Israel Rodríguez-Giralt

Healing, knowing, enduring: Care and politics in damaged worlds

How can politics be articulated or at least imagined by ill, impoverished and abandoned communities? This article documents how care is invoked by activist groups and local citizens in their search for ethical recognition and environmental justice in Puchuncaví, Chile. The authors argue that in a context of prolonged and systematic harm, care emerges as a way to render their suffering understandable, knowable and actionable, and thus as a mode of intervention that instantiates politics in different spaces and at several scales. At the interfaces of feminist science studies, environmental sociology and political theory, this article examines how care acts as a grammar to enunciate problems and make connections deemed irrelevant by expert apparatuses. Specifically, the authors ethnographically track the capacity of care practices to create therapeutic spaces of affective endurance and healing, and to produce new forms of sensual and ecological knowledge about beings, things and relations. These different modes of caring and being cared for, it is suggested, underline the capacity of care for the politicization of harm and suffering: to re-arrange what is visibilized, valued and problematized in the face of intractable environmental crises – a crucial objective for collectives removed from every form of politics. Care, as it is articulated here, is not a coherent and predefined programme, but a fluid and adaptable ethico-political set of practices and potentialities always concerning specific individuals facing specific problems in specific circumstances. If care is to be mobilized to craft more response-able policy, researchers should think more thoroughly about these multiple configurations of care, and the disparate ways in which they can contribute (or not) to invoke new styles and formats, new sensitivities and possibilities for policy-making.

Disasters as meshworks: migratory birds and the enlivening of Doñana's toxic spill

The aim of this article is to revisit disasters as materially enlivened events. The sociology of disasters has usually rested upon two assumptions. First, that disasters are phenomena circumscribed in time and space. They are geographically situated and time-specific, thus their effects can be controlled and compared. And second, that the main actors involved in disasters are humans and institutions, the basic units of sociological research and theory. These principles, taken together, help in converting disaster into objects for cultural inquiry, but at the expense of diluting their material surplus. Based on the work of Tim Ingold, and drawing on the case of the Aznalcóllar ecological disaster in Doñana, one of the most damaging environmental disasters in the history of Spain, we propose to define disasters as meshworks in order to fully grasp the vibrant ontology of disasters. More specifically, by focusing on the role played by migratory birds in the enacting of the disaster, we argue that disasters are dynamic realities, difficult to localize and always distributed along disparate scales and actors. Moreover, disasters have a dual reality, unfolding actually and virtually at once – and therefore comprising a form of cosmopolitics rather than conforming to classical political imaginations. Finally, our larger point is to take disasters as opportunities to rethink our ways of living together.

Reassembling activism, activating assemblages: an introduction

Abstract This introductory essay conceptually situates the dialogue between Actor–Network Theory (ANT) and Social Movement Studies that this special issue aims to foster. Rather than considering ANT as a theory in the classic sense, we define it as a theoretical sensibility open to permanently redrawing its own shape in response to the relational entanglements it studies. ANT and its sibling, assemblage theory, have allowed scholars to attend to the complex ecologies within which agents, both human and non-human, mobilise to effect change in overlapping social, ecological, economic and technological realms. In these studies, relations take precedence over substances, thereby forging a radically decentred, redistributed approach to mobilisation. As such, ANT offers a point of departure from dominant understandings of social movements that rely on modernist, dualist epistemologies; ANT studies have expanded the body politic through the incorporation of non-human actants, and redefined collective action as a form of association between heterogeneous entities. Ultimately, we argue that ANT is a useful tool in the task of constructing forms of attention and care that aspire to learn from and think with social movements, rather than explaining them away.

Down to earth social movements: an interview with Bruno Latour

Abstract Taking his most recent publications on ways to engage with the planet as a point of departure, this conversation with Bruno Latour considers some of the political and conceptual challenges associated with what he calls the New Climate Regime. Latour discusses the need for breaking with the modernist framework that set the stage for the environmental crisis in the first place, and which has also hindered the capacity of social movements to affect the situation. Latour argues that only a new body politic (inclusive of non-humans) and a new geosocial politics (attuned to Gaia) will open up the possibility for sustaining life on our severely damaged planet.