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As geographers confront the manifold challenges of an Anthropocene, so the framing of geography as the critical study of space – a framing that took hold of theory and practice in the 20th century and that searched for antecedents as well as prognostications – is increasingly splayed across the long durée of geography as the interrogation of the nature of human being as well as the Earthly environment and the constitutive relations between these. While the prospect of a new geologic epoch situates these Anthropocene challenges as the conjunction of a human history with the deep time of the planet, it also suggests, for example, the entanglement of the geopolitical and the geophysical, an entanglement that the (colonial and imperialising) discipline of geography has helped to articulate and produce even while proffering an explanation of the same. In pivoting back once more to the knotty matter of geopolitics and geophysics, what concepts and lexicons might be productive? Here, and thinking through the work that terrain has done and can do, I offer the multi-agential, survey defying, taxonomically mutable, drifting geographies of drift that have been so perturbing to a solid geology and its stratigraphic tempo, and hence can, perhaps, provide another resource from which to construe the political materialities of an Anthropocene.

Current day volcanology largely tends to an instrumentalist view of art as, in its mimetic form, capable of providing proxy data on the timing and unfolding of particular volcanic events and, in its impressionistic form, of conveying the sublime grandeur of volcanic events and scenes. In this chapter, we note that such a reductionist view of what science is unhelpfully glosses over a much more complex disciplinary lineage, wherein both art and aesthetics played a key role in knowledge production concerning volcanoes. Using the work of Sir William Hamilton and Mary Somerville as case studies, we emphasise that art and aesthetics were part and parcel of both an 18th and 19th century approach to the study of volcanoes, and the making of particular scientific audiences. What is more, it is this lineage that provides a creative reservoir for more recent efforts that cut across scientific and arts divides, such that the ‘communication’ of the nature of volcanoes becomes a multi-media, multi-affective endeavour that speaks to a diverse range of publics.

How can a feminist materialism problematise the knowledges and practices of geopolitics, and locate new objects for critical analysis? In the following, I acknowledge how geopolitics as a form of statecraft has been preoccupied with the unruly nature of flesh. I also note how an accounting for flesh as a socio-spatial material has helped to animate both a critical geopolitical inquiry concerned with the inscription of bodies alongside other texts and a feminist concern with embodiment. My response to these developments is twofold. First, I want to query the devolving of the flesh into an ideologically saturated matter that can be examined using corporeal bodies as entry points for analysis. Second, and via recourse to work founded on feminist material philosophies, I want to reclaim the excessive, lively character of flesh. To do so, I outline how the geo- in geopolitics can be understood as an ‘earthiness’ that is concerned, at the broadest level, with differential orderings of and access to life, and especially the matters of sex, sexuality and reproduction, and, more specifically, with a concern for differential renderings of a corporeal vulnerability and obduracy, and the articulation of these alongside the building of a practice-based ethics. Using the example of stem cells, I go on to demonstrate how an emphasis upon flesh as an object of analysis allows for a reworking of geopolitics' traditional foci – such as borders – away from questions of the ‘where’ of social relations and toward the inexhaustible becoming of materials and forces that makes and unmakes such foci.