Ventriloquism

The purpose of this paper was to re-visit data from a nine-week scrapbooking project, with Black and Latinx youth, in an urban after-school programme, using an affective lens. To examine the entanglement of human and non-human bodies, I (White, woman, researcher) returned to week three of the nine-week project, during which the youth and I explore health and fitness-related magazines. I explicate how affect, using feminist new materialism, drew me into three affective moments, which took place during and after the project had officially ended. In looking at these non-linear moments, I explain the ways in which the participants, materials and, perhaps, most importantly, myself became affected by a co-constitutive entanglement of human (youth, adult) and non-human (scrapbooks, images, texts) bodies. These moments generated affects that were uncomfortable, disruptive, and productive. I end the paper by urging researchers, educators, and practitioners to continue to engage in critical scholarship with youth, particularly in the United States. While this is a modest beginning, it is also a point to pause in discomfort and disruption which can, in turn, produce possibilities for youth and adults to destabilise traditional hierarchies in research and practice and learn from each other.

Steampunk is an aesthetic technological movement incorporating science fiction, art, engineering, and a vibrant 21st century Do-It-Yourself counterculture. This article explores the feminist potentials of ‘thinking with’ steampunk as a playful, affective and decidedly political response to the present technological condition. It starts out by navigating the field of affect theory with a Deleuzian reading of Baruch Spinoza on affect, to then engage in the affective renderings of the relations, rhythms, and power of a soma-technology central to steampunks as well as their Victorian predecessors: the corset. The purpose of the article is (at least) threefold: first, it sets out to complicate the notion of the corset as either oppressive or liberating by a move from signification to affect. Secondly, it aims to put a feminist spin on Spinoza, by offering what Moira Gatens (2000) calls a micropolitical feminism of the in-betweens of subjects (or bodies). The argument, thus, takes seriously the seeming lack of distinction in Spinoza between nature and artifice, which opens up possibilities of exploring the affective relations and the in-betweens of human and nonhuman bodies. Finally, and as a result of this interest in the affective relationality of human and nonhuman bodies, the article contributes to the discussion of ‘somatechnics’ ( Sullivan and Murray 2009 ) by proposing an intimate relationship between somatechnics and affect.

Landscapes have a long history of being shaped by human activities, leaving lasting imprints that persist into the 21st century. However, the last few centuries have witnessed an unprecedented transformation, as evidenced by the emergence of the Anthropocene. In this current epoch, it is undeniable that every landscape bears some degree of human influence, particularly in light of the ecological ramifications of global climate change. These human imprints on landscapes vary in their spatial reach and intensity of land use. Some are easily discernible, such as the striking rice terraces in Southeast Asia or the sprawling cities that have emerged on every continent. Others are more subtle, but no less significant, like the microscopic presence of microplastics in the milk of Indian cows or the traces of mercury found in the rivers of the most remote sections of the Brazilian Amazon Forest. The Brazilian Atlantic Forest Biome has undergone profound transformations, especially since the arrival of Portuguese colonizers, but even prior to that, when the first human inhabitants settled in the region. The landscapes within the Atlantic Forest have always incorporated a human and cultural aspect, dating back to the time when the shellmound builders arrived approximately 8,000 years ago. These early inhabitants left indelible marks on the landscape that can still be observed today. However, it is the more recent historical events that have left the most visible signs of culture imprinted in the landscapes. Abandoned coffee farms and remnants of old charcoal production sites stand as tangible reminders of past human activities within the Atlantic Forest. The colonization of Brazil has profoundly transformed the Atlantic Forest over the past five centuries. Diverse populations with distinct perceptions of nature and land-management practices have engaged with the forested environments in different regions of the Atlantic Forest biome. Landscapes serve as historical records that mirror the socioeconomic and cultural interactions with a physical dimension. Indigenous, Afro-Brazilian, and European knowledge systems and practices have all contributed to the formation of these landscapes, although it is crucial to acknowledge the violent colonial legacy that has shaped the country’s history. Therefore, the Atlantic Forest is shaped by human and nonhuman agencies, including diverse cultural influences (caiçara, quilombola, indigenous and rural livelihoods), that rearranged native species composition, including the introduction of exotic species. This has resulted in a patchwork of unique cultural landscapes within the biome, highlighting the interconnectedness between human populations and the forested environment. In essence, landscapes across the globe have been shaped by human activities, with the intensity and extent of these transformations increasing in recent centuries. The Brazilian Atlantic Forest Biome serves as a prime example of this phenomenon, with its rich history of human occupation and cultural influences evident in the landscape. While both subtle and overt imprints are present across the landscapes, it is the vestiges of recent historical events that emerge as prominent markers of human presence and activity within the contemporary cultural landscapes.

Recent Publications on Archaeological Ceramic Analyses and their Contributions to the Study of Ancient Pottery Technology

Using a critical legal geography approach that incorporates theories of law, space, and power, this paper explores how the public health surveillance of dengue fever is utilised by the state in an ongoing ‘war against the mosquito’ in Singapore. Here, the state deploys biopower as a form of spatio-legal ‘lawscaping’ – consisting of and implicating a host of actors, institutions, and objects – in order to seek and eradicate sources of stagnant water (and the mosquitoes that breed in them) in spaces across the city. The paper demonstrates how, in combating dengue fever this way, the public health surveillance and regulation of dengue fever in Singapore informs four distinct yet interconnected forms of spatio-legal materiality and normativity: a) the inspection of space; b) the invisibilisation of death; c) the implementation of self-regulatory objects; and d) the illegality of uncleanliness. Therefore, in tracing the public health surveillance of dengue fever as it relates to the biopolitical regulation of stagnant water, this paper is also able to evince how the state uses spatio-legal means to govern a range of sites as well as a host of human and non-human bodies, and in doing so reveal how state biopower can be exerted across different species. At the same time, these acts of biopolitical lawscaping serve to flatten different typologies of urban space – be they public, private, or even transient (or under construction). In its desire to eradicate mosquito breeding grounds, the state reduces urban space to that which is clean and unclean – even if unwittingly.

This article analyzes Rita Indiana’s novel La mucama de Omicunlé (Dominican Republic, 2015) from the perspective of queer ecologies. This approach seeks to dismantle normative conceptions of sexuality and nature through discourses and practices that articulate the relationships between human and non-human bodies from a fundamentally non-evolutionary, non-reproductive and multi-species perspective. La mucama de Omicunlé offers a unique opportunity to explore this approach by presenting an eco-political conspiracy plot -involving transgender characters, Afro-Caribbean rituals, magical animals, and time travel- to save the Caribbean Sea from a maritime disaster in the Dominican Republic. All this is framed in the context of the Caribbean, where the historical exploitation of nature intersects with the potentiality of this insular space to question the logics of disaster capitalism and imagine dissident and alternative ways of experiencing the body, sexuality, and the defense of the environment.

The current study applies the concept of the assemblage, an aggregation of discursive and nondiscursive bodies, objects, and ideas, to young adults and casual sex. By de-centering human subjectivity, we are able to focus on some of the ways in which dating apps and sexual desires, in addition to human and nonhuman bodies, can be propelled and/or impeded in anticipation of sexual encounters. To answer our research questions, we rely on online survey data from young adults living in the United States ( N = 99). Making use of the theoretical contributions of Deleuze and Guattari, our findings highlight the ways dating apps and social media contribute to organizing, arranging and rearranging the casual sex assemblage.

ABSTRACTVarious neuropsychiatric disorders are a common feature today, not least in educational contexts where Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common diagnosis. The dominant perspective regarding ADHD is biomedical. This perspective has been questioned and challenged in various ways. The aim of this article is to think ADHD through quantum physicist and philosopher Karen Barad’s [Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.] theory of agential realism. According to Barad, what we perceive as singular entities do not exist in advance. Barad pays attention to the world’s entanglements, and what we perceive as singular objects and subjects are effects of specific and various material-discursive practices acting as agential cuts. The theory of agential realism assigns performativity to matter, which highlights that ADHD is something that continuously comes into being together with human and non-human bodies. The material dimension has not previously been emphasised as a causal factor in studies on ADHD. In this article, the focus is on the agency of the book. As a conclusion, the importance of taking responsibility for every material-discursive practice with which we are always entangled is emphasised.

In recent decades, part of the human sciences has been dedicated to rethinking the separations between subjects and objects, or, in another sense, between nature and culture. If, in part of the Western context, this separation guaranteed the ontological primacy of subjects, other strands of thought have sought to rediscover the interactions between subjects and objects, including finding ways to establish the conditions of autonomy of objects by themselves. In particular and turning to the cultural context and the production of objects in capitalist societies, we ask about the conditions of autonomy of commodities. Depending on the perspective we adopt, the commodity loses its economic attribute, reappearing with other constitutive meanings. In this paper, we trace a brief conceptual course about the separations between subjects and objects and the contemporary interpretations that intend to undo such separation. First, we start with Sigmund Freud’s critical comments about the animistic practices of indigenous people and Karl Marx’s comments about commodity fetishism. According to Peter Stallybrass (2009), Marx would not be antagonistic to the fetish as a possible cultural form, but solely a critic of the commodity fetish in capitalist societies. Losing its harmful character, the fetish reappears as a potential agent of relations between human and non-human bodies, according to Latour (2005). Finally, we speculate on the commodity-object to reactivate the interlacements between subjects and objects in contemporaneity.

This essay offers a “landbody” method to examine how Xicanx (Chicanx Indigenous) performances express decolonial relationships between human and non-human bodies. I will employ a close textual reading method to analyze Chicana artist Laura Aguilar’s a self-portrait, Grounded #106, a photograph featuring the artist’s gender nonconforming body posed among a rocky outcrop. The arrangement of the photo—with the author’s broad back to the camera, her round form almost indistinguishable from the large boulders that surround her—blur distinctions between human and non-human embodiment. I utilize a “landbody” reading to consider how Aguilar’s text stages the ongoing presence of queer Indigenous bodies that are deeply rooted to the land in ways that disrupt settler processes of Native disappearance. The paper thus develops a methodology to guide our reading practices to analyze how texts and performances express relationships between land and bodies that navigate settler processes of dispossession.

Thesaurus definitions map out resonance in terms such as "richness or significance, especially in evoking an association or strong emotion" and "oscillation induced in a physical system when it is affected by another system that is itself oscillating at the right frequency". More than a technical term, resonance refers to instances of being affected: to connectivity and contact between objects, ideas, and people as they move one another. As a dynamic relation of varying intensities and speeds where the affective and the emotional stick and cohere, resonance gives shape to online connections and disconnections, proximities and distances between both human and non-human bodies. This contribution explores the affordances of the notion of resonance in analyzing the networked circulation of data and the affective intensities that it entails. More specifically, it deploys resonance in unpacking the notions of virality and memes in ways that both detach them from biological premises and make it possible to account for their power to affect the people engaging with them.

This paper conceptualizes children’s mathematical thinking from a materialist perspective on language and mathematics. This perspective considers human and non-human bodies as ontologically equivalent; that is, as both being agentive, vibrant, and animated, thus resisting static representations. This conceptualization is an alternative to the interactionist and language-based models that have dominated research in language and mathematics. This conceptual approach informs the paper’s non-hierarchical analysis of a bilingual classroom studying the concept of equivalent fractions. The non-hierarchical nature of this analysis permits a dynamic shift of focus from learners to materials to mathematical concepts. This non-traditional analysis informs the paper’s final discussion regarding the nature of children’s mathematical thinking. The discussion highlights how working outside language-based interactionist models provides an alternative view of children and artefacts as equal partners working within and as part of the vibrant boundaries between matter and meaning.

How are colonial violence and resistance entangled in Dutch plantation poetry? This article aims to answer this question through an analysis of Paul François Roos’Surinaamsche mengelpoëzy (1804), a collection of poems describing Suriname’s plantation culture. Previously, its representations of Suriname’s natural environment have been interpreted as exotic variations on pastoral conventions, offering a Eurocentric perspective on the colony. This article hypothesises that, even if literary conventions in the poems contributed to the concealment of colonial violence against the natural environment and the Afro-American population, an affective analysis can also reveal voices of dissent. To do so, it will combine ecocritical and postcolonial theory to demonstrate how Surinaamsche mengelpoëzy ‘naturalised’ distinctions between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, and between ‘harmony’ and ‘combat’, asserting colonial order. However, when this representation of Suriname’s plantation culture is conceptualised as an ‘affective economy’ in which human and non-human bodies are interrelated through economic and ecological affects, these distinctions start to blur, and order is destabilised. Using Monique Allewaert’s concept of ‘ecological personhood’ ecological affects become visible as Afro-American resistance against European notions of individuality and sovereignty.

Interview has been condensed to include most relevant topics to essay titled, “Shared Vulnerability: Rethinking Human and Nonhuman Bodies in Disasters.” Green Theory and Praxis Journal 13.1 (Winter 2020): 32-44.

The “field” has long been contested as spatially and temporally bounded. Feminist epistemologies have re-imagined and engaged field/work as shared, messy and co-constitutive, while critical more-than-human methodologies in the transdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities are further expanding our understanding of who and what counts in the production of knowledge in the field. This compendium article orbits around a collective concern for the sharedness of bodily and planetary ecologies through field/work. It brings together cross-disciplinary accounts of field encounters that critically explore what it feels like to do this work and what it entails. With a focus on practice and process, the six contributing authors—researchers, artists, practitioners, writers—consider how nonhumans share in our research, shaping the work we do, the questions we ask and the responses we craft. Together, they offer thoughtful provocations on the troubling and promising ways in which human and non-human bodies become unsettled and rearranged through field encounters.