Emerging Climate Change Publics: Cultivating Sustainability and Justice in the Pioneer Valley

Climate change is setting off erratic weather patterns and environmental changes that threaten the livelihood, stability, and survival of the planet. Communities and institutions around the globe are sounding the clarion call about these devastating impacts, advocating for sustainable practices and deep changes to every facet of our lives. This dissertation research consists of an ethnography of a local network of actors and organizations who are responding to climate change, centered on those who define sustainability as integrally connected to justice. I analyze this network of activity through the lens of the concept of an emerging public. I start from the premise that publics are sites that facilitate the potential for collective agency. Publics have the potential to make a wedge between the imperatives that drive the market and the state -- imperatives that are driven by power interests that are largely driving the unsustainable practices that have engendered climate change in the first place. At many points, the research revealed a tenacious gap between an inspired vision of sustainability and justice, and real-life points of entry through which to enact that vision. Participants often felt frustrated that they weren\u27t doing more; that action steps seemed far from the discussions at hand. The data revealed a kind of public incapacity that needed explaining. To this end, I identify three areas that were fundamental to creating openings for agency in emerging publics: discourse, knowledge production, and the structure of publics. I argue that the agentic potential of emerging climate change publics to produce social changes that benefit all citizens is constrained by three tensions observed in this data: 1. the tension between the discursive threads of justice on the one hand, and sustainability on the other 2. the tension between expert and experiential knowledge, and 3. the tension between a desire for inclusive publics, and the reality of their stratification. In conclusion, I argue that if we can see these tensions more clearly, we can work to make publics more effective as sites for unleashing the collective imagination, as well as for generating change that is socially just

Attention to infrastructure offers a welcome reconfiguration of anthropological approaches to the political

This constitutes the edited proceedings of the 2015 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory held at Manchester

Companies as Commodities

Like copper, corn, or crude oil, companies increasingly trade like commodities. Some investors-certain holders of debt, activist shareholders, and controlling shareholders, especially private equity funds-are focused solely on returns. In practice, this means that they care about the fate of the companies in which they invest no more than they care about the fate of any tonne of copper, bushel of corn, or oil barrel they happen to trade. These investors are so immune to reputational concerns that they will even prefer that the companies in which they invest fail if failure maximizes their return on investment. This Article identifies and labels these going-concern-neutral ( GCN ) investors. By virtue of their singular focus on return on investment, GCN investors are not bound by the same norms and relationships as other stakeholders in a company. This disconnect allows GCN investors to transfer an outsized share of company value to themselves. As a result, GCN investing typically increases the costs and risk faced by other stakeholders. This Article then uses property theory to understand GCN investing and the conflicts in the use of company value that it creates. Although it is contested whether GCN investors are properly understood as true owners of firms and their assets, accepting that premise to leverage the tools of property theory leads to significant insights. Analyzing these investors\u27 ownership claims through an exclusion framework reveals unseen nuances in the relationships between GCN investors and other stakeholders. Next, four property-law concepts-the right to destroy, waste, nuisance, and the tragedy of the commons-provide a rich source of analogies. These analogies reveal that the law has long used a number of so-called governancer ules to manage property where there are several competing users. These rules restrict the rights of owners in order to address externalities and to promote welfare maximization. Although companies have been commoditized into mere property, the governance rules that restrict property ownership in other contexts do not yet apply to ownership of companies. It is time to consider interventions that would align the benefits and burdens of ownership of commoditized companies with ownership of other assets

Companies as Commodities

Like copper, corn, or crude oil, companies increasingly trade like commodities. Some investors — certain holders of debt, activist shareholders, and controlling shareholders, especially private equity funds — are focused solely on returns. In practice, this means that they care about the fate of the companies in which they invest no more than they care about the fate of any tonne of copper, bushel of corn, or oil barrel they happen to trade. These investors are so immune to reputational concerns that they will even prefer that the companies in which they invest fail if failure maximizes their return on investment. This Article identifies and labels these “going-concern-neutral” (GCN) investors. By virtue of their singular focus on return on investment, GCN investors are not bound by the same norms and relationships as other stake-holders in a company. This disconnect allows GCN investors to transfer an out sized share of company value to themselves. As a result, GCN investing typically increases the costs and risk faced by other stakeholders.This Article then uses property theory to understand GCN investing and the conflicts in the use of company value that it creates. Although it is contested whether GCN investors are properly understood as true owners of firms and their assets, accepting that premise to leverage the tools of property theory leads to significant insights. Analyzing these investors’ ownership claims through an exclusion framework reveals unseen nuances in the relationships between GCN investors and other stakeholders. Next, four property-law concepts — the right to destroy, waste, nuisance, and the tragedy of the commons — provide a rich source of analogies. These analogies reveal that the law has long used a number of so-called governance rules to manage property where there are several competing users. These rules restrict the rights of owners in order to address externalities and to promote welfare maximization. Although companies have been commoditized into mere property, the governance rules that restrict property ownership in other contexts do not yet apply to ownership of companies. It is time to consider interventions that would align the benefits and burdens of ownership of commoditized companies with ownership of other as-sets

Indigenous Impositions in Contemporary Culture: Knotting Ontologies, Beading Aesthetics, and Braiding Temporalities

This work covers Indigenous philosophy, history, aesthetics, ethics, axiology, pedagogy, temporality, and language. This is the necessary result of a central but implicit claim made throughout the project, which is that any exploration of Indigenous culture that does not work within such a multi- and inter-disciplinary approach and instead parses and isolates these elements from each other runs the risk of attenuating the complex-systems features of the Indigenous culture it examines. Indigenous cultures are a processual holism. I offer here a piece of cultural analysis/synthesis that is Indigenous from the inside and, as such, does not neglect philosophical foundations. Rather, I endeavor to show how interconnected and interrelated these various elements are to any exploration of Indigenous culture. By describing a shared Indigenous orientation toward what I call “universal sacrality” and “universal relationality,” this project builds from these assumptions described in Chapter One by tracking them across aesthetic modalities (Chapter Two), temporal and narrative constructions (Chapter Three), and performative epistemologiesand pedagogies (Chapter Four). In so doing, I explore the ways in which this universal sacrality/relationality servse as a blockaded awareness of Indigenous interiority: the sacrality that inheres in all things even while it remains on the move in its ineffable transit across time and space. Centrally, this project is about Indigenous temporalities: expressions of Indigenous futurism, the near proximity of our Indigenous past, and the milieu of both that compose our enduring present, and why these conceptualizations remain different from broader American culture and important for us. What makes Indigenous culture different and important is that Indigenous peoples are different and important. It is the self-determination that inheres in tribal collectivity—that is, within the particularities of tribal community as such—that generates the difference and importance. What binds together Indigenous culture is orientation toward sacrality and our intimate relationship to the experiential particularities of place, which necessarily includes an orientation toward complex systems since, unless the abstractive/extractive project of settler-colonial capitalism is completed, lived place is always necessarily imbricated within the complex-system dynamics of experiential, concrete reality itself—in all its beauty, ugliness, pain, and pleasure

The Humid Condition

The Humid Condition: (More) Overheated Observations continues on the clicking heels of Dominic Pettman’s Humid, All Too Humid (2016), providing a companion volume of pithy and witty observations for our overheated age. Covering topics from pop culture to academia to romance to politics to human mortality to everything in between, this collection of pointed musings aims to amuse, edify, instruct, provoke, tease, caution, and inspire. As with the first installment, the spirit of this book represents a fusion of Montaigne and Wilde; a mashup of Adorno and Yogi Berra; a parallel channeling of Marx and Marx (both Karl and Groucho). No doubt, Hannah Arendt would be appalled at the irreverence on display within these pages. Then again, “Heidegger has left the bildung.” And as the author himself notes: “I have nothing new to say. And I’m saying it!

In Theory, There\u27s Hope: Queer Co-(m)motions of Science and Subjectivity

Given the state of the planet at present —specifically, the linked global ecological and economic crises that conjure dark imaginings and nihilistic actualities of increasing resource depletion, poisonings, and wide-scale sufferings and extinctions—I ask What might we hope now? What points of intervention offer possibility for transformation? At best, the response can only be partial. The approach this thesis takes initiates from specific pre-discursive assumptions. The first understands current conditions as having been produced, and continuing to be so, through practices that enact and sustain neoliberal relations. Secondly, these practices are expressive of a subjectivity tied to a Cartesian worldview, which, therefore, needs to be interrupted at its foundational roots. Thirdly, the scaffolding that supports this subjectivity draws on Newtonian science and neo-Darwinian narratives deemed to be natural law and, therefore, ontological, immutable reality. Contrary to modernist thinking, I premise that these two strains, subjectivity and science, are neither autonomous nor ontological, but that they are materially and contingently integral. Finally, this thesis presumes that different and life-affirming trajectories are, in fact, desired. An integral framing of science and subjectivity provides a productive method of feminist science studies analysis and theorization. Observing the capitalist Western social imaginary through this lens reveals its philosophical and scientific infrastructures to be outdated and crumbling. Observing how emerging scientific narratives in quantum physics and systems-biology intersect with marginalized theories in process-philosophy and subjectivity reveals a life-affirming imaginary of difference, one that arrests nihilism and sets ethical trajectories in motion. Certain, though not all, percepts of feminist new materialism engage twentieth and twenty-first century sciences successfully to show that ethicality matters. Though many questions remain, this points auspiciously towards the possibility for a transformed politics of justice

Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies

Taking as its premise that the proposed geologic epoch of the Anthropocene is necessarily an aesthetic event, this book explores the relationship between contemporary art and knowledge production in an era of ecological crisis, with contributions from artists, curators, theorists and activists. Contributors include Amy Balkin, Ursula Biemann, Amanda Boetzkes, Lindsay Bremner, Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr, Heather Davis, Sara Dean, Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse (smudge studio), Irmgard Emmelhainz, Anselm Franke, Peter Galison, Fabien Giraud & Ida Soulard, Laurent Gutierrez & Valérie Portefaix (MAP Office), Terike Haapoja & Laura Gustafsson, Laura Hall, Ilana Halperin, Donna Haraway & Martha Kenney, Ho Tzu Nyen, Bruno Latour, Jeffrey Malecki, Mary Mattingly, Mixrice (Cho Jieun & Yang Chulmo), Natasha Myers, Jean-Luc Nancy & John Paul Ricco, Vincent Normand, Richard Pell & Emily Kutil, Tomás Saraceno, Sasha Engelmann & Bronislaw Szerszynski, Ada Smailbegovic, Karolina Sobecka, Zoe Todd, Richard Streitmatter-Tran & Vi Le, Anna-Sophie Springer, Sylvère Lotringer, Peter Sloterdijk, Etienne Turpin, Pinar Yoldas, and Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer & Marina Zurkow