Download or read book Coexistentialism and the Unbearable Intimacy of Ecological Emergency written by Sam Mickey and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-07-29 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The philosophy of existentialism is undergoing an ecological renewal, as global warming, mass extinction, and other signs of the planetary scale of human actions are making it glaringly apparent that existence is always ecological coexistence. One of the most urgent problems in the current ecological emergency is that humans cannot bear to face the emergency. Its earth-shattering implications are ignored in favor of more solutions, fixes, and sustainability transitions. Solutions cannot solve much when they cannot face what it means to be human amidst unprecedented uncertainty and intimate interconnectedness. Attention to such uncertainty and interconnectedness is what "ecological existentialism" (Deborah Bird Rose) or "coexistentialism" (Timothy Morton) is all about. This book follows Rose, Morton, and many others (e.g., Jean-Luc Nancy, Peter Sloterdijk, and Luce Irigaray) who are currently taking up the styles of thinking conveyed in existentialism, renewing existentialist affirmations of experience, paradox, uncertainty, and ambiguity, and extending existentialism beyond humans to include attention to the uniqueness and strangeness of all beings—all humans and nonhumans woven into ecological coexistence. Along the way, coexistentialism finds productive alliances and tensions amidst many areas of inquiry, including ecocriticism, ecological humanities, object-oriented ontology, feminism, phenomenology, deconstruction, new materialism, and more. This is a book for anyone who seeks to refute cynicism and loneliness and affirm coexistence.
Download or read book Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America written by Mark Anderson and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Worldwide environmental crisis has become increasingly visible over the last few decades as the full scope of anthropogenic climate change manifests itself and large-scale natural resource extraction has expanded into formerly remote areas that seemed beyond the reach of industrialization. Scientists and popular culture alike have turned to the term "Anthropocene" to capture the global scale of environmental and even geological transformations that humans have carried out over the last two centuries. The chapters in Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America examine the dynamics and interplay between local cultures and the expansion of global capitalism in Latin America, emphasizing the role of art in bearing witness to and generating awareness of environmental and social crises, but also its possibilities for formulating solutions. They take particular care to draw out the ways in which local environmental crises in Latin American nations are witnessed and imagined as part of a global system, focusing on the problems of time, scale, and complexity as key terms in conceiving the dimensions of crisis. At the same time, they question the notion of the Anthropocene as a species-wide "human" historical project, making visible the coloniality of natural resource extraction in Latin America and its dire effects for local people, cultures, and environments. Taking an ecocritical approach to Latin American cultural production including literature, film, performance, and digital artwork, the chapters in this volume develop a notion of ecological crisis that captures not only its documentary sense in the representation of environmental destruction (the degradation of the oikos), but also the crisis in the modern worldview (logos) that the acknowledgment of crisis provokes. In this sense, crisis is also the promise of a turning point, of the possibilities for change. Latin American representations of ecological crisis thus create the conditions for projects that decolonize environments, developing new, sustainable ways of conceiving of and relating to our world or returning to old ones.
Download or read book Eco Anxiety and Planetary Hope written by Douglas A. Vakoch and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-09-15 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely volume examines the conflict between human individual life and larger forces that are not controllable. Drawing on recent literature in phenomenological and existential psychology it calls for a more nuanced understanding of the human predicament. Focusing on the co-occurring crises of climate change and the COVID-19 epidemic, it explores the nature of widespread anxiety and the long-term human consequences. It calls for an expansion of current research that would include the arts and humanities for critical insights into how this essential conflict between humanity and nature may be reconciled.
Download or read book Gender and Environment in Science Fiction written by Bridgitte Barclay and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender and Environment in Science Fiction focuses on the variety of ways that gender and “nature” interact in science fiction films and fictions, exploring questions of different realities and posing new ones. Science fiction asks questions to propose other ways of living. It asks what if, and that question is the basis for alternative narratives of ourselves and the world we are a part of. What if humans could terraform planets? What if we could create human-nonhuman hybrids? What if artificial intelligence gains consciousness? What if we could realize kinship with other species through heightened empathy or traumatic experiences? What if we imagine a world without oil? How are race, gender, and nature interrelated? The texts analyzed in this book ask these questions and others, exploring how humans and nonhumans are connected; how nonhuman biologies can offer diverse ways to think about human sex, gender, and sexual orientation; and how interpretive strategies can subvert the messages of older films and written texts.
Download or read book Environment and Pedagogy in Higher Education written by Lucie Viakinnou-Brinson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The commitment to participate in ecological protection has grown considerably and, in the academic world, it has been tackled primarily by the Social Sciences. The Humanities has followed suit and several books have dealt with the reasons why such commitment is essential and morally imperative. What has been crucially lacking, however, are books that propose concrete pedagogical approaches to the study of environmental issues and aim at inspiring and motivating both educators and students to become actively engaged in the pursuit of ecological preservation. It is here that this book comes into play. Faced with the polluting of the earth, the devastating effect of climate change, and the inequalities of North/South resources to counter the throes of environmental degradation, our responsibility as educators and in particular as eco-pedagogues is to engage in theoretical discourses on the subject matter but also to begin to provide practitioners in all fields with essential tools to shape an ecological sense of consciousness among future leaders of the earth: our students.
Download or read book Narratives of Environmental Challenges in Brazil and India written by Zélia M. Bora and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narratives of Environmental Challenges in Brazil and India: Losing Nature, edited by Zelia Bora and Murali Sivaramakrishnan, contextualizes the two subcontinents of India and Brazil and closely examines environmental issues from within and without. This collection focuses largely on the fate of forests and water in these two geographical terrains. This book explores narratives that reflect transformations: hitherto unprecedented demographic expansions, exploitation of natural resources, pollution and depletion of river and fresh water sources, uncontrollable demands on the energy front, waste and garbage disposal, drastic reduction of biodiversity. All of these are factors to research when one considers “losing nature.” In philosophical as well as theoretical terms the question of what is nature, what is gained and lost in human-nature interaction, what is the essential “balance” of nature, are all important queries on a similar scale. Societal reality in present day Brazil and India is reconstructed and deconstructed at will by the powerful influence of the past alongside that of globalization and technocratic market structures. The volume contemplates the representation and interrogation of environmental issues in both subcontinents, Brazil and India.
Download or read book Nordic Narratives of Nature and the Environment written by Reinhard Hennig and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-07-06 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many contemporary environmental risks and global environmental changes occurring today are unprecedented in the history of human life on earth. However, the images and narratives through which humans relate to these phenomena are built on existing cultural tropes and narrative models. Cultural, social, and historical contexts strongly influence how we construct images and narratives of nature and the environment. It is therefore highly important to study such narratives in works of literature, film, and other forms of cultural expression in relation to the specific circumstances from which they arise. Nordic Narratives of Nature and the Environment is the first English language anthology that presents ecocritical research on northern European literatures and cultures. The contributors examine specifically Nordic narratives of nature and the environment, with a focus on the cultures and literatures of the modern northern European countries Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, including Sápmi, which is the land traditionally inhabited by the indigenous Sami people. Covering northern European literatures and cultures over a period of more than two centuries, this anthology provides substantial insights into both old and new narratives of nature and the environment as well as intertextual relations, the variety of cultural traditions, and current discourses connected to the Nordic environmental imagination. Case studies relating to works of literature, film, and other media shed new light on the role of culture, history and society in the formation of narratives of nature and the environment, and offer a comprehensive and multi-faceted overview of the most recent ecocritical research in Scandinavian studies.
Download or read book The Variety of Integral Ecologies written by Sam Mickey and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2017-04-24 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the current era of increasing planetary interconnectedness, ecological theories and practices are called to become more inclusive, complex, and comprehensive. The diverse contributions to this book offer a range of integral approaches to ecology that cross the boundaries of the humanities and sciences and help us understand and respond to today's ecological challenges. The contributors provide detailed analyses of assorted integral ecologies, drawing on such founding figures and precursors as Thomas Berry, Leonardo Boff, Holmes Rolston III, Ken Wilber, and Edgar Morin. Also included is research across the social sciences, biophysical sciences, and humanities discussing multiple worldviews and perspectives related to integral ecologies. The Variety of Integral Ecologies is both an accessible guide and an advanced supplement to the growing research for a more comprehensive understanding of ecological issues and the development of a peaceful, just, and sustainable planetary civilization.
Download or read book Living Earth Community Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing written by Sam Mickey and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2020-05-18 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Living Earth Community: Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing is a celebration of the diversity of ways in which humans can relate to the world around them, and an invitation to its readers to partake in planetary coexistence. Innovative, informative, and highly accessible, this interdisciplinary anthology of essays brings together scholars, writers and educators across the sciences and humanities, in a collaborative effort to illuminate the different ways of being in the world and the different kinds of knowledge they entail – from the ecological knowledge of Indigenous communities, to the scientific knowledge of a biologist and the embodied knowledge communicated through storytelling. This anthology examines the interplay between Nature and Culture in the setting of our current age of ecological crisis, stressing the importance of addressing these ecological crises occurring around the planet through multiple perspectives. These perspectives are exemplified through diverse case studies – from the political and ethical implications of thinking with forests, to the capacity of storytelling to motivate action, to the worldview of the Indigenous Okanagan community in British Columbia. Living Earth Community: Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing synthesizes insights from across a range of academic fields, and highlights the potential for synergy between disciplinary approaches and inquiries. This anthology is essential reading not only for researchers and students, but for anyone interested in the ways in which humans interact with the community of life on Earth, especially during this current period of environmental emergency.
Download or read book Evergreen Ash written by Christopher Abram and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-02-06 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Norse mythology is obsessed with the idea of an onrushing and unstoppable apocalypse: Ragnarok, when the whole of creation will perish in fire, smoke, and darkness and the earth will no longer support the life it once nurtured. Most of the Old Norse texts that preserve the myths of Ragnarok originated in Iceland, a nation whose volcanic activity places it perpetually on the brink of a world-changing environmental catastrophe. As the first full-length ecocritical study of Old Norse myth and literature, Evergreen Ash argues that Ragnarok is primarily a story of ecological collapse that reflects the anxieties of early Icelanders who were trying to make a home in a profoundly strange, marginal, and at times hostile environment. Christopher Abram here contends that Ragnarok offers an uncanny foreshadowing of our current global ecological crisis—the era of the Anthropocene. Ragnarok portends what may happen when a civilization believes that nature can be mastered and treated only as a resource to be exploited for human ends. The enduring power of the Ragnarok myth, and its relevance to life in the era of climate change, lies in its terrifying evocation of a world in which nothing is what it was before, a world that is no longer home to us—and, thus, a world with no future. Climate change may well be our Ragnarok.
Download or read book Energy and Change written by Clayton Crockett and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-27 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As humanity continues to consume planetary resources at an unsustainable rate, we require not only new and renewable forms of energy but also new ways of understanding energy itself. Clayton Crockett offers an innovative philosophy of energy that cuts across a number of leading-edge disciplines. Drawing from contemporary philosophies of New Materialism, non-Western traditions, and the sciences, he develops a comprehensive vision of energy as a material process spanning physics, biology, politics, ecology, and religion. Crockett argues that change is foundational to material reality, which is ceaselessly self-organizing. We can observe energy’s effects in the operations of natural selection as well as those at work in human societies. Matter and energy are not an oppositional binary; rather, they are expressions of how change functions in the universe. Ultimately, Crockett argues, we can conceive of God neither as a deity nor as a being but as the principle of change. Informed by cutting-edge theoretical discourses in thermodynamics, science studies, energy humanities, systems theory, continental philosophy, and radical theology, Energy and Change draws on theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Žižek, Karen Barad, Bruno Latour, and Kojin Karatani as well as ideas about spirituality, society, and nature from Amerindian, Vodou, and Neo-Confucian traditions. A foundational work in New Materialist philosophy of religion, this book offers compelling new insights into the structure of the cosmos and our place in it.
Download or read book Climate Change Ethics and the Non Human World written by Brian G. Henning and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines from different perspectives the moral significance of non-human members of the biotic community and their omission from climate ethics literature. The complexity of life in an age of rapid climate change demands the development of moral frameworks that recognize and respect the dignity and agency of both human and non-human organisms. Despite decades of careful work in non-anthropocentric approaches to environmental ethics, recent anthologies on climate ethics have largely omitted non-anthropocentric approaches. This multidisciplinary volume of international scholars tackles this lacuna by presenting novel work on non-anthropocentric approaches to climate ethics. Written in an accessible style, the text incorporates sentiocentric, biocentric, and ecocentric perspectives on climate change. With diverse perspectives from both leading and emerging scholars of environmental ethics, geography, religious studies, conservation ecology, and environmental studies, this book will offer a valuable reading for students and scholars of these fields.
Download or read book Women and Nature written by Douglas Vakoch and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Notes on contributors -- Editor's foreword -- Part I Overview -- Introduction -- 1 Françoise d'Eaubonne and ecofeminism: rediscovering the link between women and nature -- Part II Rethinking animality -- 2 A retreat on the "river bank": perpetuating patriarchal myths in animal stories -- 3 Visual patriarchy: PETA advertising and the commodification of sexualized bodies -- 4 Ethical transfeminism: transgender individuals' narratives as contributions to ethics of vegetarian ecofeminisms -- Part III Constructing connections -- 5 The women-nature connection as a key element in the social construction of Western contemporary motherhood -- 6 The nature of body image: the relationship between women's body image and physical activity in natural environments -- 7 Writing women into back-to-the-land: feminism, appropriation, and identity in the 1970s magazine -- Part IV Mediating practices -- 8 Bilha Givon as Sartre's "third party" in environmental dialogues -- 9 "Yo soy mujer" ¿yo soy ecologista? Feminist and ecological consciousness at the Women's Intercultural Center -- 10 The politics of land, water and toxins: reading the life-narratives of three women oikos-carers from Kerala -- 11 Ecofeminism and the telegenics of celebrity in documentary film: the case of Aradhana Seth's Dam/Age (2003) and the Narmada Bachao Andolan -- Afterword -- Index
Download or read book The Problem of Religious Experience written by Olga Louchakova-Schwartz and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a long time, the philosophically difficult topic of religious experience has been on the sidelines of phenomenological research (with a notable exception of Anthony Steinbock, who focused on mysticism). The book The Problem of Religious Experience: Case Studies in Phenomenology, with Reflections and Commentaries brings together preeminent as well as emerging voices in the field, with fresh views on the topic. Originating from dialogues of the Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience, these two volumes cover a spectrum of phenomenological approaches, with a thematization of the field in the form of case studies. Contributions from theology, comparative religion, psychology and the philosophy of religion come together in the commentaries and meta-narrative written by Olga Louchakova-Schwartz (the editor). Volume I, The Primeval Showing of Religious Experience, examines religious experience with regard to its lived “interiority”, in light of the problem of the ego cogito, including the recent research on the embodiment of subjectivity and phenomenological materiality. Volume I also sheds light on religious experience in regard for the problems of its constitution, passive synthesis, the world, and otherness. Volume II, Doxastic Perspectives in the Phenomenology of Religious Experience, addresses the phenomenology of revelation, shows how different approaches treat the question of essence in religious experience (i.e., what is it that makes religious experience religious?), and demonstrates how religious experience contributes to the psychological horizon of meaning. The book identifies the “growing edges” in the phenomenological research of religious experience and is useful for psychologists, philosophers, and theologians alike. "The two volumes offer an excellent interdisciplinary introduction to the phenomenon of religious experience. The case studies presented in them are arranged under the central topics of self, alterity, revelation, and psychological aspects of religious experience and provide outstanding examples of applied phenomenology." Hans Rainer Sepp, Charles University, Prague, and Central European Institute of Philosophy "In the context of the "return of religion," this book offers both a timely and necessary contribution to confront the peculiarities of religious experience. Providing readers with applied phenomenological descriptions in an interdisciplinary spirit, these debates will prove stimulating for a resurgent field of research that is starting to refine its conceptual devices and methodological presuppositions." University of Vienna.
Download or read book The Human Animal Boundary written by Mario Wenning and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the centuries philosophers and poets alike have defended an essential difference—rather than a porous transition—between the human and animal. Attempts to assign essential properties to humans (e.g., language, reason, or morality) often reflected ulterior aims to defend a privileged position for humans.. This book shifts the traditional anthropocentric focus of philosophy and literature by combining the questions “What is human?” and “What is animal?” What makes this collection unique is that it fills a lacuna in critical animal studies and the growing field of ecocriticism. It is the first collection that establishes a productive encounter between philosophical perspectives on the human–animal boundary and those that draw on fictional literature. The objective is to establish a dialogue between those disciplines with the goal of expanding the imaginative scope of human-animal relationships. The contributions thus do not only trace and deconstruct the boundaries dividing humans and nonhuman animals, they also present the reader with alternative perspectives on the porous continuum and surprising reversal of what appears as human and what as nonhuman.
Download or read book Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading written by Declan Kavanagh and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2024-11-30 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to read queerly? The Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading upholds intersectional thinking to recognise the wide currency and appeal of queer studies for a new generation of scholars, activists, students and interested allies. Its four interconnecting parts - 'transing queer readings', 'reading queer ecologies', 'queer reading as practice' and 'reading queer futures' - speak to, and help to critique and foreground, expansive queer epistemologies. Contributors evocatively explore the relationships between queerness and genders, embodiments, race, narrative, methodology, history, literature, media and art. Bringing together emerging and established queer theorists, this timely collection demonstrates how germane queer readings, theories and companions are to the livelihood of interdisciplinary research and humanistic inquiry in the 2020s.
Download or read book Routledge International Handbook of Religion in Global Society written by Jayeel Cornelio and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-29 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like any other subject, the study of religion is a child of its time. Shaped and forged over the course of the twentieth century, it has reflected the interests and political situation of the world at the time. As the twenty-first century unfolds, it is undergoing a major transition along with religion itself. This volume showcases new work and new approaches to religion which work across boundaries of religious tradition, academic discipline and region. The influence of globalizing processes has been evident in social and cultural networking by way of new media like the internet, in the extensive power of global capitalism and in the increasing influence of international bodies and legal instruments. Religion has been changing and adapting too. This handbook offers fresh insights on the dynamic reality of religion in global societies today by underscoring transformations in eight key areas: Market and Branding; Contemporary Ethics and Virtues; Intimate Identities; Transnational Movements; Diasporic Communities; Responses to Diversity; National Tensions; and Reflections on ‘Religion’. These themes demonstrate the handbook’s new topics and approaches that move beyond existing agendas. Bringing together scholars of all ages and stages of career from around the world, the handbook showcases the dynamism of religion in global societies. It is an accessible introduction to new ways of approaching the study of religion practically, theoretically and geographically.
