open with our histories and how we have come to be kin in order to make our positionalities explicit. I then tell three stories that illustrate how our lives – and our bodies – (...) are being shaped by the current pandemic, addressing the ways in which its contribution to my loneliness in COVID-induced lockdown manifested in our everyday life. Engaging with existing scholarship on emotional/personal, social and cultural loneliness, I theorise that life in lockdown suffers from a new type of loneliness: proximal loneliness. Then, I build on the concept of response-ability to argue that multispecies kinship helps to alleviate feelings of proximal loneliness through emergent practices that make us response-able – care and respond – to one another. I contend that even in these unprecedented and viral times that have come to elicit profound feelings of loneliness and despair for many, the repertoire of our multispecies emergent practices that may help us through the difficulties of proximal loneliness continues to exist and grow with shared response-abilities of our kinship across the species boundaries. (shrink)

Vampires are portrayed opposite to humans, depicted as the dichotomy between predator and prey. Being ever so near to their prey, vampires develop a proclivity for imbibing or emulating characteristics that are considered to be in the sole charge of humans. This text employed is The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas. The article will analyse Edward Weyland as a post-human symbol, positing himself as an ever-evolving entity that is both human as well as a threshold to gauge (...) humanity of the other characters involved. The article underlines the ways in which Giorgio Agamben’s concept of Anthropological Machine and Katherine Hayles’s concept of Technogenesis will be used to examine Weyland and other characters as being participants in mutual evolution, tacitly affecting each other through performative actions. The article will inspect the term ‘human’ as more than just a reified concept, as a term that is constantly in flux and how bio-politics is immanent to the very concept of human. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to determine the opinions of private medical practitioners in Bloemfontein, South Africa, regarding euthanasia of terminally ill patients. This descriptive study was performed amongst a simple random sample of 100 of 230 private medical practitioners in Bloemfontein. Information was obtained through anonymous self-administered questionnaires. Written informed consent was obtained. 68 of the doctors selected completed the questionnaire. Only three refused participation because they were opposed to euthanasia. Respondents were mainly male (74.2%), married (91.9%) and (...) Afrikaans-speaking (91.9%). More were specialists (53.2%) than general practitioners (46.8%). A smaller percentage (35.5%) would never consider euthanasia for themselves compared to for their patients (46.8%). The decision should be made by the patient (50%), the patient’s doctor with two colleagues (46.8%), close family (45.2%) or a special committee of specialists in ethics and medicine (37.1%). The majority (46.9%) indicated that euthanasia should be performed by an independent doctor trained in euthanasia, followed by the patient’s doctor (30.7%). Notification should mainly be given to a special committee (49.9%). Only 9.8% felt that no notification was necessary. There was strong opposition to prescribing of medication to let the patient die. Withdrawal of essential medical treatment to speed up death was the most acceptable method. Although the responding group was fairly homogeneous, responses varied widely, indicating the complexity of opinions. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to analyse selected threads of Olga Tokarczuk’s literary work and selected artworks of Patricia Piccinini as a posthumanist critique of anthropocentrism. My analysis will be guided by the question of how art clarifies and helps us to understand a world in which boundaries between species are crossed and dualistic divisions – nature/culture, human/animal, human/machine – no longer apply. I will show that art is a space of expression in which the subjectivity of (...) posthumanist hybrids is given the chance to infiltrate universal consciousness and break down the anthropocentric monolith of western European culture. The article will also cite the posthumanist postulate of decentralization of the human subject, as implemented artistically by Tokarczuk and Piccinini in their works. This postulate signifies the need to accept the new responsibility a human being bears as part of a larger, heterogeneous whole (Donna Haraway), as well as to develop a posthumanist ethics (Rosi Braidotti). With reference to one of Tokarczuk’s essays, I propose to describe this new ethics as ‘sensitive ethics’. (shrink)

A growing body of literature argues that achieving radical change in the agri-food system requires a radical renegotiation of our relationship with the environment alongside a change in our thinking and approach to transformational food politics. This paper argues that relational approaches such as a more-than-human ethic of care (MTH EoC) can offer a different and constructive perspective to analyse agri-food system transformation because it emphasises social structures and relationships as the basis of environmental change. A MTH (...) EoC has not yet been applied to regenerative agriculture, yet other literature on regenerative agriculture suggests that care may be present in these spaces and calls for the need for social science analysis of the regenerative movement. This paper uses a MTH EoC lens to reveal a diverse array of ways in which power is and can be deployed for change in the regenerative agriculture movement in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Globally, regenerative agriculture tends to be analysed through positivist, scientific approaches that focus on biophysical markers of ecological improvement. Yet, a relational approach reveals how engagement in regenerative agriculture is creating significant shifts in mindset towards more holistic and relational understandings of biological and social ecosystems. A regenerative mindset framework is suggested as a method of understanding the connection between a regenerative form of thinking, being and doing for farmers. Interviews suggested that this shift in farmers’ socio-ecological relations is crucial to the transformational potential of regenerative agriculture. This paper argues that relational analyses such as the MTH EoC approach used to analyse regenerative agriculture in this research, refresh the way we analyse agri-food system change. They also are critical to guiding and supporting on-the-ground socio-ecological shifts that are necessary to see agricultural transformation. (shrink)

The first part (“Is there a future?”), discusses the idea of the future in the context of Carl Schmitt’s vision for the spatial revolutions of modernity, and then the idea of Anthropocene, as a synonym for an environmental crisis endangering the very survival of humankind. From this point of view, the conquest of space and the colonization of Mars at the center of futuristic and technocratic visions appear to be an attempt to escape from human responsibilities on Earth. The (...) second part (“AI and other hyperobjects”) discusses the extent of intellectual hubris expressed in computation, AI (Garvin Minsky e Ray Kurzweil), and the philosophy of computing and information (Eric Fredkin), involved in the elaboration of new theoretical assessments on the ultimate nature of reality. Their vision is then contrasted and made to interact with that of philosopher Timothy Morton. He has taken the perspective of global warming and the possibility of ecological catastrophe seriously, avoiding all the futuristic enthusiasms and instead emphasizing the radical nature of the transformations that humans experience in the present. In this perspective, AI becomes one of the “hyperobjects,” like the Internet or climate change, in which humans are immersed. Morton’s hyperobjects delineate an uncanny view of the future; this uncanniness is not related to the supernatural but to the environment. The third section (“More-than-human-humanism”) further reflects on the “uncanniness” that human perceive in the encounters with the manifestations of hyperobjects. It also seeks to understand the human position in the face of the radical technological transformations induced by cybernetics and AI. This section discusses Anti-humanism, Transhumanism, and Posthumanism within the broader category of more-than-human thought, which seems to be a more appropriate term to clarify the possible misunderstandings induced by the word “posthuman” and “transhuman.” The central question is not to empower (Transhumanism) or disempower (Posthumanism) humans, but to see them in relation to what is not human, including other animals, the environment, and the machine. The analysis considers the works of Cary Wolfe, Jane Bennet, Bryant Levi, among others, and introduces ethical debates on cyborgs, robots, and Autonomous weapons systems (AWS). The fourth section (“Ethical Perspectives”) continues this inquiry, concentrating on the non-standard ethical theories of Luciano Floridi (Computer and Information Ethics) and David Gunkel (The question of the Machine). It examines the opportunity and feasibility of including in the discussion on the ethics of our time - characterized by the pervasiveness of AI - the notions of consciousness as theorized by Emmanuel Levinas’s Humanism of the Other and Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another. Finally, the last section (“The time of the end?”) reflects on how the hyperobject, Anthropocene, re-establishes a sense of limits in human history and confirms the special responsibility of human beings, and supports the need for a more-than-human-humanism. The latter, in other words, means intertwining ourselves with a unique ecosystem which cannot be overlooked and which restores meaning to our relationship with the past, present, and future. The awareness of the current challenges of technology can and must express itself in different forms of resistance to the adverse effects of AI in our lives. The ethical approach based on the persisting role of human consciousness is essential, but it must be coupled with human decision-making and political action. (shrink)

In Political Solidarity, I argue that political solidarity is a relation between humans against an injustice that is human in origin. I further argue that political solidarity requires a decision-making model that acknowledges differences in social and epistemological privilege while also seeking to understand the situation of oppression or injustice and acknowledging “multiple, overlapping, and at times contradictory knowledge claims.” However, because of unequal commitments to solidaristic aims and because of a variety of methods for enacting solidaristic commitments, I (...) argue that political solidarity is not necessarily democratic in its decision-making.In this paper I ask whether these arguments stand up .. (shrink)

The climate crisis has implications for the idea of justice. The paper explores this idea to inquire whether climate change wrongs animals and, if it does, how these wrongs are constitutive of an injustice. The first question is answered in the positive to then propose an answer to the second question through an account of climate injustice articulated as a problem of distribution of ecological space. On that basis, the general conclusion of the paper is that at least some harms (...) suffered by animals are constitutive of climate distributive injustices. They are cases of wrongful appropriation of ecological space, that is, of the benefits that the Earth’s life-support systems and its physical resources provide to sentient animals. These are wrongs against animals that should be condemned, prohibited and redressed. (shrink)

One day, Matthew Eaton was walking through an impromptu animal shelter display at his local pet store when suddenly an eight-month-old kitten dug his claws into Eaton’s flesh. Eaton recognized that the “eyes of this cat and the curve of his claw” compelled a response analogous to those found in the writings of Buber, Levinas, and Derrida. And not just Eaton but a whole community of theologians have found themselves in an encounter with particular places and animals that demands rich (...) theological reflection. Eaton enlisted fellow editors Harvie and Bechtel to collect the essays in this volume, in which theologians listen to horses, rats, snakes, cats, dogs, and the earth itself, who become new theological voices demanding a response. In this volume, the voice of the more-than-human world is heard as making theology possible. These essays suggest that what we say theologically represents not simply ideas of our own making subsequently superimposed onto the natural world through our own discovery, but rather flow from an expressive Earth. With additional contributions from: Kimberly Carfore Lisa E. Dahill Celia Deane-Drummond Heather Eaton Nathan Kowalsky Abigail Lofte Jame Schaefer Cristina D. Vanin Mark Wallace Grace Y. Kao Chris Carter John Berkman Laura Hobgood. (shrink)

This article analyses research that has explored the potential of a focus on indeterminate bodies for decision making, policy and politics. Drawing on different ways of conceptualising indeterminacy in scientific and policy domains it describes the Loweswater Care Project, a participatory ‘knowledge collective’ that attempted to avoid converting the complexities of vital cyanobacterial bodies into a purely social or managerial set of questions around water quality. Through a commitment to opening out the nature of ‘things’, participants in this collective honed (...) new questions and avenues of inquiry around cyanobacteria and its relations. The Loweswater Care Project was a kind of ‘open’ in Haraway’s sense, where questions and demands are put to bodies, and to the apparatus that allows us to sense them, in ways that do not shy away from the probabilistic character of entities and their relations. The implications of generating indeterminacies in this setting are explored for environmental decision making, policy and politics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Tracing the Anthropocene and Entangled Trauma in Yashar Kemal's NovelsMore-Than-Human Lives in the Post-Ottoman WorldDeniz Gündoǧan Ibrişim (bio)Yashar Kemal (1923–2015), one of Turkey's most prominent Kurdish-Turkish novelists and human rights activists, largely engages with the southern Turkish countryside, which the author himself had known well in his early life.1 Kemal is commonly recognized as the writer of Çukurova or the Clician Plain (Cilicia Pedias in antiquity), (...) a large fertile plain in southern Turkey. The plain covers the easternmost areas of Mersin Province, southern and central Adana Province, Western Osmaniye, and Northwestern Hatay, and it has been a major place of anthropogenic change and industrialization since the 1930s, in the aftermath of transition from the Ottoman Empire to the modern Republic. Kemal presents the severe impact of the destruction of the forests and the draining of the swamps on the nature of the local people, whose way of life was transformed by this anthropogenic uprooting during the modernization and industrialization brought about by successive political and environmental administrations in post-Ottoman Turkey:The earth was covered with woods from Misis to the Mediterranean Sea in the olden days. There is a tree called Kars. Due to the fact that the Kars tree grows there the place was called Kars for a long time.... Now there is nothing; not one single tree until the Mediterranean. Historians write that the land was a great forest even in the 19th century. This was stated in a letter of Cevdet Pasha written in 1865.... Hundreds, even thousands of [End Page 32] tractors entered the Çukurova, everything happened overnight, so to say. Farm workers digging the earth to a depth of 75 centimeters were left with nothing to eat and nowhere to dwell, left with no forest, no Kars, no tree, no cane thickets, no bushes, and no swamps. I witnessed unbelievable destruction. The Çukurova turned into a desert of agriculture. This is the reality of our century, the actual conditions of our times.(qtd. in Andaç 61–62; my translation)I suggest that Kemal's lamentation here introduces non-Western stories, placing post-Ottoman vulnerability and resilience into the Anthropocene, our current geological era in which humans as a collective are said to have become a geophysical force on a planetary scale.2 The above excerpt encourages the reader to embark on an alternative reading in which the anthropogenic changes have deep and environmentally damaging roots in the Middle Eastern region, including Turkey (see Inal and Turhan 1–9). Despite the global and universal staging of the Anthropocene within North America and Western Europe, it is crucial here to underscore how the Anthropocene renders both a global process of anthropogenic climate change and a local laying down of industrial change in other landscapes and cities beyond its Eurocentric roots and routes.Within this context, this article argues that Kemal's literary works speak well to the concerns of the Anthropocene epoch, characterized by rapid and fundamental human-driven alterations of Earth, revealing longue duree linkages between weather, war, industrialization, empire, agriculture, urbanization, and deforestation that have created extraordinary changes on local and global scales. In the above passage, where we read the loss of the woods from Misis to the Mediterranean, Kemal manifests an acute awareness that the tree already disappears amid a vanishing ecosystem. Elsewhere, Kemal recounts the destruction of the forests and swamps that grants the Çukurova region its richness and vitality. At the same time, he shows how the particular process of deforestation dramatically changes ordinary lives of both human and nonhuman communities in the area during the modernizing and westernizing processes in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire. This dramatic change is illustrated in Hüyükteki Nar Ağacı (The Pomegranate Tree on the Knoll). Andaç quotes Kemal as follows: [End Page 33]Çukurova was a whole forest of pomegranate trees from here to the sea at one time. In spring and summer time, these trees would be covered with red blossoms, so that the whole area from here to Ayas would be all red and would wave like the sea. Black snakes used to mate... (shrink)

Over the last four decades, both ecofeminism and care ethics have profoundly theorized the link between oppression and what is viewed as Others, such as women, non-human animals and nature. After uncovering and analyzing some important commonalities and differences between these two branches of feminist ethical theories and their critiques of dominant Western philosophy and ethics, Tove Pettersen also identifies some clear thematic and methodological overlaps with Arne Johan Vetlesen’s philosophy. She explores three topics in particular where ecofeminism and (...) care ethics may benefit from an exchange, and which is also relevant to Vetlesen’s scholarship: the relationship between reason and emotion, the relational ontology, and the emphasis on lived experience. In addition to challenging traditional conceptualizations of reality, conventional value hierarchies, and established power configurations, ecofeminism and care ethics also propose alternatives to oppressive arrangements and new ideals for the future, which are also discussed in this chapter. By integrating ecofeminism and care ethics into one conversation, Pettersen argues, these theories can enhance each other’s philosophical foundations and provide a powerful framework for analyzing the interconnection between the unjustified domination of women, other Others, and nature. They can also contribute toward kindling the radical shift in mindset and urgent action that Arne Johan Vetlesen calls for in his environmental philosophy. (shrink)

Infusing contemporary critical terrorism studies (CTS) with concepts and methodologies from philosophy and critical theory via a Baradian posthumanist agential realist perspective and (counter)terrorist cases and vignettes, this chapter argues for a retheorisation of (counter)terrorism. It does so, firstly, by reconceptualising terrorism and counterterrorism as complex assemblages consisting not only of discursive-material components – an entanglement now largely accepted within CTS and critical security studies (CSS) – but also of affective layers and more-than-human phenomena. Secondly, by analysing (...) European urban (counter)terrorist cases from the UK, Germany, France, and Spain, together with these cases’ surprising spacetime-jumping interlinkages underwriting what we here conceptualise as queer(ing) spacetimematterings, this chapter zooms in on the intra-actions taking place between human and more-than-human agential phenomena and their risk-managed urban environments. Lastly, extra analytical attention is paid to how, in this neoliberal day and age – here rephrased as control society-driven ‘situationscaping times’ – very specific macro- and micropolitical violence-preventing measures and efforts are employed in the fight against various manifestations of urban terror and terrorism. (shrink)

A common view in both philosophy and the vision sciences is that, in human vision, wavelength information is primarily ‘for’ colouring: for seeing surfaces and various media as having colours. In this article we examine this assumption of ‘colour-for-colouring’. To motivate the need for an alternative theory, we begin with three major puzzles from neurophysiology, puzzles that are not explained by the standard theory. We then ask about the role of wavelength information in vision writ large. How might wavelength (...) information be used by any monochromat or dichromat and, finally, by a trichromatic primate with object vision? We suggest that there is no single ‘advantage’ to trichromaticity but a multiplicity, only one of which is the ability to see surfaces and so on as having categorical colours. Instead, the human trichromatic retina exemplifies a scheme for a general encoding of wavelength information given the constraints imposed by high spatial resolution object vision. Chromatic vision, like its partner, luminance vision, is primarily for seeing. Viewed this way, the ‘puzzles’ presented at the outset make perfect sense. 1 Reframing the Problem1.1 Introduction1.2 Three puzzles1.2.1 Why is trichromatic vision an anomaly in diurnal mammals?1.2.2 Why does the colour system occupy such a large and central part in human vision?1.2.3 Why are the blue cones so rare?1.3 Recasting the question2 The Costs and Benefits of Spectral Vision2.1 Spectral information and object vision2.2 Encoding the spectral dimension of light2.2.1 ‘General’ versus ‘specific’ encoding2.2.2 Spectral encoding and the monochromat2.2.3 Spectral encoding and the dichromat2.2.4 Spectral encoding and the human trichromat2.3 Three puzzles revisited2.3.1 Why is trichromatic vision an anomaly in diurnal mammals?2.3.2 Why does the colour system occupy such a large and central part in human vision?2.3.3 Why are the blue cones so rare3 Conclusion. (shrink)

Ethical approaches rooted in care are distinct and important contributors to ethical discussions surrounding animals. Recently, however, concern has been raised that practices of care can facilitate the instrumentalization of animal life in a way that is antithetical to an ethical relationship toward animals. This article explores this debate through a discussion of contemporary apiculture practices. This analysis reveals that the practices of care that constitute contemporary apiculture are the very same practices that have facilitated the instrumentalization of the honeybee. (...) This suggests that accounts of care ethics regarding animal life need to be complicated and that care ethicists need to be more attuned to the ways in which care can become complicit in the practices they would seek to oppose. (shrink)

Environmental ethics deals with discussing the ethical framework of environmental values, their organization and regulation, and their ethical premises. One of the main cul-de-sacs that environmental ethics has is its anthropocentrism that can be observed through its diverse ethical approaches—even ecocentric ones, developed as non-anthropocentric egalitarian alternatives. This article aims to question the exclusiveness of Anthropos, the practices, values, and discourses that determine the scope and course of environmental ethics, and the exclusion of nonhuman animals or more-than (...) class='Hi'>human beings from its focus. It first examines the main approaches in environmental ethics (land ethic, deep ecology, social ecology, and postmodern environmental ethics)—biocentric, ecocentric, anthropocentric, socialist, postmodern—and reveals that they are but limited to the human perspective, deeply rooted in human exceptionalism. All of these approaches provide us with a critical frame that still needs to be deconstructed so that they will not project an anthropocentric orientation. This article posits that the compass of environmental ethics, recently aligning itself to embrace the more-than-human world in its ecocentric attitude, still needs to be revisited for its discourses of exclusion. At this point, new materialism functions as a prolific theoretical site as it diminishes the classical boundaries between human and animal or subject and object that anthropocentric environmental ethics relies on. With such concepts as “agential realism” (Barad), “transcorporeal ethics” (Alaimo), “vibrant matter” (Bennett), or “storied matter” (Oppermann and Iovino) the new materialist view of the human and the nonhuman evolves to end set dualities in the discourses of environmental ethics. This article concludes that the new materialist theory destabilizes any anthropocentric position in environmental ethics and includes more-than-human beings in its ethical focus, discarding any dualities that serve anthropocentrism or human exceptionalism. (shrink)

Finishing this essay exactly one year after the official arrival of the SARS-COV-2 virus in Belgium and the Netherlands—where the cartographers of this essay are currently located—it is safe to say that the COVID-19 pandemic has immensely impacted our day-to-day lives. The pandemic has not only forced us to question various taken-for-granted existential certainties and luxuries provided by a capitalist system out to destroy the earth but has also re-spotlighted post-Enlightenment critiques of the human subject. If these pandemic times (...) are indeed more-than-human, then the clock is ticking for the discipline of philosophical anthropology to face these post-anthropological facts and receive what feminist science studies scholar Donna J. Haraway has aptly called a thorough dose of “epistemological electroshock therapy” (1988, p. 578). Taking Haraway’s foregoing call and the idea of thinking-with the (end of the) Anthropocene seriously, we construct a critical cartography of Emmanuel Levinas’ take on philosophical anthropology in dialogue with other major philosophical anthropologists and feminist new materialists while arguing for a post-anthropology for the Chthulucene. (shrink)

As ecologically and socially oriented food initiatives proliferate, the significance of these initiatives with respect to conventional food systems remains unclear. This paper addresses the transformative potential of alternative food networks by drawing on insights from recent research on food and embodiment, diverse food economies, and more-than-human food geographies. I identify several synergies between these literatures, including an emphasis on the pedagogic capacities of AFNs; the role of the researcher; and the analytical and political value of using (...) assemblage and actor-network thinking to understand the far-reaching forces and power disparities confronting proponents of more ethical and sustainable food futures. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Val Plumwoods call for writers to engage in ‘the struggle to think differently’. Specifically, she calls writers to engage in the task of opening up an experience of nature as powerful and as possessing agency. I argue that a critical component of opening up who or what can be understood as possessing agency involves challenging the conception of time as linear, externalised and absolute, particularly in as much as it has guided Western conceptions of (...) process, change and invention. I explore this through anthropologist Carol Greenhouse's claim that social conceptions of time can be read as theories of agency. Thus, in seeking to respond to Plumwood’s call to think differently, the question becomes: what kind of writing would enable a fundamental re-thinking of agency without, however, ignoring the way Western notions of agency have been shaped by linear accounts of time? I look to Jacques Derrida's work as one example. I first locate the possibility of re-writing time and agency in the experiential aspects of his writing, which I argue interrupt both the reader’s sense of agency and linear models of reading. But further, I connect Derrida’s work directly with Plumwood’s by examining how his deconstruction of the Western concept of invention may enable another account of creative change that could reshape what counts as ‘agency’ within the Anthropocene. (shrink)

In the struggle for breathable air amid pollution and climate change, both resistance and inspiration can be found in ‘atmospheric care practices’ (Vine 2019). In this article, I embed these practices in a more than human political approach (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). More than human atmospheric care practices work to undo toxic harm both on a material and social level while intimately involving human beings with more than human worlds. (...) In so doing, they are demonstrative of different kinds of agency and political activity that open up alternative ways of relating and responding to climate change. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to examine the status and promise of Emmanuel Levinas’s humanism for a posthuman and more-than-human age. I suggest that, even though Levinas’s approach partially r...

This paper presents an attempt to describe parents’ activities, in which context it is puzzling that – on the basis of a negative assessment of the current reality (current crises, including the privatization of what is public) – parents seem to be searching intensively for new solutions that would make better not only the school but also the world it is a part of. Their focus, in this, is on the local dimension of activities that refer to sustainability and emphasize (...) place. In this approach, place is a field of confrontation and constant becoming. Parental activities in one sustainable community school in Chicago is the point of departure to introduce a pedagogy of the vital place that pays specific attention to how the heritage of these places makes them (partially) resistant to capitalist capture, and somewhat ready to take on the challenges of the crisis in which we live on the planet today. The reflection presented in this article is guided by the assumption that, in these times, when the survival of humankind is at stake, we desperately need a more-than-human format of world. (shrink)

Posidonia oceanica is an endemic seagrass from the mediterranean that provides key ecosystem services. A protected species, its presence is regressing due to anthropogenic pressures, some associated to the tourism economy that much of the Mediterranean coast depends on. In 1992, the European Union declared it a priority habitat, and since the early 2000s, it has occupied a central space in marine conservation debates in the Balearic Islands. Popularly known as Posidonia, this seagrass went from being considered dirt that ruined (...) virgin Balearic beaches to become an emblematic species. This article takes this U-turn in policy and public perception as a study case to think of knowledge-making practices and restoration initiatives as a form of environmental care. The relational, situated and affective character of care ethics helps to understand the human and ecological labour embedded in knowledge-making and restoration practices and its inevitable engagement with the Balearic tourism industry. Drawing on those engagements, I reflect on environmental care practices of knowledge-making and restoration, arguing that they emerge ambivalently: they challenge management logics based on economic rationales while forced to develop and coexist inside those same rationales. I conclude by arguing that developing care-centric narratives for environmental conservation and restoration is essential to continue promoting more-than-human aquatic relations in which the needs of others are the ethical basis for action. (shrink)

Pleistocene Park is a large-scale science experiment in Arctic Siberia in the form of a future-oriented rewilding project with the goal of mitigating climate change. The park’s creators hypothesize that introducing large herbivores into the area will slow the thawing of permafrost. Using the approach of multispecies ethnography in attending to the nonhuman agencies at work in the project, I argue that the park differs from other rewilding projects, which are usually ecocentric, in emerging as a survivalist project with a (...) distinct anthropocentric bent. Even so, the park’s survivalist goal for humans coexists with ontologies based on collaboration and mutual aid between humans and nonhumans and between organic and inorganic matter, with extensive agency assigned to nonhuman others. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within the frame of the park’s various genealogies, I trace the project’s underlying assumptions in equal measure to the history of Russian science and to the park’s lead scientists’ experience of sociopolitical rupture following the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a case study, Pleistocene Park is especially suited to exploring issues of time and temporality, apocalypticism and redemption, and extinction and eternity, in addition to particular visions of the natural and the human. (shrink)

The short experimental film Shifting Perspectives stems from a collaborative research project initiated in 2019 in Sydney, Australia, during the 'Choreographic Hack Lab-a week-long laboratory co-presented by Critical Path and Sydney Festival in partnership with the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS), which asked artists and academics to rethink and respond to the idea of the Anthropocene (Pini & George, 2019). The film was later developed in 2020 during a Responsive Residency at Critical Path, Sydney, awarded to anthropologist and (...) choreographer Sarah Pini in collaboration with Jestin George, biotechnologist and visual artist, and Melissa Ramos, visual artist and filmmaker. This work aims to open a multivocal interdisciplinary dialogue across screendance, performance and synthetic biology. Inspired by a recent conversation between two leaders in the field of synthetic biology (Sarah Richardson and Tom Knight) and their divergent approaches to working with microbial life (Agapakis, 2019), the film invites to consider how collaborating with microorganisms can reshape our future in a more-than-human world. (shrink)

Men often make riskier decisions than women across a wide range of real-life behaviors. Whether this sex difference is accentuated, diminished, or stable under stressful conditions is, however, contested in the scientific literature. A critical blind spot lies amid this contestation: Most studies use standardized, laboratory-based, cognitive measures of decision making rather than complex real-life social simulation tasks to assess risk-related behavior. To address this blind spot, we investigated the effects of acute psychosocial stress on risk decision making (...) in men and women using a standardized cognitive measure and a novel task that simulated a real-life social situation. Participants were exposed to either an acute psychosocial stressor or an equivalent control condition. Stressor-exposed participants were further characterized as high- or low-cortisol responders. Results confirmed that the experimental manipulation was effective. On the IGT, participants characterized as low-cortisol responders made significantly riskier decisions than those characterized as high-cortisol responders. Similarly, in the online chatroom, participants characterized as low-cortisol responders were, relative to those in the Non-Stress group, significantly more likely to make risky decisions. Together, these results suggest that at lower levels of cortisol both men and women tend to make riskier decisions in both economic and social spheres. (shrink)

With service robots becoming more ubiquitous in social life, interaction design needs to adapt to novice users and the associated uncertainty in the first encounter with this technology in new emerging environments. Trust in robots is an essential psychological prerequisite to achieve safe and convenient cooperation between users and robots. This research focuses on psychological processes in which user dispositions and states affect trust in robots, which in turn is expected to impact the behavior and reactions in the interaction (...) with robotic systems. In a laboratory experiment, the influence of propensity to trust in automation and negative attitudes toward robots on state anxiety, trust, and comfort distance toward a robot were explored. Participants were approached by a humanoid domestic robot two times and indicated their comfort distance and trust. The results favor the differentiation and interdependence of dispositional, initial, and dynamic learned trust layers. A mediation from the propensity to trust to initial learned trust by state anxiety provides an insight into the psychological processes through which personality traits might affect interindividual outcomes in human-robot interaction (HRI). The findings underline the meaningfulness of user characteristics as predictors for the initial approach to robots and the importance of considering users’ individual learning history regarding technology and robots in particular. (shrink)

The subtle thought of care -- Knowledge politics -- Assembling neglected "things" -- Thinking with care -- Touching visions -- Speculative ethics in antiecological times -- Alterbiopolitics -- Soil times: the pace of ecological care.

Kabbalah and Ecology is a groundbreaking book that resets the conversation about ecology and the Abrahamic traditions. David Mevorach Seidenberg challenges the anthropocentric reading of the Torah, showing that a radically different orientation to the more-than-human world of nature is not only possible, but that such an orientation also leads to a more accurate interpretation of scripture, rabbinic texts, Maimonides and Kabbalah. Deeply grounded in traditional texts and fluent with the physical sciences, this book proposes not (...) only a new understanding of God's image but also a new direction for restoring religion to its senses and to a more alive relationship with the more-than-human, both with nature and with divinity. (shrink)