Franklin Ginn | University of Bristol (original) (raw)
Papers by Franklin Ginn
What does it mean that plants-soy, coffee, wheat, cotton, lettuce and more-are growing in Near-Ea... more What does it mean that plants-soy, coffee, wheat, cotton, lettuce and more-are growing in Near-Earth orbit? What histories account for their presence beyond the terrestrial, and what futures might they be incubating? In this paper, to address these questions, I describe four very different planetary vegetal thresholds, which I understand as geohistoric events thick with potentials for realigning worlds. First, technoscientific cultures of space science. Second, the allying of crops and elites in late neolithic plantation agriculture. Third, the cosmic and global travels of the kumara, figuring Māori plant alliances that take us beyond colonial ideologies of space exploration. Fourth, a science fiction art installation growing plants in a prototyped Martian House. Drawing on vegetal geographies, critical plants studies and Anthropocene geophilosophy, the paper is a work in speculative planetology which argues that plants are seeking to stretch out beyond Earth and enable other planets to become otherwise: photosynthesis is a vegetal gift to the cold cosmos.
Social & Cultural Geography
As bats adapt to anthropogenic environmental change they increasingly interact with humans and in... more As bats adapt to anthropogenic environmental change they increasingly interact with humans and inhabit human infrastructure. This article addresses the challenge of learning to live with synanthropic bats. Building on ideas from multispecies studies, we explore the practices and accommodations that coproduce meaningful humanbat cohabitation in domestic space. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in the Netherlands, we find that domestic space is remade in small but significant ways in response to bats. The aim of our interviewees is to ensure minimal interference between human and bat domestic geographies: intimacy can be spatialized at the domestic scale but is best done in ways that maintain degrees of tolerance. Rather than help bats in general, much care-work centres around supporting the inter-generational reproductive work of bats.This sequential sense of ethical time certainly shifts conservation from a done to mode, and recasts home-dwellers as participants in the story of bat survival and intergenerational nourishment.
Cultural Geographies, 2022
In this paper we outline an arts-based practice of experimenting with plant growth. Working with ... more In this paper we outline an arts-based practice of experimenting with plant growth. Working with hydroponic systems, we describe a means to interact with plants beyond instrumentalism and beyond appreciation at a distance. We present several opening glimpses into a distinctly plant subjectivity that are afforded by technological mediation. This method informs ongoing research into growing liveable worlds with plants and is offered as a novel practice for critical plant studies, vegetal geographies and multispecies studies.
Dialogues in Human Geography, 2021
Agriculture & Human Values, 2022
This article examines India's response to the global soil health crisis. A longstanding centre of... more This article examines India's response to the global soil health crisis. A longstanding centre of agricultural production and innovation, India has recently launched an ambitious soil health programme. The country's Soil Health Card (SHC) Scheme intervenes in farm-scale decisions about efficient fertiliser use, envisioning farmers as managers and soil as a substrate for production. India is also home to one of the world's largest alternative agriculture movements: natural farming. This puts farmer expertise at the centre of soil fertility and attends to the wider ecological health of soils. Despite emerging as a mode of resistance to dominant agricultural systems, natural farming is now being delivered in increasingly bureaucratic ways by India's state governments. This article offers Himachal Pradesh as a case study in how the soil is governed, drawing on 38 semi-structured interviews with scientists, agricultural officers, non-governmental organisation leaders, and activists. Rather than assess approaches to soil health according to their ecological bottom line, we examine the differing forms of knowledge, expertise and 'truth' in the SHC and Natural Farming approaches. Our analysis reveals discontinuities in how farmers are imagined, as well as continuities in how quasi-spiritual language combines in a bionationalist project, positing assumptions about the correct arrangement of life in nationalist terms. We point to a shift toward hybrid and pick-and-mix approaches to soil health, as farmers and their organisers are increasingly invested with the capacities to combine multiple options. We see a fracturing of expertise and the opening up of epistemic pluralism in responses to the soil fertility crisis.
Environmental Humanities, 2020
Arcadia, 2018
Plants play a visible role in the urban politics of Karachi, Pakistan. This article explores how ... more Plants play a visible role in the urban politics of Karachi, Pakistan. This article explores how plants have been used to support ethno-political, military, and elite privilege over the last decade.
GEO: Geography & Environment, 2018
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which... more This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
The fractured timespace of the Anthropocene brings distant pasts and futures into the present. Th... more The fractured timespace of the Anthropocene brings distant pasts and futures into the present. Thinking about deep time is challenging: deep time is strange, and warps our sense of belonging and our relationships to earth forces and creatures. The introduction to this special issue builds on scholarship in the environmental humanities concerning the ongoing inheritance of biological and geological processes that stretch back into the deep past, as well as the opening up of multiple vistas of the futures. Rather than understanding deep time as an abstract concept, we explore how deep time manifests through places, objects and practices. Focusing on three modes through which deep time is encountered-enchantment, violence and haunting-we introduce deep time as an intimate element woven into everyday lives. Deep time stories, we suggest, engage with the productive ways in which deep time reworks questions of narrative, self and representation. In addressing these dynamics, this introduction and the accompanying articles place current concerns into the larger flows of planetary temporalities, revealing deep time as productive, homely and wondrous, as well as unsettling, uncanny.
Antipode, 2018
Collective gardening spaces have existed across Lisbon, Portugal, for decades. This article atten... more Collective gardening spaces have existed across Lisbon, Portugal, for decades. This article attends to the makeshift natures made by black migrants from Portugal’s former colonies, and the racial urban geography thrown into relief by the differing fortunes of white Portuguese community gardening spaces. Conceptualizing urban gardens as commons-in-the-making, we explore subaltern urbanism and the emergence of autonomous gardening commons on the one hand, and the state erasure, overwriting or construction of top-down commons on the other. While showing that urban gardening forges commons of varying persistence, we also demonstrate the ways through which the commons are always closely entwined with processes of enclosure. We further argue that urban gardening commons are divergent and cannot be judged against any abstract ideal of the commons. In conclusion, we suggest that urban gardening commons do not have a ‘common’ in common.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2014
In response to the pressing need to re-constitute the ways we live with non-humans, more-than-hum... more In response to the pressing need to re-constitute the ways we live with non-humans, more-than-human geography’s distinctive contribution has been to describe an ethics based not on ‘certain subjects’ but on the relational entanglement of life: to show that ‘we’ are connected and thus invited to care. This paper aims to suggest, however, that this relational diagnostic obscures as much as it reveals and that detachment, as much as relation, provides an everyday ethic that can accommodate more-than-human difference. I do this by analysing how life is stuck together and pulled apart in the British domestic garden, drawing on life history interviews and ‘show me your garden’ walking tours with experienced gardeners. The article is aligned with a widening bestiary of companion species in geography, and considers the appearances and disappearances of a domestic monster: the slug. Therefore in contrast to existing literature the paper explores gardening’s darker aspects. First, I describe how slugs and gardeners are ‘sticky’: joined together by shared histories, curiosity and disgust. The paper then shifts to examine how gardeners practice detachment: distancing themselves from the act of killing slugs but yet avowing the violence of their actions; acknowledging the limits of their capacities to bend space to their will and imagination; recognising the vulnerability of slugs, and being transformed by that recognition. The analysis shows first, that the emphasis on gathering together and relationality obscures what lies outside relations, and second how detachment emerges not as the negation, but as an enabling constituent of more-than-human ethics. In conclusion the paper argues for looser mappings of relationality and ethics that attend more fully to the distance between species.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2015
In this article I suggest that fantasies of apocalypse are both a product and a producer of the A... more In this article I suggest that fantasies of apocalypse are both a product and a producer of the Anthropocene. Although images and narratives of contemporary environmental apocalypse have usually been understood as politically regressive and postpolitical distractions, I demonstrate that a more hopeful reading is possible. Apocalypse tells us that the human as currently configured in the Anthropocene—an ideal universal subject who is energized through fossil fuels and who has been elevated to a position of ecological mastery—cannot continue indefinitely. This article therefore considers what apocalyptic imaginaries reveal about the limits to being human and the future of human life after the Anthropocene. It does so by analyzing a critically acclaimed film, The Turin Horse (2011). In this film an old farm horse refuses to eat, drink, or leave its stall, while a daughter and her father struggle on through an unspecified disaster, gnawing on raw potatoes as their world slowly unravels. The Turin Horse discloses the earth forces that have made Anthropocene humans along three lines: the geological, the biological, and the temporal. The film also hints at three challenges to be overcome to make humans differently: the need to surpass carbon humanity, the need for nonhuman allies, and the need to affirm agency against the inevitability of deep time. I suggest that contemporary apocalyptic visions are a core aspect of how geographers should understand socioecological transformation, as they challenge those who view them to feel the condition of the Anthropocene, and pose the question of how to respond well to unruly earth forces.
Environmental Humanities, 2014
Environmental Humanities, 2014
The sudden decline of bee pollinator populations worldwide has caused significant alarm, not leas... more The sudden decline of bee pollinator populations worldwide has caused significant alarm, not least because Apis mellifera, the European honeybee, is thought to be responsible for pollination of 71 of the 100 crop species which provide 90% of the world’s food supply. Here we investigate the response to colony collapse disorder of a committed group of beekeepers who live in southern England, UK. These beekeepers are inspired by the writings of Rudolf Steiner and the principles of biodynamic agriculture, and they care deeply about bees. Drawing on Judith Butler’s work on vulnerability as a shared condition of living, we examine the philosophies and practices of alternative apiculture along two axes: the gifts of honey and poison; longing, connection and bee-worship. The first emphasizes how poison and honey draw bee and beekeeper together in uneven gift relations; the second axis emphasizes how beekeepers make their bodies and their selves vulnerable to bees. We show how these beekeepers want us to do more than reshape bees’ vulnerability to colony collapse disorder; they want to recognize, and reconstitute, their own vulnerability to the bee. The lessons to be drawn are less about solving bee decline and more about how becoming less uncomfortable with vulnerability and seeking to put ourselves at risk to others becomes an ethical practice. The example of these alternative beekeepers suggests that we might learn to accept more generously the risks of cohabiting with awkward nonhumans, so as to loosen the hegemonic grip of a self-certain subject that is disrupted by an outsider.
Progress in Human Geography, 2015
Drawing upon the personal reflections of geographical educators in Brazil, Canada, the UK, and th... more Drawing upon the personal reflections of geographical educators in Brazil, Canada, the UK, and the US, this Forum provides a state-of-the-discipline review of teaching in the history of geography; identifies the practical and pedagogical challenges associated with that teaching; and offers suggestions and provocations as to future innovation. The Forum shows how teaching in the history of geography is valued -as a tool of identity making, as a device for cohort building and professionalization, and as a means of interrogating the disciplinary present -but also how it is challenged by neoliberal educational policies, competing priorities in curriculum design, and sub-disciplinary divisions.
Cultural Geographies, 2014
Downloaded from cultural geographies 0(0) 1 -17
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2014
Geoengineering, especially its potentially fast and high-leverage versions, is often justified as... more Geoengineering, especially its potentially fast and high-leverage versions, is often justified as a necessary response to possible future climate emergencies. In this article, we take the notion of 'necessity' in international law as a starting point in assessing how rapid, high-leverage geoengineering might be justified legally. The need to specify reliably 'grave and imminent peril' makes such a justification difficult because our scientific ability to predict abrupt climate change, for example, as tipping elements, is limited. The time it takes to establish scientific consensus as well as policy acceptance restricts the scope for effective forewarning and so pre-emptive justifications for geoengineering become more tempting. While recognizing that dangerous, large-scale impacts of climate change is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid, the pre-emptive, emergency frame is problematic. We suggest that arguments from emergency operate on a high level of uncertainty and tend toward hubristic attempts to shape the future, as well as tending to close down rather than open up space for deliberation. We conclude that the emergency frame is not likely to go away, that ignoring or repressing it is a dangerous response, and that more effort is required to defuse and disarm emergency rhetoric.
Journal of Historical Geography , 2012
Prompted by the curious fact that both progressive environmentalists and Conservative Party polit... more Prompted by the curious fact that both progressive environmentalists and Conservative Party politicians have recently drawn on popular understandings of austerity associated with Britain's wartime domestic gardening campaign, this article broadens the range of histories associated with Dig for Victory. It suggests firstly that far from simply encouraging self-sufficiency, the government conceptualised Dig for Victory as requiring the extension of order and control into the domestic sphere. Second, it shows how the ideal figure of a national citizen digging for victory elided differentiated gender and class experiences of gardening, and finally the article demonstrates that statistics of food production were more about fostering trust than picturing the realities of vegetable growing. By so doing the paper illuminates the particular ways in which present-day articulations of Dig for Victory's history are partial and selective.
Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 2013
The neoliberalization of universities is creating an increasingly instrumental, marketfocused app... more The neoliberalization of universities is creating an increasingly instrumental, marketfocused approach to higher education. This paper focuses on Masters dissertation supervision in the UK, which to date has been understudied and which recent changes to higher education have left in a precarious position. It presents a collaborative reflection on the supervision process conducted by students and the author at the University of Edinburgh. Expanding on recent interventions concerning geography, neoliberalization and the academy, I suggest that communality, ambiguity and collective reflectivity offer tactics both to enhance supervisory practice and to resist neoliberalization.
What does it mean that plants-soy, coffee, wheat, cotton, lettuce and more-are growing in Near-Ea... more What does it mean that plants-soy, coffee, wheat, cotton, lettuce and more-are growing in Near-Earth orbit? What histories account for their presence beyond the terrestrial, and what futures might they be incubating? In this paper, to address these questions, I describe four very different planetary vegetal thresholds, which I understand as geohistoric events thick with potentials for realigning worlds. First, technoscientific cultures of space science. Second, the allying of crops and elites in late neolithic plantation agriculture. Third, the cosmic and global travels of the kumara, figuring Māori plant alliances that take us beyond colonial ideologies of space exploration. Fourth, a science fiction art installation growing plants in a prototyped Martian House. Drawing on vegetal geographies, critical plants studies and Anthropocene geophilosophy, the paper is a work in speculative planetology which argues that plants are seeking to stretch out beyond Earth and enable other planets to become otherwise: photosynthesis is a vegetal gift to the cold cosmos.
Social & Cultural Geography
As bats adapt to anthropogenic environmental change they increasingly interact with humans and in... more As bats adapt to anthropogenic environmental change they increasingly interact with humans and inhabit human infrastructure. This article addresses the challenge of learning to live with synanthropic bats. Building on ideas from multispecies studies, we explore the practices and accommodations that coproduce meaningful humanbat cohabitation in domestic space. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in the Netherlands, we find that domestic space is remade in small but significant ways in response to bats. The aim of our interviewees is to ensure minimal interference between human and bat domestic geographies: intimacy can be spatialized at the domestic scale but is best done in ways that maintain degrees of tolerance. Rather than help bats in general, much care-work centres around supporting the inter-generational reproductive work of bats.This sequential sense of ethical time certainly shifts conservation from a done to mode, and recasts home-dwellers as participants in the story of bat survival and intergenerational nourishment.
Cultural Geographies, 2022
In this paper we outline an arts-based practice of experimenting with plant growth. Working with ... more In this paper we outline an arts-based practice of experimenting with plant growth. Working with hydroponic systems, we describe a means to interact with plants beyond instrumentalism and beyond appreciation at a distance. We present several opening glimpses into a distinctly plant subjectivity that are afforded by technological mediation. This method informs ongoing research into growing liveable worlds with plants and is offered as a novel practice for critical plant studies, vegetal geographies and multispecies studies.
Dialogues in Human Geography, 2021
Agriculture & Human Values, 2022
This article examines India's response to the global soil health crisis. A longstanding centre of... more This article examines India's response to the global soil health crisis. A longstanding centre of agricultural production and innovation, India has recently launched an ambitious soil health programme. The country's Soil Health Card (SHC) Scheme intervenes in farm-scale decisions about efficient fertiliser use, envisioning farmers as managers and soil as a substrate for production. India is also home to one of the world's largest alternative agriculture movements: natural farming. This puts farmer expertise at the centre of soil fertility and attends to the wider ecological health of soils. Despite emerging as a mode of resistance to dominant agricultural systems, natural farming is now being delivered in increasingly bureaucratic ways by India's state governments. This article offers Himachal Pradesh as a case study in how the soil is governed, drawing on 38 semi-structured interviews with scientists, agricultural officers, non-governmental organisation leaders, and activists. Rather than assess approaches to soil health according to their ecological bottom line, we examine the differing forms of knowledge, expertise and 'truth' in the SHC and Natural Farming approaches. Our analysis reveals discontinuities in how farmers are imagined, as well as continuities in how quasi-spiritual language combines in a bionationalist project, positing assumptions about the correct arrangement of life in nationalist terms. We point to a shift toward hybrid and pick-and-mix approaches to soil health, as farmers and their organisers are increasingly invested with the capacities to combine multiple options. We see a fracturing of expertise and the opening up of epistemic pluralism in responses to the soil fertility crisis.
Environmental Humanities, 2020
Arcadia, 2018
Plants play a visible role in the urban politics of Karachi, Pakistan. This article explores how ... more Plants play a visible role in the urban politics of Karachi, Pakistan. This article explores how plants have been used to support ethno-political, military, and elite privilege over the last decade.
GEO: Geography & Environment, 2018
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which... more This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
The fractured timespace of the Anthropocene brings distant pasts and futures into the present. Th... more The fractured timespace of the Anthropocene brings distant pasts and futures into the present. Thinking about deep time is challenging: deep time is strange, and warps our sense of belonging and our relationships to earth forces and creatures. The introduction to this special issue builds on scholarship in the environmental humanities concerning the ongoing inheritance of biological and geological processes that stretch back into the deep past, as well as the opening up of multiple vistas of the futures. Rather than understanding deep time as an abstract concept, we explore how deep time manifests through places, objects and practices. Focusing on three modes through which deep time is encountered-enchantment, violence and haunting-we introduce deep time as an intimate element woven into everyday lives. Deep time stories, we suggest, engage with the productive ways in which deep time reworks questions of narrative, self and representation. In addressing these dynamics, this introduction and the accompanying articles place current concerns into the larger flows of planetary temporalities, revealing deep time as productive, homely and wondrous, as well as unsettling, uncanny.
Antipode, 2018
Collective gardening spaces have existed across Lisbon, Portugal, for decades. This article atten... more Collective gardening spaces have existed across Lisbon, Portugal, for decades. This article attends to the makeshift natures made by black migrants from Portugal’s former colonies, and the racial urban geography thrown into relief by the differing fortunes of white Portuguese community gardening spaces. Conceptualizing urban gardens as commons-in-the-making, we explore subaltern urbanism and the emergence of autonomous gardening commons on the one hand, and the state erasure, overwriting or construction of top-down commons on the other. While showing that urban gardening forges commons of varying persistence, we also demonstrate the ways through which the commons are always closely entwined with processes of enclosure. We further argue that urban gardening commons are divergent and cannot be judged against any abstract ideal of the commons. In conclusion, we suggest that urban gardening commons do not have a ‘common’ in common.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2014
In response to the pressing need to re-constitute the ways we live with non-humans, more-than-hum... more In response to the pressing need to re-constitute the ways we live with non-humans, more-than-human geography’s distinctive contribution has been to describe an ethics based not on ‘certain subjects’ but on the relational entanglement of life: to show that ‘we’ are connected and thus invited to care. This paper aims to suggest, however, that this relational diagnostic obscures as much as it reveals and that detachment, as much as relation, provides an everyday ethic that can accommodate more-than-human difference. I do this by analysing how life is stuck together and pulled apart in the British domestic garden, drawing on life history interviews and ‘show me your garden’ walking tours with experienced gardeners. The article is aligned with a widening bestiary of companion species in geography, and considers the appearances and disappearances of a domestic monster: the slug. Therefore in contrast to existing literature the paper explores gardening’s darker aspects. First, I describe how slugs and gardeners are ‘sticky’: joined together by shared histories, curiosity and disgust. The paper then shifts to examine how gardeners practice detachment: distancing themselves from the act of killing slugs but yet avowing the violence of their actions; acknowledging the limits of their capacities to bend space to their will and imagination; recognising the vulnerability of slugs, and being transformed by that recognition. The analysis shows first, that the emphasis on gathering together and relationality obscures what lies outside relations, and second how detachment emerges not as the negation, but as an enabling constituent of more-than-human ethics. In conclusion the paper argues for looser mappings of relationality and ethics that attend more fully to the distance between species.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2015
In this article I suggest that fantasies of apocalypse are both a product and a producer of the A... more In this article I suggest that fantasies of apocalypse are both a product and a producer of the Anthropocene. Although images and narratives of contemporary environmental apocalypse have usually been understood as politically regressive and postpolitical distractions, I demonstrate that a more hopeful reading is possible. Apocalypse tells us that the human as currently configured in the Anthropocene—an ideal universal subject who is energized through fossil fuels and who has been elevated to a position of ecological mastery—cannot continue indefinitely. This article therefore considers what apocalyptic imaginaries reveal about the limits to being human and the future of human life after the Anthropocene. It does so by analyzing a critically acclaimed film, The Turin Horse (2011). In this film an old farm horse refuses to eat, drink, or leave its stall, while a daughter and her father struggle on through an unspecified disaster, gnawing on raw potatoes as their world slowly unravels. The Turin Horse discloses the earth forces that have made Anthropocene humans along three lines: the geological, the biological, and the temporal. The film also hints at three challenges to be overcome to make humans differently: the need to surpass carbon humanity, the need for nonhuman allies, and the need to affirm agency against the inevitability of deep time. I suggest that contemporary apocalyptic visions are a core aspect of how geographers should understand socioecological transformation, as they challenge those who view them to feel the condition of the Anthropocene, and pose the question of how to respond well to unruly earth forces.
Environmental Humanities, 2014
Environmental Humanities, 2014
The sudden decline of bee pollinator populations worldwide has caused significant alarm, not leas... more The sudden decline of bee pollinator populations worldwide has caused significant alarm, not least because Apis mellifera, the European honeybee, is thought to be responsible for pollination of 71 of the 100 crop species which provide 90% of the world’s food supply. Here we investigate the response to colony collapse disorder of a committed group of beekeepers who live in southern England, UK. These beekeepers are inspired by the writings of Rudolf Steiner and the principles of biodynamic agriculture, and they care deeply about bees. Drawing on Judith Butler’s work on vulnerability as a shared condition of living, we examine the philosophies and practices of alternative apiculture along two axes: the gifts of honey and poison; longing, connection and bee-worship. The first emphasizes how poison and honey draw bee and beekeeper together in uneven gift relations; the second axis emphasizes how beekeepers make their bodies and their selves vulnerable to bees. We show how these beekeepers want us to do more than reshape bees’ vulnerability to colony collapse disorder; they want to recognize, and reconstitute, their own vulnerability to the bee. The lessons to be drawn are less about solving bee decline and more about how becoming less uncomfortable with vulnerability and seeking to put ourselves at risk to others becomes an ethical practice. The example of these alternative beekeepers suggests that we might learn to accept more generously the risks of cohabiting with awkward nonhumans, so as to loosen the hegemonic grip of a self-certain subject that is disrupted by an outsider.
Progress in Human Geography, 2015
Drawing upon the personal reflections of geographical educators in Brazil, Canada, the UK, and th... more Drawing upon the personal reflections of geographical educators in Brazil, Canada, the UK, and the US, this Forum provides a state-of-the-discipline review of teaching in the history of geography; identifies the practical and pedagogical challenges associated with that teaching; and offers suggestions and provocations as to future innovation. The Forum shows how teaching in the history of geography is valued -as a tool of identity making, as a device for cohort building and professionalization, and as a means of interrogating the disciplinary present -but also how it is challenged by neoliberal educational policies, competing priorities in curriculum design, and sub-disciplinary divisions.
Cultural Geographies, 2014
Downloaded from cultural geographies 0(0) 1 -17
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2014
Geoengineering, especially its potentially fast and high-leverage versions, is often justified as... more Geoengineering, especially its potentially fast and high-leverage versions, is often justified as a necessary response to possible future climate emergencies. In this article, we take the notion of 'necessity' in international law as a starting point in assessing how rapid, high-leverage geoengineering might be justified legally. The need to specify reliably 'grave and imminent peril' makes such a justification difficult because our scientific ability to predict abrupt climate change, for example, as tipping elements, is limited. The time it takes to establish scientific consensus as well as policy acceptance restricts the scope for effective forewarning and so pre-emptive justifications for geoengineering become more tempting. While recognizing that dangerous, large-scale impacts of climate change is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid, the pre-emptive, emergency frame is problematic. We suggest that arguments from emergency operate on a high level of uncertainty and tend toward hubristic attempts to shape the future, as well as tending to close down rather than open up space for deliberation. We conclude that the emergency frame is not likely to go away, that ignoring or repressing it is a dangerous response, and that more effort is required to defuse and disarm emergency rhetoric.
Journal of Historical Geography , 2012
Prompted by the curious fact that both progressive environmentalists and Conservative Party polit... more Prompted by the curious fact that both progressive environmentalists and Conservative Party politicians have recently drawn on popular understandings of austerity associated with Britain's wartime domestic gardening campaign, this article broadens the range of histories associated with Dig for Victory. It suggests firstly that far from simply encouraging self-sufficiency, the government conceptualised Dig for Victory as requiring the extension of order and control into the domestic sphere. Second, it shows how the ideal figure of a national citizen digging for victory elided differentiated gender and class experiences of gardening, and finally the article demonstrates that statistics of food production were more about fostering trust than picturing the realities of vegetable growing. By so doing the paper illuminates the particular ways in which present-day articulations of Dig for Victory's history are partial and selective.
Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 2013
The neoliberalization of universities is creating an increasingly instrumental, marketfocused app... more The neoliberalization of universities is creating an increasingly instrumental, marketfocused approach to higher education. This paper focuses on Masters dissertation supervision in the UK, which to date has been understudied and which recent changes to higher education have left in a precarious position. It presents a collaborative reflection on the supervision process conducted by students and the author at the University of Edinburgh. Expanding on recent interventions concerning geography, neoliberalization and the academy, I suggest that communality, ambiguity and collective reflectivity offer tactics both to enhance supervisory practice and to resist neoliberalization.
The Work that Plants Do, 2021
The Work That Plants Do, 2021
Whether driven by developments in plant science, bio-philosophy, or broader societal dynamics, pl... more Whether driven by developments in plant science, bio-philosophy, or broader societal dynamics, plants have to respond to a litany of environmental, social, and economic challenges. This collection explores the 'work' that plants do in contemporary capitalism, examining how vegetal life is enrolled in processes of value creation, social reproduction, and capital accumulation. Bringing together insights from geography, anthropology, and the environmental humanities, the contributors contend that attention to the diverse capacities and agencies of plants can both enrich understandings of capitalist economies, and also catalyze new forms of resistance to their logics. Marion Ernwein is a lecturer in environmental geography at the Open University. She researches the changing place of plants in contemporary urbanism.
The Work that Plants Do, 2021
It is unfortunate that Pakistan's image abroad has been tarnished so badly that the world associa... more It is unfortunate that Pakistan's image abroad has been tarnished so badly that the world associates it only with terrorism and extremism ... I have therefore tried to project a truer image of Pakistan which I call a soft image, through the promotion of tourism, sports and culture.
International Encyclopedia of Geography , 2022
Geophilosophy employs a range of spatial concepts to reimagine the discipline of philosophy. Inve... more Geophilosophy employs a range of spatial concepts to reimagine the discipline of philosophy. Invented by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Félix Guattari (1930-1992), but elaborated by other thinkers since, geophilosophy does not constitute a formal intervention in the discipline of geography. Rather, the prefix "geo" offers several challenges to widely held views that philosophy: (i) concerns the historical progress or development of universal reason and (ii) entails the search for transcendent (top-down, self-evident, and context-free) truths. Recognizing that the history of philosophy "is marked by detours and contingency," Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 88) create a system of spatially distributed concepts, each of which is "immanent" to (bottom-up, emergent from) its particular situation. "[T]hinking," in other words, "takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth" (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 85). Geophilosophy remains concerned with abstract philosophical ideas ("concepts"), but does not view these as generalizations detached from site-specific, messy materialities. Instead, geophilosophical concepts are "differential": they emerge with the contingencies of sociospatial differences and encounters, of proximity and entanglement, and of dynamic material relations.
AAG-Wiley Encyclopedia of Geography 2nd Edition, 2021
Geophilosophy employs a range of spatial concepts to reimagine the discipline of philosophy. Inve... more Geophilosophy employs a range of spatial concepts to reimagine the discipline of philosophy. Invented by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Félix Guattari (1930-1992), but elaborated by other thinkers since, geophilosophy does not constitute a formal intervention in the discipline of geography. Rather, the "geo" prefix offers several challenges to widely held views that philosophy: (i) concerns the historical progress or development of reason and (ii) entails the search for transcendent (top-down, self-evident and context-free) truths. Recognizing that the history of philosophy "is marked by detours and contingency," Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 88) create a system of spatially distributed concepts, each of which is "immanent" to (bottom-up, emergent from) its particular situation. "[T]hinking," in other words, "takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth" (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 85). Geophilosophy remains concerned with abstract philosophical ideas ("concepts") but does not view these as generalizations detached from site-specific, messy materialities. Instead, geophilosophical concepts are "differential": they emerge with the contingencies of sociospatial differences and encounters, of proximity and entanglement, and of dynamic material relations. Although geophilosophy is not formally named until What is Philosophy? (1994), it arguably runs throughout Deleuze and Guattari's collaborations. The geographical lexicon provides Anti-Oedipus (1969) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980) with several key concepts that reconfigure the stakes of philosophy, most notably de/re/territorialization, landscapity, and milieu. Spatial abstractions (lines, planes,
Concise Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2022
Mainstream social science approaches to nature treat environmental crisis as selfevidently real, ... more Mainstream social science approaches to nature treat environmental crisis as selfevidently real, align with modes of scientific knowledge production, and rationally set about turning crisis into problems that can be managed. While some geographers engage with this form of 'Anthropocene nature' others take a different approach. Critical geographers seek to uncover the inequities of capitalist nature at scales from the planetary to the microbial. Other geographers argue for recuperative approaches which find hope in relations of care between humans and nonhuman. Geography also faces a reckoning with its complicity in creating the historic imposition of a 'onenature' reality, posed by increasingly strident calls to decolonise nature.
The Work That Plants Do, 2021
It is unfortunate that Pakistan's image abroad has been tarnished so badly that the world associa... more It is unfortunate that Pakistan's image abroad has been tarnished so badly that the world associates it only with terrorism and extremism ... I have therefore tried to project a truer image of Pakistan which I call a soft image, through the promotion of tourism, sports and culture.
Once marginal, knowledge that many other species share characteristics hitherto thought restricte... more Once marginal, knowledge that many other species share characteristics hitherto thought restricted to humans, including language, tool-use and consciousness, is now commonplace across many scientific fields, from ethology to biosemiotics to neurophysiology. 1 Such new scientific understandings of nonhuman life have been one important inspiration for posthuman theorists aiming to replace ontologies of division with those of connection and relative difference. Animal sexual selection, for example, is much more than an instrumental process. As theorized by Elizabeth Grosz, animal courtship and sex provide not merely the means for reproduction and genetic survival, but are playful, exuberant, creative articulations of the active, forward-moving force of life. 2 Similarly, Brian Massumi outlines how the play of young animals shows their 'capacity to mobilize the possible.' 3 The wolf cub nipping the ear of another wolf cub enacts a ludic gesture, saying 'this is play.' But for the cub to learn how to be an adult wolf, the play bite must also stand in for a real, violent bite. The distinction between violent-bite and play-bite is not simply that one is training for adult wolf-hood and one is childish play. Rather, both ways of biting operate in a zone of indiscernibility without the specific differences of either being erased. The paradox of play is its 'as if-ness.' For Massumi, when animals play, 'they are preparatorily enacting human capacities.' 4 In this vitalist mode, posthumanism places the human in a continuum with other animals, connected through both lines of descent and contemporary ecological relations. Animals become worthy subjects of academic attention in the humanities, while humans become creaturely beings.
This chapter asks what happens to place in the absence of birds. Specifically, it examines the ca... more This chapter asks what happens to place in the absence of birds. Specifically, it examines the case of house sparrow (Passer domesticus) decline in London, UK. While the house sparrow may be rapidly disappearing across Britain, it is nevertheless not at risk of global extinction. Loss in this context is not absolute, but is about the irretrievability of the past, of the former ways birds and humans were bound together, and of the textures and sounds of urban life. The chapter uses the experiences of individuals involved in a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds conservation initiative to follow house sparrow absence/presence through five real and imagined places: meadow, hedge, flock, childhood and London. We suggest that house sparrow decline is not simply a loss that can be mourned, but rather creates something new: haunted and spectral sparrow places.
forthcoming in Richardson, D et al. eds. International Encyclopedia of Geography, Wiley-Blackwell-AAG
in Giesecke, A and Jacobs, N eds., The Good Gardener? Nature, Humanity and the Garden, London: Artifice
in Lees, L and Imrie, R eds., Sustainable London? The future of a global city, Bristol: Policy Press
, in Clifford, N, Holloway, S, Rice, S and Valentine, G eds., Key concepts in Geography, London: Sage
, in Habermann, I and Keller, D eds., Topographies of Britain, Amsterdam: Rodopi
We live in an era of great loss. A growing number of creatures and species hover between life and... more We live in an era of great loss. A growing number of creatures and species hover between life and oblivion, and if trends continue the world will soon grow quieter in their absence. Van Dooren situates his work in the 'shadow' of this period of great loss. Taking his cue from Donna Haraway and Deborah Bird Rose, he understands species as storied 'life ways' unfolding amid embodied, situated 'ways of life', rather than as natural kinds. Creatures, he argues, are less representatives of than participants in their species story. Flight Ways keeps one eye on deep, evolutionary time, and the other on the work of the living, whose labour holds together the long chains of intergenerational species being. Since species are knotted ways of life, it follows that extinction is not some singular event but the slow unravelling of a particular geographically assembled ecology, as the work and relationships necessary to continue the species become harder to sustain. This is established in chapter one, where we learn how consumer plastics floating in the Pacific garbage patch clog up albatross digestive systems. These plastics -along with DDT, PCBs and the toll of death levied by fishing by-catch -disrupt the vital work of rearing the next generation of birds. This is Flight Ways' central thesis: extinction is far from an acute event (the asteroid sealing the fate of the dinosaurs); extinction is more often a drawn-out process, a 'slow unravelling of intimately entangled ways of life' (p. 12).
On 9 February 2014 a young giraffe named Marius was killed by bolt gun in Copenhagen Zoo. Marius'... more On 9 February 2014 a young giraffe named Marius was killed by bolt gun in Copenhagen Zoo. Marius' body was dissected in front of a crowd comprised of young children, parents, and an international media throng -a public lesson in giraffe anatomy. His carcass was then fed to the lions. The zoo had deemed Marius surplus to requirements, since any of his future offspring would diminish, rather than enhance, the captive giraffe population's genetic diversity. Like most Scandinavian zoos, Copenhagen holds that sexual reproduction is central to animal welfare and wellbeing, and prefers euthanasia of a few young animals to contraception for many (contraception having potentially debilitating side effects). Hence, a single giraffe was killed in the name of the genetic diversity of his worldwide kin, illustrating the inseparability of 'good' biopolitics (the power to make valued life live) and 'bad' biopolitics (the power to kill or let die in the name of other valued life) in the more-thanhuman world of the zoo.
