Forthcoming Publications
Drafts of the below papers have been completed and are awaiting publication. Please get in touch if you’d like to see any of them.
A Bird, a Flock, a Song and a Forest
Forthcoming in The Australian Journal of Anthropology.
Authored by Thom van Dooren, Zoë Sadokierski, Myles Oakey, Sam Widin, Timo Rissanen, and Ross Crates.
The south-eastern corner of the Australian continent was once criss-crossed by the nomadic flight paths of the Regent Honeyeater. For hundreds of thousands of years, they winged their way up and down this vast continent. Today, however, the species is listed as critically endangered and is just clinging to existence. This multimedia essay tells the story of this decline, exploring the complex, co-shaping, relationships between individual birds and their flocks, their songs, and their forests. While these are relationships that might be glossed as being social, cultural, and ecological (respectively), and so belonging to separate domains of life, they are in reality delicately interwoven elements of what it is to be a Regent Honeyeater; relationships that, taken together, have been integral to the emergence and ongoing life of this species. In attending to the breakdown of these relationships in our present time, this essay seeks to develop new resources for storying loss in a time of ongoing extinctions. Bringing text into conversation with images and audio, the essay works to draw the reader/viewer/listener into an encounter with an unravelling world. Ultimately, our aim has been to create an essay in which the conceptual ideas, the design, and the biology of the species described, are brought into some sort of alignment that allows them to become mutually reinforcing elements of a storied encounter. Our reflection on the process of creating this essay are provided in the accompanying exegetical commentary.
Military Snails: Multispecies Solidarities in Hawai‘i
For Roman Bartosch, Ursula K. Heise, and Kate Rigby (eds) Unsettling Extinction: Biodiversity Loss and the Environmental Humanities.
Mākua Valley on the island of O‘ahu is a place in which snail conservation, the US Army, and Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) claims to access land and cultural sites, are all brought into dynamic tension. Over roughly the past 100 years, the Army have used this valley for live-fire and other exercises, excluding people while also blowing up and burning the habitat of critically endangered land snails and other species. Snails and some local people are drawn together here into a powerful multispecies solidarity centered on efforts to conserve the biological and cultural heritage of this place in the context of deep histories and ongoing realities of both colonization and militarization. In telling this story, this chapter aims to draw out how the history of struggles over this valley was shaped by a particular snail species, Achatinella mustelina: by its specific evolution, life history, and ecology. In so doing, it aims to highlight the importance of multispecies solidarities, of the particular possibilities that different, other-than-human, beings open up and foreclose as allies in struggles for more livable worlds.
Developing the Public Environmental Humanities: Challenges, Opportunities, and Lessons
Forthcoming in Resistance: Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities.
Authored by Thom van Dooren, Drew Rooke, Zoë Sadokierski, Natalie Osborne, Bethany Wiggin, Marco Armiero, Stephen Muecke, Emily O’Gorman, Joni Adamson, Sebastián Ureta, Jennifer Deger, Yen-Ling Tsai, Cameron Muir, Kirsten Wehner, Matthew Kearnes, Peter Minter, and Kate Rigby.
The environmental humanities are a dynamic and growing field of scholarly inquiry that grapple with many of the key challenges of our time. Over the past decade, in particular, the field has developed a strong emphasis on public-facing scholarship. However, while that public scholarship has grown steadily, scholarly analysis and reflection on this work has not kept pace. This article offers a timely discussion of the ‘public environmental humanities’ as a field of engaged, experimental, research practice. It explores how, where, and when this area of scholarship began to emerge, the diverse goals, formats, and modes of public-engagement that are developing, and provides an overview of some of the key challenges and opportunities in this space.
Animal Cultures at the Edge of Extinction
Forthcoming in Theory, Culture, and Society.
Authored by Thom van Dooren, Matthew Chrulew, Myles Oakey, Samuel Widin, and Drew Rooke.
Over the course of the latter part of the twentieth century the notion that some animals might partake in a cultural form of life has gained growing support in the natural sciences. Iconic examples of tool using chimpanzees, sweet potato washing macaques, and milk bottle opening birds have captured scientific and popular interest alike. But at the same time that this effort to describe, define, and study animal cultures was developing, the global ecological crisis was deepening. This article explores this strange juxtaposition. It offers a critical overview of the concept of animal culture as it has taken shape in the natural sciences. Building on this foundation, the article explores how and why animal cultures matter at the edge of extinction, exploring possible roles for the environmental humanities, extinction studies, and philosophical ethology, in developing new approaches to the question of animal culture in a time of escalating biodiversity loss.