The Anthropocene is characterised as much by a crisis in ethics and subjectivity as it is a geological marker of ecological degradation. Questions of subjectivity and alienation can no longer be seen as separate from the spheres of science and policymaking in western liberal democracies. The purpose of the strand, therefore, is to place ethics – the speculative field of how to exist, individually and collectively, both in human and non-human registers – at the centre of geographical and interdisciplinary concerns across politics, the environment, science and technology. In so doing, strand members examine, for example: controversies in bioethics; the field of non-western ethics in contemporary environmental, economic, and political discourses; the challenge and potential of decolonisation of environmental, economic, and political debates and pedagogies; the role of creative social and cultural theory in responding to ready-made problems; the place and force of affect in mediating and transforming shared political events; and the ways in which studies of science and technology enrol and legitimate historical and contemporary forms of knowledge and understanding. 

Themes

The strand is organised by six key conceptual themes:

1. Micropolitics: in what ways do new materialisms open-up novel fields of politics; how does affect and the virtual draw our attention to diverse expressions of shared political and environmental events? What kinds of subjectivities and relations are forged by emerging human and technological relations?
2. Embodiment: how are ‘publics’ of science and technology are reconfigured by efforts to make research responsive to ethical concern. How are new subjects and collectives imagined and called into being by ecological and political crises? How are ‘old’ political problems reconstituted in the wake of ecological catastrophe (e.g. the resurgence of debates over population control as a policy response to climate change)?
3. Durations: how is the Anthropocene pushing us to think life (histories) beyond human durations? How does this compel us to write and research more-than-human histories that collapse the divide between natural and human histories, and therefore human and physical geographies?
4. Ecological Ethics: a substantial field of scholarship, with interesting ties into environmental humanities, environmental law, socio-legal studies, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Questions asked include: What sorts of ecological knowledges become dominant and why? How does what counts as environmental and social policy discipline thinking and action? How might we think about and act otherwise to social and, hence, ecological, imperatives?
5. Ethics of Experimentalism:  in order to bring the material, embodied, and affective registers of social life, in both human and non-human registers and durations, to the fore we draw on an ethics of experimentalism that is open to what emerges in the research encounter and is not restricted by preconceived expectations or hypotheses. This demands we put both our ‘selves’ and our theories at risk and develop practices that problematise methodological assumptions embedded in both the human and physical sciences.
6. Epistemic Justice: examining the force of decolonization. Questions the colonial impulses that structure the formation of knowledge, and the injustices that flow from these epistemic injustices.

Collaborations

Difference Lab, University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia

Events

Annual Bassett Lecture (2021: Professor Rosi Braidotti)

Forthcoming Seminar Series, Autumn 2021

Members

Joe Gerlach, Franklin Ginn, Merle Patchett, Thomas Jellis, Negar Elodie Behzadi, Mark Jackson, Maria Fannin, James Duminy, James Palmer, Naomi Millner, Paul Glennie, Joe Williams, Joe Day, Sean Fox, Robert Mayhew, Yvonne Sherratt, John Morgan