Humans of Minneapolis
Author : Stephanie Glaros
Publisher :
Page : pages
File Size : 40,3 MB
Release : 2016-11-01
Category :
ISBN : 9781945769092
A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans
Author : Jakob von Uexküll
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 13,24 MB
Release : 2013-11-30
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781452903798
Book Description
“Is the tick a machine or a machine operator? Is it a mere object or a subject?” With these questions, the pioneering biophilosopher Jakob von Uexküll embarks on a remarkable exploration of the unique social and physical environments that individual animal species, as well as individuals within species, build and inhabit. This concept of the umwelt has become enormously important within posthumanist philosophy, influencing such figures as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Guattari, and, most recently, Giorgio Agamben, who has called Uexküll “a high point of modern antihumanism.” A key document in the genealogy of posthumanist thought, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans advances Uexküll’s revolutionary belief that nonhuman perceptions must be accounted for in any biology worth its name; it also contains his arguments against natural selection as an adequate explanation for the present orientation of a species’ morphology and behavior. A Theory of Meaning extends his thinking on the umwelt, while also identifying an overarching and perceptible unity in nature. Those coming to Uexküll’s work for the first time will find that his concept of the umwelt holds new possibilities for the terms of animality, life, and the framework of biopolitics.
Matters of Care
Author : María Puig de la Bellacasa
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 11,64 MB
Release : 2017-03-21
Category : Science
ISBN : 1452953473
Book Description
To care can feel good, or it can feel bad. It can do good, it can oppress. But what is care? A moral obligation? A burden? A joy? Is it only human? In Matters of Care, María Puig de la Bellacasa presents a powerful challenge to conventional notions of care, exploring its significance as an ethical and political obligation for thinking in the more than human worlds of technoscience and naturecultures. Matters of Care contests the view that care is something only humans do, and argues for extending to non-humans the consideration of agencies and communities that make the living web of care by considering how care circulates in the natural world. The first of the book’s two parts, “Knowledge Politics,” defines the motivations for expanding the ethico-political meanings of care, focusing on discussions in science and technology that engage with sociotechnical assemblages and objects as lively, politically charged “things.” The second part, “Speculative Ethics in Antiecological Times,” considers everyday ecologies of sustaining and perpetuating life for their potential to transform our entrenched relations to natural worlds as “resources.” From the ethics and politics of care to experiential research on care to feminist science and technology studies, Matters of Care is a singular contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary debate that expands agency beyond the human to ask how our understandings of care must shift if we broaden the world.
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet
Author : Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 734 pages
File Size : 50,91 MB
Release : 2017-05-30
Category : Science
ISBN : 1452954496
Book Description
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.
Humans, Animals and Biopolitics
Author : Kristin Asdal
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 11,19 MB
Release : 2016-07-01
Category : Science
ISBN : 1317119436
Book Description
Human-animal co-existence is central to a politics of life, how we order societies, and to debates about who ’we’ humans think ’we’ are. In other words, our ways of understanding and ordering human-animal relations have economic and political implications and affect peoples’ everyday lives. By bringing together historically-oriented approaches and contemporary ethnographies which engage with science and technology studies (STS), this book reflects the multi-sited, multi-species, multi-logic and multiple ways in which lives are and have been assembled, disassembled, practised and possibly policed and politicized. Instead of asking only how control and knowledge are and have been extended over life, the chapters in this book also look at what happens when control fails, at practices which defy orders, escape detection, fail to produce or only loosely hang together. In doing so the book problematises and extends the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics that has been such a central analytical concept in studies of human-animal relations and provides a unique resource of cases and theoretical refinements regarding the ways in which we live together with more than human others .
What is Posthumanism?
Author : Cary Wolfe
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 394 pages
File Size : 36,93 MB
Release : 2010
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0816666148
Book Description
What does it mean to think beyond humanism? Is it possible to craft a mode of philosophy, ethics, and interpretation that rejects the classic humanist divisions of self and other, mind and body, society and nature, human and animal, organic and technological? Can a new kind of humanities-posthumanities-respond to the redefinition of humanity's place in the world by both the technological and the biological or "green" continuum in which the "human" is but one life form among many? Exploring how both critical thought along with cultural practice have reacted to this radical repositioning, Cary Wolfe-one of the founding figures in the field of animal studies and posthumanist theory-ranges across bioethics, cognitive science, animal ethics, gender, and disability to develop a theoretical and philosophical approach responsive to our changing understanding of ourselves and our world. Then, in performing posthumanist readings of such diverse works as Temple Grandin's writings, Wallace Stevens's poetry, Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, the architecture of Diller+Scofidio, and David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, he shows how this philosophical sensibility can transform art and culture. For Wolfe, a vibrant, rigorous posthumanism is vital for addressing questions of ethics and justice, language and trans-species communication, social systems and their inclusions and exclusions, and the intellectual aspirations of interdisciplinarity. In What Is Posthumanism? he carefully distinguishes posthumanism from transhumanism (the biotechnological enhancement of human beings) and narrow definitions of the posthuman as the hoped-for transcendence of materiality. In doing so, Wolfe reveals that it is humanism, not the human in all its embodied and prosthetic complexity, that is left behind in posthumanist thought.
Fictionalizing Anthropology
Author : Stuart J. McLean
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 379 pages
File Size : 17,8 MB
Release : 2017-11-22
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1452955689
Book Description
What might become of anthropology if it were to suspend its sometime claims to be a social science? What if it were to turn instead to exploring its affinities with art and literature as a mode of engaged creative practice carried forward in a world heterogeneously composed of humans and other than humans? Stuart McLean claims that anthropology stands to learn most from art and literature not as “evidence” to support explanations based on an appeal to social context or history but as modes of engagement with the materiality of expressive media—including language—that always retain the capacity to disrupt or exceed the human projects enacted through them. At once comparative in scope and ethnographically informed, Fictionalizing Anthropology draws on an eclectic range of sources, including ancient Mesopotamian myth, Norse saga literature, Hesiod, Lucretius, Joyce, Artaud, and Lispector, as well as film, multimedia, and performance art, along with the concept of “fabulation” (the making of fictions capable of intervening in and transforming reality) developed in the writings of Bergson and Deleuze. Sharing with proponents of anthropology’s recent “ontological turn,” McLean insists that experiments with language and form are a performative means of exploring alternative possibilities of collective existence, new ways of being human and other than human, and that such experiments must therefore be indispensable to anthropology’s engagement with the contemporary world.
Humans at the End of the Ice Age
Author : Lawrence Guy Straus
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 380 pages
File Size : 48,74 MB
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1461311454
Book Description
Humans at the End of the Ice Age chronicles and explores the significance of the variety of cultural responses to the global environmental changes at the last glacial-interglacial boundary. Contributions address the nature and consequences of the global climate changes accompanying the end of the Pleistocene epoch-detailing the nature, speed, and magnitude of the human adaptations that culminated in the development of food production in many parts of the world. The text is aided by vital maps, chronological tables, and charts.
Humans
Author : Surekha Davies
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 335 pages
File Size : 36,28 MB
Release : 2025-02-04
Category : History
ISBN : 0520388097
Book Description
Why do humans make monsters, and what do monsters tell us about humanity? Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. Join award-winning historian of science Dr. Surekha Davies as she reveals how people have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way. With rich, evocative storytelling that braids together ancient gods and generative AI, Frankenstein's monster and E.T., Humans: A Monstrous History shows how monster-making is about control: it defines who gets to count as normal. In an age when corporations increasingly see people as obstacles to profits, this book traces the long, volatile history of monster-making and charts a better path for the future. The result is a profound, effervescent, empowering retelling of the history of the world for anyone who wants to reverse rising inequality and polarization. This is not a history of monsters, but a history through monsters.
The Pine Island Paradox
Author : Kathleen Dean Moore
Publisher : Milkweed Editions
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 34,32 MB
Release : 2011-12-18
Category : Nature
ISBN : 1571318585
Book Description
Can the love reserved for family and friends be extended to a place? “Luminous essays” on nature and environmental stewardship (Booklist). Named one of the Top Ten Northwest Books of the Year by the Oregonian In this book, acclaimed author Kathleen Dean Moore, a winner of the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award for Holdfast, reflects on how deeply the environment is entrenched in the human spirit, despite the notion that nature and humans are somehow separate. Moore’s essays, deeply felt and often funny, make connections in what can appear to be a disconnected world. Written in parable form, her stories of family and friends—of wilderness excursions with her husband and children, camping trips with students, blowing up a dam, her daughter’s arrest for protesting the war in Iraq—affirm an impulse of caring that belies the abstract division of humans from nature, of the sacred from the mundane. Underlying these wonderfully engaging stories is the author’s belief in a new ecological ethic of care, one that expands the idea of community to include the environment, and embraces the land as family. “Stands with the best tradition of nature writing.” —The Oregonian
