Toward a critical posthuman geography (original) (raw)

Decolonizing posthumanist geographies

Cultural Geographies, 2013

This paper engages my struggles to craft geo-graphs or earth writings that also further broader political goals of decolonizing the discipline of geography. To this end, I address a body of literature roughly termed ‘posthumanism’ because it offers powerful tools to identify and critique dualist constructions of nature and culture that work to uphold Eurocentric knowledge and the colonial present. However, I am discomforted by the ways in which geographical engagements with posthumanism tend to reproduce colonial ways of knowing and being by enacting universalizing claims and, consequently, further subordinating other ontologies. Building from this discomfort, I elaborate a critique of geographical-posthumanist engagements. Taking direction from Indigenous and decolonial theorizing, the paper identifies two Eurocentric performances common in posthumanist geographies and analyzes their implications. I then conclude with some thoughts about steps to decolonize geo-graphs. To this end, I take up learnings offered by the Zapatistas. My goal is to foster geographical engagements open to conversing with and walking alongside other epistemic worlds.

Sundberg, J. (2014). Decolonizing posthumanist geographies

This paper engages my struggles to craft geo-graphs or earth writings that also further broaden political goals of decolonizing the discipline of geography. To this end, I address a body of literature roughly termed ‘posthumanism’ because it offers powerful tools to identify and critique dualist constructions of nature and culture that work to uphold Eurocentric knowledge and the colonial present. However, I am discomforted by the ways in which geographical engagements with posthumanism tend to reproduce colonial ways of knowing and being by enacting universalizing claims and, consequently, further subordinating other ontologies. Building from this discomfort, I elaborate a critique of geographical-posthumanist engagements. Taking direction from Indigenous and decolonial theorizing, the paper identifies two Eurocentric performances common in posthumanist geographies and analyzes their implications. I then conclude with some thoughts about steps to decolonize geo-graphs. To this end, I take up learnings offered by the Zapatistas. My goal is to foster geographical engagements open to conversing with and walking alongside other epistemic worlds.

The understated turn: Emerging interests and themes in Canadian posthumanist geography

The Canadian Geographer, 2020

Posthumanist geography is a broad tradition incorporating a range of intersecting theoretical approaches including assemblage theory, actor-network theory, new materialisms, affect theory, neo-vitalism, political ecology, postphenomenology, and non-representational theory-as well as contributions from a number of theoretically progressive subject fields such as new mobilities, relational thinking, sensory and performance studies, biosocial and biopolitics studies, and science and technology studies. The specificities of and differences between these traditions and fields aside, common to posthumanism is a scepticism of human exceptionalism. Here, the sovereign human subject is decentred, and in doing so, posthumanist work acknowledges the agencies of a full array of human and non-human actors and forces. Recognizing that there are important "geographies to (the discipline of) geography," this paper identifies and reviews some of the key posthumanist interests and themes that have emerged over recent years quietly and organically in Canadian geography, namely posthumanist (i) Indigenous geographies; (ii) animal and natures geographies; (iii) health, wellbeing, and disability geographies; (iv) affective and atmospheric geographies; and (v) non-representational and creative methodologies. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the nature and strengths of Canadian posthumanist geography, and on some possibilities for future advancement.

What Might GeoHumanities Do? Possibilities, Practices, Publics, and Politics

GeoHumanities, 2015

This article draws together seven practitioners and scholars from across the diffuse GeoHumanities community to reflect on the pasts and futures of the GeoHumanities. Far from trying to circle the intellectual wagons around orthodoxies of practice or intent, or to determine possibilities in advance, these contributions and the accompanying commentary seek to create connections across the diverse communities of knowledge and practice that constitute the GeoHumanities. Ahead of these six contributions a commentary situates these discussions within wider concerns with interdisciplinarity and identifies three common themes-possibilities practices, and publics-worthy of further discussion and reflection. The introduction concludes by identifying a fourth theme, politics, that coheres these three themes in productive and important ways.

More-than-human social geographies: posthuman and other possibilities

Progress in Human Geography, 2010

While 'the social' is problematized in diverse ways in current geographical debates this report refl ects on the ongoing relevance of social geographies, especially those that attend to the complexity and interconnectivity of life. This review outlines three ways in which society-nature relations are being interrogated via: poststructural, posthuman and Indigenous foci. It concludes that important questions of social difference and unequal power relations remain relevant for more-than-human geographies.

Mind over matter? on decentring the human in human geography

2014

The fantasy of a human being who is, or becomes, human to the extent they move away from animal nature is stubbornly persistent in western cultural formations. This article (see Acknowledgements) works with, and against, recent materialist moves within Cultural Geography to critically engage the idea that the human is in some sense irreducible to nature. It considers how comparative anatomists of the early 19th century – in explicitly departing from the 18th-century Cartesian dualism that had identified the human with an immaterial notion of soul or mind – looked to the human body, and above all the head, in order to establish that people were categorically different from all other animals. More specifically, the paper considers how it was to ‘race’ that scientists turned, in order to provide an anatomical foundation for a specifically modern strand of humanism. The discourse of humanism is thus considered, not – as many would have it – as an otherworldly or flawed myth, irremediably upheld by blind human faith and vanity. It is not the bearer of an idealism set up in (often shrill) negation to the task of ‘re-materializing’ Cultural Geography. Instead it is, itself, a worldly mix of ideas, practices and technologies. Eliciting humanism’s instability via this (overlooked) historical episode is to render it more vulnerable to precisely the scrutiny demanded by the earth’s current state of ecological fragility. It also enables a more rigorous interrogation of the notion of mind – humanist but also colonialist – that has been disowned in recent efforts to decentre the human in Human Geography. For, as this article demonstrates, re-imagining humanity’s place in nature extends to its co-habitation with all manner of others: human as well as nonhuman.

Critical Political Ecology and the Seductions of Posthumanism

2014

"Posthumanist" theories have become increasingly popular among scholars in political ecology and other fields in the human sciences. The hope is that they will improve our grasp of relations between humans and various nonhumans and, in the process, offer the means to recompose the "social" and the "natural" domains. In this paper, I assess the merits of posthumanisms for critical scholarship. Looking specifically at the work of Bruno Latour (including his latest book, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence) and Donna Haraway, I argue that posthumanist thinking offers not only analytical but normative advantages over conventional and even Marxian approaches. But these newer frameworks contain their own ethico-political limitations and, to the extent that they are useful for addressing conditions of injustice, they continue to depend upon conceptual resources from their precursors. For this reason, a critical political ecology would best be served by preserving a tension between humanist and posthumanist methods.