Re-assembling climate change policy: Materialism,posthumanism, and the policy assemblage

National and international policy-makers have addressed threats to environmental sustainability from climate change and other environmental degradation for over 30 years. However, it is questionable whether current policies are socially, politically, economically, and scientifically capable of adequately resolving these threats to the planet and living organisms. In this paper we theorize and develop the concept of a “policy assemblage” from within a new materialist ontology, to interrogate critically four policy perspectives on climate change: “liberal environmentalism”; the United Nations policy statements on sustainable development; “green capitalism” (also known as “climate capitalism”) and finally “no-growth economics.” A materialist analysis of interactions between climate change and policies enables us to establish what each policy can do, what it ignores or omits, and consequently its adequacy to address environmental sustainability in the face of climate change. None, we conclude, is adequate or appropriate to address climate change successfully. We then use this conceptual tool to establish a “posthuman” policy on climate change. Humans, from this perspective, are part of the environment, not separate from or in opposition to it, but possess unique capacities that we suggest are now necessary to address climate change. This ontology supplies the starting point from which to establish sociologically a scientifically, socially, and politically adequate posthuman climate change policy. We offer suggestions for the constituent elements of such a policy.     

Disability studies after the ontological turn: a return to the material world and material bodies without a return to essentialism

Over recent decades, poststructuralist theories have allowed critical disability scholars to challenge essentialist understandings of the human species and to contest discourses which divide humans into ‘normal’/‘impaired’ subjects with respect to a wide – and ever expanding – range of corporeal and cognitive traits. For critics, however, these theories are deeply flawed. By focusing primarily on language, poststructuralism shifts our critical attention away from the often harsh material realities of life for disabled people. This has led some to turn to critical realism and to effectively re-essentialise impairment. In this article, I wish to consider an alternative approach. I suggest that the recent ‘ontological turn’ in social theory has seen the emergence of new-materialist approaches – including Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of assemblage and methodology of assemblage analysis – which allow us to consider disability as a material phenomenon without a return to essentialism.     

Mixed methods,materialism and the micropolitics of the research-assemblage

We assess the potential for mixing social research methods, based upon a materialist and micropolitical analysis of the research-assemblage and of what individual research techniques and methods do in practice. Applying a DeleuzoGuattarian toolkit of assemblages, affects and capacities, we document what happens when research methods and techniques interact with the events they wish to study. Micropolitically, many of these techniques and methods have unintended effects of specifying and aggregating events, with the consequently that the knowledge produced by social inquiry is invested with these specifications and aggregations. We argue that rather than abandoning these social research tools, we may use the micropolitical analysis to assess precisely how each method affects knowledge production, and engineer the research designs we use accordingly. This forms the justification for mixing methods that are highly aggregative or specifying with those that are less so, effectively rehabilitating methods that have often been rejected by social researchers, including surveys and experiments.     

New materialist social inquiry: designs,methods and the research-assemblage

This paper discusses issues of research design and methods in new materialist social inquiry, an approach that is attracting increasing interest across the social sciences as an alternative to either realist or constructionist ontologies. New materialism de-privileges human agency, focusing instead upon how assemblages of the animate and inanimate together produce the world, with fundamental implications for social inquiry methodology and methods. Key to our exploration is the materialist notion of a ‘research-assemblage’ comprising researcher, data, methods and contexts. We use this understanding first to explore the micropolitics of the research process, and then – along with a review of 30 recent empirical studies – to establish a framework for materialist social inquiry methodology and methods. We discuss the epistemological consequences of adopting a materialist ontology.     

Disability activism in the new media ecology: campaigning strategies in the digital era

This article examines the changing nature of disability activism through the influence of social media. As disabled people in the United Kingdom have been subjected to acute austerity, this has coincided with a new era of disability activism channelled through increased social media participation. Drawing on the analysis of one group’s online activities and a qualitative content analysis of disability protest coverage in traditional news media during the 2012 Paralympic Games, this article positions this shift in the broader framework of ‘new media ecology’. We explore how emerging structures of disability activism have begun to offer a more visible profile to challenge government policy and negative stereotypes of disabled people. This highlights the usefulness of campaigning strategies for generating favourable news coverage for disability protest.     

Amazonia and the cultural politics of extractivism: Sumak Kawsay and Block 20 of Ecuador

ABSTRACT

This article explores the dynamics of power and ideology that congeal around the narrative of Sumak Kawsay, or Good Living in Ecuador. My purpose is document these social and cultural logics of extractivist capitalism through a detailed ethnography of these processes within indigenous communities in Ecuador. Specifically, I focus on the communities within Block 20 of Amazonian Ecuador, the site of the Pungarayacu heavy petroleum project, 2008–2015, in the Province of Napo. The paper provides an analysis and ethnographic examples of the political, social and cultural relations that defined the implementation of the heavy petroleum project in the region; the analysis details not only the close connections among the State, the company, and local governments, but also the way indigenous communities were controlled and subordinated to the interests of extractivism. My argument is that, for Amazonian communities located in strategic zones, extractivism is a sphere of exchange that is intimately connected with development. Development and its ideology of Good Living naturalize and legitimate extractivist activities, and allow capitalism to expand and adapt to different State logics. The narrative of Good Living, I conclude, is ideological. Its true purpose is not social welfare or the reform of capitalism, but rather power.     

Off-centring empire in the Anthropocene: towards multispecies intimacies and nonhuman agents of survival

ABSTRACT

This paper examines colonial legacies in human-nonhuman relations to off-centre empire in the Anthropocene. Imperial methods of collecting, preserving and displaying nature profoundly shaped species perception, which in turn affected the scientific attention and ecological relevance a species was granted. In particular, I reflect on the category of invasibility to show how empire sanctioned the mobility of specific population groups and animal species as border-crossing. This further shows how speciesist logics served to extend, maintain and legitimize imperial power. This analysis is relevant in the Anthropocene where invasibility is mobilised to police movement in the context of increased human and nonhuman migration. Further, I discuss how invasibility is considered as one of main threats for biodiversity, which may misdirect conservation efforts. Overall, the article examines the potential in human-nonhuman encounters to challenge colonial legacies. Based on an ethnographic example of multispecies homemaking with species considered invasive in (hetero)normative modes of intimacy and domesticity, I argue that colonial legacies of racialized, gendered and speciesist hierarchies can be disturbed by human-nonhuman relations of companionship, care and interdependence. Finally, I scale-up the analysis to the landscape, by tracing the transformation of a former imperial wasteland in Vienna’s peripheral South from being perceived as economically and aesthetically worthless to a natural monument. Attending to multispecies entanglements is key here to understand the transformative process that led to the recovery of this wasteland. Here I off-centre empire by challenging anthropocentric narrations of how landscape transforms in favour of a narration that re-centres nonhuman agency. I argue that stories of wasteland recovery guided by nonhuman animals are crucial due to the increase in industrial wasteland and environmental degradation in the Anthropocene.     

Emotions,affects and the production of social life

While many aspects of social life possess an emotional component, sociology needs to explore explicitly the part emotions play in producing the social world and human history. This paper turns away from individualistic and anthropocentric emphases upon the experience of feelings and emotions, attending instead to an exploration of flows of ‘affect’ (meaning simply a capacity to affect or be affected) between bodies, things, social institutions and abstractions. It establishes a materialist sociology of affects that acknowledges emotions as a part, but only a part, of a more generalized affective flow that produces bodies and the social world. From this perspective, emotions are not a peculiarly remarkable outcome of the confluence of biology and culture, but part of a continuum of affectivity that links human bodies to their physical and social environment. This enhances sociological understanding of the part emotions play in shaping actions and capacities in many settings of sociological concern.     

Beyond deference and demystification in the sociology of science and technology: A reply to Otero

A response to Otero's criticism of the thesis of the nonrevolutionary character of biotechnology is developed within a larger consideration of the relatively small amount of attention high technologies have received within the sociology of science. It is argued that the new sociology of science of the past decade has been a major advance on midcentury functionalist perspectives that took an essentialist, deferential view toward science. The new sociology of science, based on the demystification of science through a relativist view of scientific knowledge production, is nonetheless limited in several respects in its applicability to contemporary issues relating to high technologies. Otero's criticisms are considered in the light of the continuing need for uniting the sociology of science and sociology of technology, and for developing a perspective on science and technology that avoids both uncritical deference and excessive relativization of these forces for social change.     

Place,people and processes in waste theory: a global South critique

Scholars across the humanities and social sciences have long sought to theorize waste, and more particularly the relationship between humans – their history, society, culture, art and thought – and their discards. My contention, though, is that these theories, since Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966) and Thompson’s Rubbish Theory (1979), have been predominantly based in and on global North contexts and, concomitantly, have taken as their axiom the distance between our cultures, lives, experiences and our material rejects. By intersecting existing cultural theories of waste with two important emerging schools of thought – environmental justice and new materialism – I argue that the exclusion or side-lining of places, notably in the global South where countless people live on a day-to-day basis with, on, and off waste, leads to certain imbalances, biases and gaps. Most notably, the livingness and agency of material rejects is often overlooked in theories that oppose humans and other-than-human waste. By way of conclusion, I propose the notion of ‘living waste’ – a more literal and material take on Bauman’s well-known concept ‘wasted lives’ – as a new point of departure for a reconceptualization of waste that might escape the prevailing dualisms and account simultaneously for ‘full-belly’ and ‘empty-belly’ contexts, human (wasted) lives and other-than-human waste materials, and understandings of lived experiences of waste.     

Nature and the international: towards a materialist understanding of societal multiplicity

ABSTRACT

The global environmental crisis requires a grasp of how human society interacts with nature, but also, simultaneously, how the world is divided into multiple societies. International Relations has a weak grasp of nature treating it as external to the international – an ‘environment’ to be managed – while environmentalism has a planetary epistemology that occludes the significance of the international. How to break this impasse? While neither Geopolitics nor ‘new materialism’ capture the complex conjuncture of socio-natural and inter-societal dynamics, I argue that Justin Rosenberg’s theorization of the international as ‘the consequences of societal multiplicity’ provides a theoretical opening. If a materialist notion of societal is adopted, ‘societal multiplicity’ allows human-natural and international dynamics to be grasped together. Thus, climate change is not a problem arising exogenously to the international, but something emerging through international dynamics, reciprocally affecting the units, structure and processes of the international system itself.     

N2: reading,writing, walking the South African highway

This piece is drawn from a larger project that asks what it might mean to write a cultural history or “biography” of the longest highway in South Africa, the N2. Influenced by literature on the everyday, on infrastructures and the “infra-ordinary,” my approach pays attention to the highway as a material artefact. Who builds, maintains and manages it; who makes their life along it; what subcultures, lexicons and social behaviours can be read off it? Exploring the possibilities of creative non-fiction within the environmental humanities, the piece here unfolds as an exercise in psychogeography, or a deconstructed travelogue. While much travel writing about modern Cape Town describes a (motorised) journey from airport to city, here I reverse the gaze and proceed on foot from town to the airport along the hard shoulder of the N2. In doing so I try to understand the vexed relations between drivers and pedestrians in a divided city, and to conduct an “anthropology of the near” on the road reserve: perhaps the most visible but least contemplated part of the modern urban landscape.     

Biotech aesthetics: Exploring the practice of bio art

Advances in biotechnology include contemporary artists working in laboratories to create living and semi-living works of art. This paper offers an account of how bio art can be read as an emerging contemporary art practice of the early twenty-first century. This draws on the art-historical precedent of Marcel Duchamp, who transformed objects from commonplace existence into works of art, and contemporary theories of art. Empirical data, in the form of interviews with leading bio art practitioners Oron Catts, Eduardo Kac, Kira O'Reilly, Stelarc and Paul Vanouse, are used to study how artists navigate between disciplines. In doing so, we discuss bio art as a critical practice based on a communal ethos.     

Aiming for the discursive high ground: Monsanto and the biotechnology controversy

The past several years have seen the publication of a great deal of exciting theoretical work on ideology and discourse. There has, however, been much less empirical work in the area. In this essay, we undertake a study of a specific set of discursive products developed by Monsanto Corporation in its efforts to shape public opinion and the terms of debate in the controversy over the development of biotechnology. Drawing on existing work, we suggest that relationships between signifiers and signifieds are not natural, but social creations, and that the creation of signs is often the product of social struggles. We show how Monsanto has drawn on discursive elements with historical resonance to create an image of biotechnology that the company hopes will lead to public support for the technology or, at the very least, will stifle opposition.     

Institutionalizing the Network Form: How Life Scientists Legitimate Work in the Biotechnology Industry

This study combines insights from economic sociology on recent structural changes in the knowledge economy with neoinstitutionalist analyses of cultural change in organizations. Because a network form of organization relies on interorganizational ties, new models of legitimacy emerge alongside of old ones, rather than replacing them, so that seemingly contradictory institutions coexist in the network form. This article explores how life scientists legitimate working in the biotechnology industry—a new option that nevertheless fails to delegitimate the old academic path. The data are based on qualitative observations of a young biotechnology firm. These are supplemented by observations at a university laboratory and interviews with 41 life scientists.     

Remembering Lucky Dragon,re-membering Bikini: worlding the Anthropocene through transpacific nuclear modernity

This paper examines two recent Godzilla-themed cultural artefacts that highlight the entanglement between nuclear weaponry and nuclear energy: first, the 60th anniversary Godzilla exhibit at the Tokyo Metropolitan Daigo Fukuryū Maru Exhibition Hall; second, the 2014 American Godzilla directed by Gareth Edwards. This paper frames these two distinctive post-Fukushima cultural texts as memory work that mediates post-WWII genealogies of nuclear weaponry and nuclear power as constitutive elements of U.S. militarism and transpacific technological modernity. Specifically, this paper foregrounds how these two recent cultural texts, produced at different Pacific shores, bring the complexity of the often-absented Pacific back into focus. By enacting what Rob Wilson and Chris Connery call ‘worlding’ to make sense of divergent representations of the tragic Lucky Dragon/Bikini incident that decidedly informed the creation of the original Japanese Gojira [1954. Film. Directed by Honda Ishiro. Japan: Toho Co., Ltd.], this paper analyses geopolitical figurations of the Pacific and its peoples in both the specific context of this tragic incident and the broader formation of transpacific nuclear modernity. In so doing, this paper unravels the ways in which these divergent representations grapple with nuclear modernity’s reordering of necropolitics and biopolitics and its effects: specifically, the ways in which the renarration of death-making nuclear technology as a technology of good life conveniently erases the victims of nuclear weapons, radioactive fallout, and nuclear waste that the reproduction of U.S. nuclearism depends on and continues to produce.     

Modernity and Globalization: The Local and Global Sources of Individualistic and Materialistic Values in Shanghai

Sociological research has arrived at an intellectual crossroad where it faces the challenge of understanding how the dynamics of globalization have joined the forces of modernization in inducing social change. In this paper, using a survey conducted in Pudong, Shanghai, in 2001, which had captured conditions of the area's rapid transformations in a globalizing city, first, we have uncovered two distinctive dimensions of individualistic vs. materialistic values via factor analysis. Second, we have shown strong bivariate relationships between these two dimensions of values and several demographic and socioeconomic variables, as well as personal global connections (PGCs). Third, we have found that PGCs have uneven significant effects on the emergence of individualistic and materialistic values net of the demographic and socioeconomic variables. Finally, we discuss how modernizing and globalizing conditions are conducive to the formation of individualistic and materialistic values in Shanghai, heralding this process in other rapidly modernizing and globalizing cities in China and elsewhere.