Franklin Ginn

Flourishing with Awkward Creatures: Togetherness, Vulnerability, Killing

Giant isopods are one of the star attractions in the Toba Aquarium, Japan. Under normal circumstances these crustaceans live at depth on the cold, dark ocean floor, scavenging flesh from dead fish and whales. Their alien appearance, as well as the strangeness of their lives, instills a combination of fascination, fear, and disgust in the aquarium visitor. In 2007, one specimen—29 centimetres long and weighing just over a kilogram—was plucked from waters off the Mexican coast and sent to the aquarium. He was named Giant Isopod No.1. No.1 refused to eat for the first year at the aquarium. In 2008 he took two small bites of fish, and again in 2009, but stopped eating completely thereafter. For five years he refused all food, and every attempt to coax the creature into eating failed. Then, one morning his caretaker, Takeya Moritaki, found Giant Isopod No.1 lying listless on the bottom of its tank. By 5pm No. 1 was dead. No.1’s captivity and death captures the themes addressed by this special section: the awkwardness of being together in multispecies entanglements; the differential vulnerability that both precedes and is reshaped by being drawn together; the way killing and death circulate alongside care and life. This special section aims to enrich our understanding of the ethics of living with nonhuman others. We are interested in creatures that bite, or sting, or—like giant isopods—fascinate but repulse us, and in creatures that must die so that others may live: awkward creatures, in other words, which tend not to fit off-the-shelf ethics. 1 Toba Aquarium, “ダイオウグソクムシについてのお知らせ” (News about the Giant Isopod). Accessed 29 April 2014, http://www.aquarium.co.jp/topics/index.php?id=250. 2 Nikkei Inc., “絶食6年目、ダイオウグソクムシ死ぬ 鳥羽水族館” (After Six Years of Fasting, a Giant Isopod Died: Toba Aquarium). Accessed 29 April 2014, http://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXNASFK1404F_U4A210C1000000.

Xeriscape people and the cultural politics of turfgrass transformation

Turfgrass yards dominate the residential landscapes of St Petersburg, Florida, and much of the rest of the urban and suburban United States. Increasingly, alternatives to the resource-intensive turfgrass lawn are the focus of interest among environmentalists, state and county governments, and growing numbers of residents in cities in the water-scarce Southeast and Southwest. Drawing on ethnographic and survey field research on everyday yard practices, resource use, and landscape perceptions, we explore the environmental and cultural dilemmas presented by the choice between conventional turfgrass and the more environmentally benign xeriscaping. We engage with Bourdieus notions of habitus, field, and distinction to explore how local and personal scale yards, as produced and consumed technonatures, mediate the scales of global environmentalism, national and regional cultural identities, classed aesthetics, and personal and collective security. We find that xeriscaping does not increase proportionate to income. We argue that yards are a display of cultural capital and that xeriscapers are invested in an environmentalist field that operates at an imagined global scale as opposed to the neighborhood and national scale values invoked with the traditional turfgrass lawn. Referring to Bourdieus work on taste and distinction, we argue that xeriscaped landscapes may entail a more environmentally benign set of landscaping practices but that the adoption of xeriscaping is no less implicated in the reproduction of privilege and distinction than is the traditional turfgrass lawn.

When Horses Won't Eat: Apocalypse and the Anthropocene

In this article I suggest that fantasies of apocalypse are both a product and a producer of the Anthropocene. Although images and narratives of contemporary environmental apocalypse have usually been understood as politically regressive and postpolitical distractions, I demonstrate that a more hopeful reading is possible. Apocalypse tells us that the human as currently configured in the Anthropocene—an ideal universal subject who is energized through fossil fuels and who has been elevated to a position of ecological mastery—cannot continue indefinitely. This article therefore considers what apocalyptic imaginaries reveal about the limits to being human and the future of human life after the Anthropocene. It does so by analyzing a critically acclaimed film, The Turin Horse (2011). In this film an old farm horse refuses to eat, drink, or leave its stall, while a daughter and her father struggle on through an unspecified disaster, gnawing on raw potatoes as their world slowly unravels. The Turin Horse discloses the earth forces that have made Anthropocene humans along three lines: the geological, the biological, and the temporal. The film also hints at three challenges to be overcome to make humans differently: the need to surpass carbon humanity, the need for nonhuman allies, and the need to affirm agency against the inevitability of deep time. I suggest that contemporary apocalyptic visions are a core aspect of how geographers should understand socioecological transformation, as they challenge those who view them to feel the condition of the Anthropocene, and pose the question of how to respond well to unruly earth forces.

Death, absence and afterlife in the garden

This article considers what we might learn about landscape from how certain gardeners respond to death, absence and afterlife. After situating the domestic garden amid recent work on landscapes of memory and absence in geography, the article presents a circuit of the garden in four movements: passing, touching, weeding and sitting. Each draws on encounters with experienced gardeners living in British suburbs. In particular, these movements focus on: commemorabilia, including plants, which offer the possibility to materialize and anchor something of what would otherwise be lost; how absences are teased into awkward presence through conversation and reminiscence; and the importance of the ‘people’ who continue to produce the garden landscape after their death. Collectively, the practices I describe are an attempt to domesticate – that is, to coconstitute more malleable and familiar relations with – absent presences, and in so doing to seek a comfortable, even if ultimately impossible, alignment between self, past, memory and landscape. I stress that this seeking requires work: practical projects of digging, planting, weeding, of making memory and losing it again. In so doing, the article suggests that the spectral does not always arrive from the outside but is something that can be fabricated. I conclude that we should look to the practicalities of living rather than ideas of life, and to acts of landscaping rather than concepts of landscape, in seeking to ascertain the ways in which absence comes to matter.

Teaching the history of geography: Current challenges and future directions

Drawing upon the personal reflections of geographical educators in Brazil, Canada, the UK, and the US, this Forum provides a state-of-the-discipline review of teaching in the history of geography; identifies the practical and pedagogical challenges associated with that teaching; and offers suggestions and provocations as to future innovation. The Forum shows how teaching in the history of geography is valued – as a tool of identity making, as a device for cohort building and professionalization, and as a means of interrogating the disciplinary present – but also how it is challenged by neoliberal educational policies, competing priorities in curriculum design, and sub-disciplinary divisions.

Being Like a Researcher: Supervising Masters Dissertations in a Neoliberalizing University.

The neoliberalization of universities is creating an increasingly instrumental, market-focused approach to higher education. This paper focuses on Masters dissertation supervision in the UK, which to date has been understudied and which recent changes to higher education have left in a precarious position. It presents a collaborative reflection on the supervision process conducted by students and the author at the University of Edinburgh. Expanding on recent interventions concerning geography, neoliberalization and the academy, I suggest that communality, ambiguity and collective reflectivity offer tactics both to enhance supervisory practice and to resist neoliberalization.

Jakob von Uexküll Beyond Bubbles: On Umwelt and Biophilosophy

Who cares about other species? How can we know other creatures, their worlds, their wants or even desires? And what is the relationship between knowing and caring? Such questions have been animating the ‘multispecies’ turn in the critical social sciences and humanities for some time. Now, as we enter the Anthropocene—a geological epoch shaped by human activity on a planetary scale—the looming threat of a sixth great extinction event gives these ‘animal questions’ heightened urgency. For how long will we be able to turn to our fellow companions and think with them, about them or for them, before their worlds shrink and they vanish from the Earth? Critics often implicate Enlightenment thought—resolutely reductionist, wilfully utilitarian, caught up with the drive for progress—in the objectification and suffering of animals. Of course, we could construct an equally plausible genealogy of thought in which the nonhuman was never equated to unthinking matter. Such a history might run from Lucretius to Spinoza to Deleuze (Bennett, 2010). Certainly, the little-known Estonian thinker, Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944), deserves a place on any roll call of thinkers who have treated animals as more than machines. Uexküll’s life passion was to observe and describe the lives of sea anemones, spiders, flies, humans, slime moulds, oak trees, tics and other creatures. He adventured in the worlds of organisms. He wrote prolifically; he speculated wildly. Uexküll appears at once as ‘naturalist and biologist shaman’, as the Science as Culture, 2014 Vol. 23, No. 1, 129–134, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2013.871245

Unexpected Encounters with Deep Time

The fractured timespace of the Anthropocene brings distant pasts and futures into the present. Thinking about deep time is challenging: deep time is strange and warps our sense of belonging and our relationships to Earth forces and creatures. The introduction to this special section builds on scholarship in the environmental humanities concerning the ongoing inheritance of biological and geologic processes that stretch back into the deep past as well as the opening up of multiple vistas of the futures. Rather than understanding deep time as an abstract concept, we explore how deep time manifests through places, objects, and practices. Focusing on three modes through which deep time is encountered— enchantment, violence, and haunting—we introduce deep time as an intimate element woven into everyday lives. Deep time stories, we suggest, engage with the productive ways in which deep time reworks questions of narrative, self, and representation. In addressing these dynamics, this introduction and the accompanying articles place current concerns into the larger flows of planetary temporalities, revealing deep time as productive, homely, and wondrous as well as unsettling, uncanny.

book review: Geographies of nature: societies, environments, ecologies. By Steve Hinchliffe. London: Sage. 2007. 224 pp. £21.99 paperback. ISBN 9781412910491

glimpse into France’s rarefied urban planning technocracy. Dikeç argues that policy makers, in attempting to remedy the social ills of the banlieues, ironically helped to constitute them as distinctive, stigmatized spaces at the same time. He situates France’s urban policy in terms of global urban restructuring, demonstrating how France’s limited embrace of neoliberal policy has produced a hybrid neoliberalism kept tightly under the reins of a strong statist and Republican tradition. Dikeç also employs the work of Jacques Rancière to theorize how the classificatory practice of partitioning spaces gives urban policy its power, regardless of its actual effects on inhabitants. Though primarily focused on policy, the study chronicles how activists in one particular banlieue attempted – unsuccessfully it seems – to open up these highly determined spaces to more inclusive politics. These difficulties, along with series of disturbances in the banlieues since the 1980s, foreshadow the 2005 revolt. However, it is one of the book’s many commendable qualities that this most sensationalized moment in the banlieues’ history remains in the background and is only given one chapter, instead serving as a culminating event after three decades of increasingly repressive urban policy.