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Various scholars have criticized that formal Western thinking was dichotomous and substantialist, leading to an alienation from nature and to its exploitation in industrialized societies. Critics argue that a relational turn towards a more holistic, process-based and relational approach to address the world would be an important step to overcome these problems. Such a relational turn involves a shift towards more flexible and inclusive concepts. We analyse 'nature' concepts of local stakeholders in Swiss nature parks to examine whether they contain any relational elements. Indeed, we found that all stakeholders interviewed see themselves as part of nature. Many reported how they experience nature in active processes and see nature as a collaborator and partner. Moreover, they do not strictly separate between natural and cultural elements in their environment. We conclude that a relational turn in environmental policy in Western countries could build on these relational elements in nature concepts of the local population. Key policy highlights: Our interview data of local actors in a Western society show that they endorse relational rather than dualistic or dichotomous worldviews when it comes to the relationship between humans and nature. The interviewees see themselves as a part of nature, with human roles in nature. They understand nature not primarily as an inventory of objects, but as an active force that shapes the environment together with human planning and design. They value and protect natural and cultural elements in the landscape together. We propose that such roots of relational thinking in Western worldviews could be a starting point for a broader relational turn in environmental policy, science, economy and other areas of formal Western thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The picturebook Tales from the Inner City (2018), created by Shaun Tan, encompasses various surreal mysteries about humans and animals. His stories represent a sociopolitical intervention, beyond the conventional purpose of animal/object representation serving humanistic allegories and show animals as autonomous beings finding their long-ignored place in the world. These imaged stories stretch literature's ability at interactions between humans and animals. Tan's experiment with new styles of reading calls for a reconfigured rhetoric. An interdisciplinary approach of ecocriticism and biopolitics creates sufficient grounds to examine the boundaries of what is human/animal. It questions the centrality of humans in literature. This article uses the biopolitical readings of Mario Ortiz-Robles as he moves beyond allegorical readings of animal tropes, the companion species of Donna Haraway as she observes animal/human relations, and Frank Serafini's methods at interpreting visual aspects of picturebooks. This paper looks at the selected tales – 'Fox', 'Eagle', 'Hippo', 'Lungfish', and 'Frog' to examine how Shaun Tan transforms humans in body and dreams through forceful encounters with animals, thus repositioning the power dynamic in human/animal relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various scholars have criticized that formal Western thinking was dichotomous and substantialist, leading to an alienation from nature and to its exploitation in industrialized societies. Critics argue that a relational turn towards a more holistic, process-based and relational approach to address the world would be an important step to overcome these problems. Such a relational turn involves a shift towards more flexible and inclusive concepts. We analyse ‘nature’ concepts of local stakeholders in Swiss nature parks to examine whether they contain any relational elements. Indeed, we found that all stakeholders interviewed see themselves as part of nature. Many reported how they experience nature in active processes and see nature as a collaborator and partner. Moreover, they do not strictly separate between natural and cultural elements in their environment. We conclude that a relational turn in environmental policy in Western countries could build on these relational elements in nature concepts of the local population.

Photographs of children are used on a daily basis in Swedish preschool practice. Although the preschool curriculum prescribes gender equality and celebration of diversity, photographs of indoor activities have shown to display a homogenous view of children and an emphasis on masculine-coded productions and accomplishments. This article examines 325 photographs of outdoor activities from Swedish preschools with diverse ethnic compositions. Our results reveal a Swedish natureculture identity that is more explicitly performed in the multi-ethnic preschool classes. Since ideals of gender equality and closeness to nature connect to the image of Swedishness, this can be understood as compensatory pedagogy. Moreover, the natureculture identity appears to be neutral in relation to ethnicity and gender, which risks rendering diversity invisible. However, the displayed neutrality is also possible to understand as working towards equity where conventionally feminine values such as care, empathym and sensitivity are underscored as desirable for everyone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Trees are natural objects that carry practical, cultural and spiritual meanings to humans. Trees are an elemental part of human daily life, both in urban and rural environments, and even in locations where forests are distant. Conflicts related to tree removal in the close environments of humans indicate that individual trees may have special significance. Despite that, we have little knowledge of the ways these relationships are formed and the meanings they carry. To examine how the properties of trees and humans influence the type of relationships that are formed between them, we conducted a large‐scale survey (n = 1758). We used cluster analysis to identify typical groups of trees and human–tree relationships and conducted cross‐tabulation to correlate human and tree types in the relationships. In studying the human–tree relationship, we applied the framework of natureculture to address how the lives of humans and trees are bound together in interspecies relationships. Our results show that the strongest influence on tree–human relationships originates from human lifestyles and nature connections. Consequently, we identified three main types of human–tree relationships: (1) Admiring relationships towards large, old and charismatic trees, primarily grounded in sensory and emotional experiences, are common among urban nature‐loving people. (2) Nurturing relationships that occur with young trees in people's own gardens, which is most typical for rural outdoorspeople owning houses. (3) Nostalgic relationships are associated with trees with symbolic value in the memories of people who no longer have a material connection to an important environment. Our study revealed that the affection of humans for trees in their close environment strongly varied in emotional intensity and practical actions related to trees. We provide new knowledge of the correlations between human and tree characteristics in forming their interspecies relationship and how this relationship affects human emotional well‐being. Based on our findings, we suggest that understanding human–nature interdependence helps to sustain and create emotionally supportive multispecies environments through green design and management. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

In this article, we explore how land subsidence is scientifically known in the coastal city of Semarang, Indonesia. We do so to ask questions about how the authority of this scientific knowledge is or not effective to help slow down land subsidence? We examine the scientific methods used to measure where, and at what rate, subsidence occurs, and we inventory the theories mobilized to interpret and explain them. Our analysis shows how land subsidence resists being fully or unambiguously known; its science remains somewhat speculative. We explore how, in Semarang, but also more broadly, this makes it difficult for subsidence scientists to act as effective 'spokespersons' for subsidence; their predictions lack certainty and confidence. As we follow the subsidence debates in Semarang we document how subsidence scientists need the authority of science to speak convincingly to powerful elite coalitions of government agencies and private companies, who have vested interests in ignoring or denying their role in causing or accelerating subsidence. We identify this as one reason why subsidence scientists deploy great efforts to present themselves, and their science, as separate from politics and society, as detached and therefore objective. Beyond contributing to emergent discussions in science and technology studies about how science shapes underground politics, our analysis opens up and sheds new light on the question of how scientific facts become entangled with politics in societal controversies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of People & Nature is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Hundreds of thousands of hectares of bushland and accompanying biodiversity were lost over a few short weeks during the Black Summer fires of 2019–2020 along the east coast of Australia. On the night of 19 December 2019, fire swept up the escarpment from the coast, slowed down with the thick understory of temperate rainforest and burnt through the lower dry sclerophyll forest on Plumwood Mountain. The aftermath of the bare, burnt landscape meant a significant change in the structure and diversity of vegetation, while the consequences of the fire also brought about fundamental changes to Plumwood as a conservation and heritage organisation. Plumwood Mountain as a place, the individual plumwood tree as an agentive being, Val Plumwood as a person and Plumwood as an organisation are all an entangled form of natureculture and indicative of a practice-based conservation humanities approach. Conservation as part of the environmental humanities can offer an alternative to mainstream models of conservation with the potential to instigate active participation on the ground, engaging in a different form of stewardship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a challenge to conceptualize an environmental/sustainability education that employs imaginaries and praxis for learning our way through and beyond our planetary crisis, we consider how posthuman creativity articulates into pedagogical practice. We share insights from our researcher/practitioner experience in two different educational settings, theorizing creative/learning ecologies with posthuman insights from Karen Barad and Dan Harris. Our two "learning ecologies" are located within: a preschool in Western Sydney; and a girls' school in the Himalayan mountains of Uttarakhand. These learning ecologies intra-act to create agentic pedagogies, equipping children to care-take themselves and their worlds, affected as they are by the ecological distortions inherent in the Capitalocene. The pedagogies, characterized as "a pedagogy of hope" and as "a pedagogy of love and responsibility" respectively, enable students to meet and respond to the world in ways which reclaim human/nature agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article articulates the places of early modern poetry with contemporary eco-theories. Mobilising the connectivities of οικος rather than the separations of environment, the author traces ecological senses of place in the poetry of Du Bellay, Jacques Peletier, and Ronsard, and reclaims Renaissance humanism from posthumanist detractors. Humanist pastoral poetry manifests the sense of connection claimed as the purview of contemporary concepts such as naturecultures or transcorporeality. Renaissance place, as an ecological habit of thought, contrasts favourably with modern veneration of wilderness which separates human from environs. The conclusion suggests continuities between Renaissance humanism and our academic humanities inasmuch as they privilege relational, rather than acquisitive or extractive, value systems. The text is a modified version of the keynote address to the 2022 SEMFS Conference and contains references to some of the papers presented in the spirit of archiving that stimulating intellectual space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disease ecology has the potential to help build a new society where the contradictions of our time are recognized and confronted in the pursuit of a more considered, and just, understanding of the interrelationships of organisms with the environment. Unfortunately, the discipline is facing a major dilemma as the advent of new technologies, access to remote data, and lack of engagement with the contexts where diseases emerge and are transmitted, has resulted in the creation of Blame Local Indigenous and Peasant Populations (BLIPP) narratives that align with hegemonic globalizing agents and processes. Here, in the first half of a two-part essay about reifications in disease ecology, thinking with dialectical materialism, we demystify BLIPP narratives around land use change in disease emergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hundreds of thousands of hectares of bushland and accompanying biodiversity were lost over a few short weeks during the Black Summer fires of 2019–2020 along the east coast of Australia. On the night of 19 December 2019, fire swept up the escarpment from the coast, slowed down with the thick understory of temperate rainforest and burnt through the lower dry sclerophyll forest on Plumwood Mountain. The aftermath of the bare, burnt landscape meant a significant change in the structure and diversity of vegetation, while the consequences of the fire also brought about fundamental changes to Plumwood as a conservation and heritage organisation. Plumwood Mountain as a place, the individual plumwood tree as an agentive being, Val Plumwood as a person and Plumwood as an organisation are all an entangled form of natureculture and indicative of a practice-based conservation humanities approach. Conservation as part of the environmental humanities can offer an alternative to mainstream models of conservation with the potential to instigate active participation on the ground, engaging in a different form of stewardship.

A wetland policy perspective based on social ecological systems accepts that wetlands are part of landwaterscapes, that people are part of wetland ecosystems, and that the health of wetlands and the health of people are interdependent, evidence of the close, reciprocal and indivisible relationships between nature and culture. These relationships are storied and place-based, associated with place attachment, and are representations of relational values. They are most easily located wherever and whenever Indigenous and local peoples' knowledge and interests are at play in wetland settings. Legal and administrative processes that recognise Chthonic law and rights for wetlands will elevate relational values and provide the governance arrangements for their inclusion in wetland (and other ecosystem) management. Co-designing with Indigenous and local communities in developing wetland policies and operationalising practices will allow for wetland stories to be shared, respectfully cared for, and built into educational curricula and ecosystem valuation models. (Warning: this article contains the name of deceased Aboriginal person.) Wetlands need to be considered in their landscape context, in context of relationships that people have with them, and how societies are organised around them. This perspective highlights relational values of wetlands, most often expressed by Indigenous and local communities, where attachments to places yield understandings and responsibilities for policy. (Warning: this article contains the name of deceased Aboriginal person.) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ywain and Gawain narrates Ywain's knightly adventures due to which he is spiritually transformed into a perfect knight. His adventure begins with his departure from Arthur's court with the intent of avenging his cousin Colgrevance upon hearing his anecdote of combat with a knight and his subsequent defeat. At the beginning of Ywain's journey, culture/nature binary opposition becomes visible with the sudden change in topography from the civilised court to the wilderness. According to anthropocentrism, culture and nature are often thought to be separate from each other and dichotomous. At first glance, it seems that Ywain and Gawain also adopts such an anthropocentric viewpoint, that is, culture predominates nature. However, it can be observed that culture/nature binary opposition and its rigid definitions are challenged and blurred throughout the romance. In this regard, this paper aims to explore Ywain and Gawain's treatment of culture/nature binary opposition and analyse how the narrative challenges the strict boundaries of these two concepts through the lens of Donna Haraway's term "natureculture(s)" which acknowledges the inseparability and equal importance of culture and nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advances in contemporary genetic science have reshaped the narratives whereby individuals and communities make sense of their personal, family, and communal histories. In this process, unknown connections have been revealed and familiar orthodoxies disrupted. This essay examines the consequences of a particularly unusual revelation--the dawning awareness of the presence of nonhuman and archaic human DNA in human genetic lines--for efforts at writing about identity and society. In this autoethnographic account, I examine my own genetic inheritance of Neanderthal DNA, and posit a performative concept of genetic life writing that begins to unpack the complexities of this new knowledge about our human condition. Rather than providing the key to unlocking an "essential" humanity, the murky, messy, and multispecies genome reveals an essentially ecological quality to humanity, and to our individual identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new materialist reading of Cervantes's Numancia (c. 1585) that reassesses the role of personified bodies of water like the Duero as early modern naturecultures. Personifications of bodies of water were ubiquitous in the political iconography of the early modern period due to their capacity to tether political order to idealized visions of a land's natural order. In its ability to bridge the divide between nature and culture, personifications like the river god Duero constitute an early modern iteration of the new materialist notion of natureculture. The Duero, however, is just one personified body of water among many in Numancia. The imperial terraforming of Numancia's land and people into a lake of blood at the end of Act Four represents a liquid counterpoint to the river god Duero and his idealized account of imperial history in Act One. I propose here that the two bodies of water that bookend Numancia must be understood in relation to each other as doubles that reveal, in the case of the lake of blood, what the Duero obfuscates. What surfaces at the confluence of the bodies of water that flood Numancia is Cervantes's critical appraisal of the river god Duero as a beguiling but misleading figure that distorts nature and history in the service of empire. One can conclude that in Numancia Cervantes is thinking of human bodies as porous entities that take on liquid forms imbued with subjectivity and history in ways that speak to the new materialist insights of contemporary theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of climate change and possible conflicts caused by water shortages, raising public awareness about the importance of urban rivers constitutes an important challenge. The article proposes a theoretical reflection on the rapidly growing research field known as water heritage. By treating rivers as a commonality of different life forms associated with a specific space, the project seeks approaches that emphasize positive forms of local adaptation, cooperation, and reciprocity. The highlighting of such human actions in past social practices could provide a reference point for contemporary rescue and prevention initiatives. The author illustrates assumptions of the presented research perspective with a critical analysis of Oskar Hansen’s project for the development of the former Warta riverbed in Poznań. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, Ferrara puts forward the first analysis of Pier Paolo Pasolini's films The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966) and Pigsty (1969) through the lens of posthumanist theory. She contends that by placing animal characters (raven and pigs) in close interaction with humans, Pasolini encouraged viewers to explore and overcome the human–animal divide. In doing so, he aimed to expose the faulty binary premises of Marxist ideology and construct a posthumanist identity that recognized the illusory separation between body and mind, and between the human and its related others. Drawing on concepts such as Marchesini's 'mimesis', Cronin's 'tradosphere', Nancy's 'co-ontology' and Braidotti's 'becoming animal', this article shows how Pasolini considers an exit from anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism via trans-species solidarity. Eventually, in Pigsty, animality turns into a metaphor for all alterity. As humans are silenced by pigs, a new powerful language of 'otherness' gives birth to the posthuman human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kiruna ‐ A Brand New World (2019) is a documentary film directed by Greta Stocklassa, and produced by the Czech company Analog Vision. It analyses the move of (part of) Kiruna, a north‐Swedish mining city, which is threatened by destruction because of the operations of the state‐owned ore mining company, Luossavaara‐Kiirunavaara (LKAB). The film focusses on the lives of a number of inhabitants, including Timo, a local activist opposing the move, the teenage Sami Maja and Abdalrahman, a teenage refugee from Yemen.Our discursive‐material analysis (see Carpentier, 2017) focusses on how the film represents and intervenes in a discursive‐material struggle over the identity of three actors—the soil, the city and the mine—and their interconnections.The article starts with a theoretical discussion on discourse theory, enriched by new materialist approaches, to develop a theoretical framework that does justice to the discursive‐material entanglement.This framework is then used to identify a hegemonic cluster of discourses that give meaning to nature, consisting of anthropocentrism, dualism and prometheanism, and a counterhegemonic cluster, consisting of ecocentrism, integrationism and survivalism.The analysis shows that the documentary film shows the workings of the hegemonic cluster (centred around the topoi of progress and TINA), but also visualizes the gaps in, and limits of, this hegemonic cluster. Second, the film also gently highlights the discursive‐material conflict by giving voice to those who identify with the counterhegemonic discourses, and by representing the soil as having material agency, resisting its exploitation. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1990s, the Dutch artist herman de vries has installed several works in public space with the title sanctuarium (or sanctuary)—empty plots of land, surrounded by a fence, where nature is left to grow uninterrupted. For the artist, these sanctuaries communicate a consistent universal plea: that of rediscovering and reconnecting with nature in its pure, unspoilt form, from which modern life has alienated us. By resituating the sanctuaries in their actual environments and looking at their evolutions throughout the years, this paper shows how the ideas and affects instigated by the sanctuaries are actually contingent, and differ significantly from one place to another. These works are continuously reshaped, both physically and symbolically, by ongoing negotiations between the "object", its (social, environmental, and geographic) context, and varied interventions by local actors. This brings to the fore a couple of broader issues as well: first, the impossibility of perceiving the human–nature relationship merely in phenomenological and universalistic terms, since this relationship is always locally embedded. Secondly, the understanding that, from a semiotic perspective, a work of public art is a radically dynamic entity—owing both to its installation in the politically charged public space, and to the possibility of local publics to experience and interact with the work in a myriad of spontaneous ways.

This article explores a stylized version of "natural" birdsong as an element of the soundscape of a historical city, late-nineteenth-century St. Petersburg. From 1880 to 1900, canaries were brought to the city in great numbers from hatcheries located in the Russian countryside. Their song was the ovsîanka , a mix of melodies acquired from wild Russian birds. This song reflects "enhanced nature," linking human intentionality to the agency of a nonhuman animal, the canary, and both to the city. Breeders, merchants, keepers, and birds formed a super-urban assemblage spanning the city and the countryside. Canaries, like human migrants flooding to the city during this time, retained their strong village roots, and their urban role depended on them. In this super-urban assemblage, the canaries' urban performance was an expression of their modified and contextual agency, though their agency was assembled and authorized by human-nonhuman networks engendered by the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops an argument for 'entrapment' as a heuristic of social process. Building on classic and contemporary ethnographies of traps and machine interfaces, the article offers the language of entrapment as an alternative to other idioms of complexity in social theory, such as 'relations', 'entanglements', and 'assemblages'. The heuristic appeal of entrapment lies in its ability to kindle modes of description where place and landscape, the obligations of bodies and energies, and the haunting presences of predation and the uncanny remain immanent to social process. Moreover, the work that entrapments do is recursively entangled with anthropology's own capacity for captivating, capturing, and making compatible further ethnographic descriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Wadden Sea is a busy environment in which multiple species share a limited space. Humans use the area for recreation and economic purposes, while it also represents an ecologically valuable space as one of the largest intertidal areas in the world. Sharing the Wadden Sea with multiple species is recognized as a challenge by a seal rehabilitation center in the Netherlands, who cares for seals and their habitat, the Wadden Sea. To diminish harmful effects of human-seal interactions, the seal rehabilitation center educates their visitors to care for the Wadden Sea through at least three different educational practices (seal releases, beach cleanups, and through an exhibition at the visitor center). By taking a relational perspective to analyze these educational moments, it becomes apparent that different "natures" are brought into being. That is, by creating different experiences in multiple circumstances, relations between what is experienced or enacted as being part of the Wadden Sea environment changes. An important focus in this article is the diverse positions humans take up in relation to the Wadden Sea as they are encouraged to care for it and the seals. Instead of taking a human and nature distinction as a starting point, I will show that these educational practices produce fluid and dynamic relations between "humans" and "nature," enabling multiple engagements with the sea and those who inhabit it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An embrace of non-hegemonic thinking will strengthen the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of education and activism in the Anthropocene. Lakshmi Ashram, a modest girls' school in the Himalayan slopes of Uttarakhand, India, gives an object lesson in thinking differently: in an imbrication of education/research/activism. This essay highlights a continued lack of attention in the literature to local, cultural and place-based diversity in transformational learning for a sustainable community. However, the core topic in this piece is not one of critique but rather one of a Himalayan approach to establishing the educational circumstances for transformation in thinking and conduct in a linked socio-ecological society. Writing across an international space, the two writers outline their ethnographic approaches, analysing the long-term influence of a Lakshmi Ashram education on students and embodying the school's educational experience. A fluid flow of socio-material practice between teaching, research and activism in the school's educational approach points to a Gandhian philosophy-in-action that is worth contemplating a contribution to global educational praxis in the Anthropocene. In sharing this account of one tiny school's pedagogical philosophy, the writers aspire not towards ideological posturing but towards providing new possibilities in thinking differently in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a retelling of a traditional Sami tale in the picturebook Sølvmånen [Silver Moon] by Sissel Horndal (2015). The book tells the story of a girl who is abducted by the Stallo, an Ogre well known in Sami lore. The fairy tale is placed in a contemporary setting, with a complex interplay between pictures and verbal text. The analysis uses perspectives drawn from ecocritical studies to discuss how nature is presented in the book. Using the concept of natureculture developed by Donna Haraway (2003), the article investigates the book’s portrayal of landscapes, climate/seasons, vegetation, animals and humans. The article asks whether the indigenous natureculture portrayed in Sølvmånen can be seen primarily as a harmonious dwelling, or as a more nuanced and troubling postequilibrium (Garrard, 2012). One of the aspects discussed in the article is the role of the Stallo figure as a threatening force within natureculture, or as an external threat.

Dans le roman Die Abschaffung der Arten de Dietmar Dath (2008), des animaux génétiquement modifiés s’interrogent sur la fin de l’humanité. Littéralement posthumains, ces “Gente” se sont détachés de la nature ; ils peuvent changer de sexe et d’espèce si librement qu’il devient impossible de comprendre le sens d’orientation sexuelle. À l’autre bout du monde, une divinité biotechnologique envahit la Terre en se servant de corps de “bio-femmes” qu’elle accouple à des nano-machines. Cet article tente d’analyser les différentes conceptions de l’hybridité décrites dans le roman. Il s’agira de se concentrer sur les notions de genre et de sexualité dans des mondes futuristes où les conceptions traditionnelles de corps et de sexe biologiques sont remises en question. Quelle érotique est rendue possible par les corps hors-normes de ces créatures, par leur efficience bio-technologique ?

Copyright of Porównania / Comparisons. A Journal on Comparative Literature & Interdisciplinary Studies is the property of Adam Mickiewicz University Poznao, Press of "Poznanskie Studia Polonistyczne" and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Cambodian city of Phnom Penh displays a unique recyclable waste collection system. This article follows the daily practices of waste pickers and the movements of recyclable waste through the city. The hereby examined recurrent daily interactions define the overall infrastructure of recyclable waste handling that can be described as infracycles: sociomaterial constellations through which the quotidian flows of persons, goods, tools, narratives and ideas are organized in a recurrent and circular manner, thereby functioning as an actual lived infrastructure. This infrastructure is lived out bottom-up, as waste pickers, depot owners, and others interrelate. As waste circulates through cycles, different sociomaterialities emerge, which shape the city. Keeping the city somewhat clean, waste pickers form material itineraries and direct flows that shape urban ecologies. In the same process, oozy materials leaking from infracycles also create new versions of the city in the form of urban naturecultures, which compete with other imaginaries and designs for Phnom Penh's urban transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drones deployed to monitor endangered species often crash. These crashes teach us that using drones for conservation is a contingent practice ensnaring humans, technologies, and animals. This article advances a crash theory in which pilots, conservation drones, and endangered megafauna are relata, or related actants, that intra-act, cocreating each other and a mutually constituted phenomena. These phenomena are entangled, with either reciprocal dependencies or erosive entrapments. The crashing of conservation drones and endangered species requires an ethics of care, repair, or reworlding. Diffractions, disruptions that expose difference, result from crashes and reveal the precarious manner by which technologies, laws, and discourses bring nature and culture together. To support crash theory, this article presents three ethnographic cases. A drone crash in the United Kingdom near white rhinoceroses while building machine learning training data exhibits the involvement of the electromagnetic spectrum; the threat of crashes in the Pacific Northwest near Puget Sound orcas discloses the impacts of drone laws; and drone crashes in Sri Lanka among Asian elephants presents the problems of technoliberal ideals around programming natural worlds. Throughout the article, a methodology is developed, parallelism, which attends to the material similarities in lateral phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A socially recognisable signifier for wealth and class in Southeast Asian consciousness, ornamental birdkeeping often focuses on exotic avian species to enhance the status symbolism of this practice. For the past five years, contemporary Vietnamese urbanites have renewed interest in and refocused birdkeeping on a non-exotic avian native to the region: the red-whiskered bulbuls, widely considered a 'bird of the people' (chim bình dân) in the words of participants. Popular media have recognised the return of ornamental birdkeeping as a healthy cultural practice that encourages mental stimulation, yet the favouring of a native, non-exotic species quite amenable to a variety of living and economic situations (dễ nuôi), I argue, is remarkable in its reimagination of the high society associations of this tradition. Further, this article will demonstrate that the increased popularity of raising red-whiskered bulbuls reflects a rapidly urbanising Vietnam wherein holistic ideals of nature, characteristic of and integral to Vietnamese consciousness, underline human-nonhuman interactions from city to country, and are caught amid a transition from industrial modernity, with its nature-culture binarism, to a postmodern period fraught with uncertainties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay maps an emerging philosophical and praxiological turn in contemporary performance studies toward the concept of "natureculture." Natureculture – a concept established in counterpoint to the bifurcated spheres of "nature" and "culture" – offers performance studies scholars new opportunities for research and aesthetic production. The opportunities described in this essay include new interdisciplinary partnerships, expansions of performance theory into nonhuman arenas, and revised theories of the relationship between performance and embodiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within post-structuralist discourse theory, there has been an ongoing interest in fantasy and the fantasmatic logic. We propose a new way forward and suggest a focus on fantasies of 'nature' and what is deemed 'natural'. Fantasies are structurally entwined with language, desire, and political ontologies. Discourses of nature hold a privileged position in this entwinement. We use the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy to explore how symbolic engagement with the world is supported by fantasmatic mechanisms. We argue that political fantasies express political subjects and objects via the imaginary mechanisms of splitting and projection. In an era of ecological crises and global pandemics, we find that fantasies that create a split between nature and society are a central part of the transformation of political imaginaries and discourses. Studying fantasies of various "naturecultures" and the politics of nature is thus an important new direction for discourse theory to explore anti-essentialist ontologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enveloped in artificial light, many urban dwellers have never experienced real darkness. Seeing this as a loss, scholars and organizations have initiated discussions on light and darkness and advocated the preservation of the dark skies. This article aims to further this study by emphasizing the importance of the stars. Instead of studying lights, stars, and darkness ethnographically, the article examines the ideas of stars and darkness in Thierry Cohen's photographs and two of Vincent van Gogh's paintings. This article will suggest that the dark, star-filled skies represented in van Gogh's paintings provide a visual blueprint of what the article calls the "star-lit cities," which goes beyond a simple preservation of darkness, and may be significant in driving vital changes in combating the current environmental crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Southern African rock art is painted on exposed but sheltered rock faces and features involved collocations of images in generally ambiguous relation to one another. Therianthropes — mixtures of parts of humans and animals — condense in one image a relationship between animals and human persons. This analysis takes inspiration from the anthropology of iconography and value creation in Melanesian and Australian indigenous cultures rather than from Siberian "shamanism." It argues that specialised artisans created value by marking nodal points in the landscape that helped to focus and to locate human-animal relations. Ethnographic sources for the interpretation of some images is not restricted to vanished "Bushmen" cultures but is present in contemporary "traditional" healing practices. Southern African cultures have used and understood the relationships between humans, non-humans and the landscape in region-wide healing and ritual practice. This paper abandons anachronistic "ethnic" boundaries of essentialised "Bushman" or "hunter-gatherer" cultures, together with the notion that this art is the primitive manifestation of altered consciousness. In sum, rock art images express concepts concerning the practical and ethical relations that necessarily exist between human health (well-being), social life, "nature" (animals, plants, earth) and the landscape in which human life and nature are set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the ancient Athenian satyr-play was the model for Italian Renaissance pastoral tragicomedy, its chorus of singing and dancing satyrs was suppressed, and these same essential characters were often reduced to a solitary outsider figure representing a violent threat rather than a regenerative force for human communities. My essay asks how and why this reduction became a prevalent dramatic choice, as well as how and why the genre-bending spirit of satyrs nevertheless persisted, with distinct modulations, in many Italian and English plays. Historiographical and theoretical insights from the field of animal studies shape my comparative analysis: these include Donna Haraway's pluralistic and playfully companionate models of 'natureculture' and respect. A key focus is on tensions between anthropocentric and theriophilic attitudes – also expressed through the figure of the 'Wild-Man' – and how they inform pastoral productions from Giraldi Cinzio's Egle to Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, revealing the protean vitality of buffoonish, irrepressibly theatrical satyrs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the basic goals of ecocriticism is to deconstruct the binary opposition between "nature" and "culture", so typical of Western thinking, and to show that these two notions are interdependent and cannot be separated. Donna Haraway proposes to reject this dichotomous division in favour of a new term coined by her, that is natureculture. This article aims at showing how the relationship between "nature" and "culture" is construed in the novel Eventide (2016) by Swedish writer Therese Bohman. The author focuses on the interplay between them and emphasizes the hybrid nature of reality, which could be described as naturalcultural, within the meaning intended by Haraway. Bohman exposes naturalcultural interactions on multiple levels, both diegetic and non-diegetic: starting from the title of her novel, through the imagery in the text, descriptions of the action scene, characters and the observations of the main protagonist, ending with elements of the plot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polish hounds, an old breed of hunting dogs reconstructed in the 50s, illustrate the history of naturoculture. Like Donna Haraway’s cyborgs, Polish hounds transgress three binary oppositions. Firstly, they transgress the boundary between reality and fiction, as the dogs’ physical bodies are co -created by cultural narrations. Secondly, Polish hounds are a product of selective breeding, so they transgress the boundary between nature and culture. Finally, the boundary between nature and technology is blurred. Their bodies are object of technological interventions and scientific research that are to enable their further existence. In addition, Polish hounds and their people encourage reflection on human -animal collectives, where human and non -human lives are interconnected. The dogs and humans provide example of co -existence and embodiment of trans -species solidarity and thus they create a starting point of thinking about post -humanist connections and collectives.

The article analyzes the idea of a sensory garden as a place of symbiotic affective coexistence of human and non-human subjects in urban space, based on the concept presented in the study of green areas belonging to the "Zachęta" Housing Cooperative in Białystok prepared in 2018 by a team from the Białystok University of Technology. The article tries to answer the question of how the sensory garden becomes a space inviting to build affective connections between the entities that co-create it, and whether this reveals its potential leading to the blurring the boundaries between oppositional categories of "nature" -- "culture", "subject" -- "object". The authors note that the concepts of critical posthumanism appreciating the affective relationships between human and non-human actors, as well as non-humans going beyond the functional framework created by human, resonate in the idea of the sensory garden presented in the study. The sensory garden becomes a productivity sphere appreciating the value of the multi-sensory experience of the world, in which humans and non-humans find countless, often non-obvious ways of interacting with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to theorize the teacher role—read also scientist and researcher—as an ontologizing practice to meet with the need for constant deauthorized knowledge and nonknowledge production for life, the ontology of sustainability. Teaching becomes eventicized and teachers become data philosophers through writing. The enigmatic and strength of the teacher is equally distance and/as presence. I place myself in the world as if that is the meaning of life itself and drift (fr. dérive) along with data, and every step I take remains in my body as a map in which I am the scale, with consistencies and smells, tastes, colors, and noises, and the patterns that are formed gradually embrace more and more of the globe, almost in intimate ways. It is a constant reassessment or assessment as learning process, self-assessment as system-assessment. I present a pluralistic approach to research and practices of criticism and value assessment based on systems and structures in our economies and thinking—a treating of problems as scientific epistemological thinking possibilities: a research on transcorporeal collectivities and molecular inter-intra factuality, rather than autonomous selves and identity constructions. It is a slow and other science and research engaged in deliberations about and with hybrid natures and inter-intragenerational sensations: body as profession and transindividual vulnerability. Slowly I inhabit the earth through writing fractured stories, slowly becoming all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, there has been a proliferation of alternative food networks (AFNs) which promote an agenda of reconnection, allegedly linking consumers and producers to the socio-ecological origins of food. Rarely, however, does the AFN literature address "origins" of food in terms of animals, as in the case of meat. This article takes a relational approach to the reconnection agenda between humans and animals by discussing how the phenomenon of animal welfare and "happy" meat are enacted by producers and consumers in mundane, embodied, and nuanced ways. Utilizing hybrid conceptualizations of human-animal relations through "natureculture" and "being alongside", we demonstrate that consumers and producers of AFNs perform natureculture entanglements daily, often considering humans and animals as part of one another and the ecological system. Nonetheless, we also point to how participants in AFNs set boundaries to distance themselves from moments of animal life and death, explaining away uncomfortable affective naturecultures through commodification logics. Drawing on qualitative data from consumers and producers of food networks in Austria, we introduce the concept of "human-animal magnetism" to illustrate that the draw for humans to care about other animal lives exists within a spectrum of attraction and disassociation, engendered through specific human-animal interactions. Ultimately, we offer a cautiously hopeful version of alterity in AFNs of meat in which more caring human-animal relations are possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay embraces the possibilities offered by the "nonhuman turn" (Grusin vii) in the humanities and social sciences, and forwards the claim that plants are performers. In so doing, the essay analyzes the common claims about the ontology of performance, demonstrates how plants meet a strict rubric of evaluation for consideration as performers, and offers potential repercussions and opportunities for performance theory, if a plant performance is seriously considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Lynne Huffer's work on queer feminism, this abridged essay centers the figure of the lesbian in order to develop a dyke ethics that engenders nuanced thinking about both monogamy and embodiment. The essay reads Alison Bechdel's comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, to elaborate a “dyke ethics of anti-monogamy.” Grounded in notions of friendship, community, and social justice, this ethics decenters the sexual dyad in a way that polyamory does not. It also insists upon a theoretical and ethical disposition of respect for the simultaneously political and embodied nature of desire. In so doing, it offers first a way of re-thinking the story of monogamy's nature as a naturecultural tale about mononormative desire and further places that desire in a field of relationality that renders its significance as a feature of humanness and an object of scientific inquiry strange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]