Sarah Whatmore

Materialist returns: practising cultural geography in and for a more-than-human world

This paper surveys the return to materialist concerns in the work of a new generation of cultural geographers informed by their engagements with science and technology studies and performance studies, on the one hand, and by their worldly involvements in the politically charged climate of relations between science and society on the other. It argues that these efforts centre on new ways of approaching the vital nexus between the bio (life) and the geo (earth), or the ‘livingness’ of the world, in a context in which the modality of life is politically and technologically molten. It identifies some of the major innovations in theory, style and application associated with this work and some of the key challenges that it poses for the practice of cultural geography. Thinking is neither a line drawn between subject and object nor a revolving of one around the other. Rather thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and earth... involving a gradual but thorough displacement from text to territory.1

Urban Wild Things: A Cosmopolitical Experiment

Cities are inhabited by all manner of things and made up of all manner of practices, many of which are unnoticed by urban politics and disregarded by science. In this paper we do two things. First, we add to the sense that urban living spaces involve much more than human worlds and are often prime sites for human and nonhuman ecologies. Second, we experiment with what is involved in taking these nonhuman worlds and ecologies seriously and in producing a politics for urban wilds. In order to do this we learn how to sense urban wildlife. In learning new engagements we also learn new things and in particular come to see urban wilds as matters of controversy. For this reason we have borrowed and adapted Latours language to talk of wild things. Wild things become more rather than less real as people learn to engage with them. At the same time, wild things are too disputed, sociable, and uncertain to become constant objects upon which a stable urban politics can be constructed. So a parliament of wild things might be rather different from the house of representatives that we commonly imagine. It may be closer to what Stengers (1997, Power and Invention University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN) has characterised as cosmopolitics, a politics that is worked out without recourse to old binaries of nature and society. Using empirical work with urban wildlife-trust members we muddy the clean lines of representational politics, and start to grapple with issues that a reconvened wild politics might involve.

Dissecting the Autonomous Self: Hybrid Cartographies for a Relational Ethics

In this paper I focus on the contributions of feminist and environmentalist thinking to the question of ethics in critical geography, I explore creative tensions between feminist deconstructions of the autonomous self, configured as rights-bearing citizen, and environmentalist efforts to extend the status of the ethical subject beyond the human. Critically engaging with Haraways figure of the cyborg, I examine the implications of notions of hybridity for mapping the spatial configurations of ethical subjects and communities conceived of in ‘relational’ terms.

Living cities: Towards a politics of conviviality

Against the cartographic opposition between cities and natures in modern western societies the idea of urban ecology has seemed little more than a contradiction in terms. But things are brewing in cities. The spaces and species that have been erased from urban visions and values now find themselves the subject of a ‘greening’ of urban policy that has gathered some momentum in the UK on at least two fronts. First, urban biodiversity is starting to be accorded the kind of conservation significance once reserved for rural and sparsely populated regions. So much so that the distinction between greenbelt and brown-field land is no longer an automatic marker of ecological value. In this, scientific energies are being newly invested in the importance of so-called ‘recombinant ecology’ (Barker, 2000). This refers to the biological communities assembled through the dense comings and goings of urban life, rather than the discrete and undisturbed relations between particular species and habitats that are the staple of conservation biology. Urban wildlife groups, amateur naturalists, voluntary organizations, no less than the highly visible animals and plants that make their way in and through cities, have been key players in this realignment of urban spaces and conservation concerns. Second, there is a growing sense in the urban policy community of the importance of this ‘recombinant ecology’ to what makes cities liveable and to the attachments of civic identity and association. Critical here is the extent to which this ecological fabric is constituted as a public good or urban commons, including leisure spaces such as parks and allotments; feral spaces such as abandoned railway sidings and derelict land; and remnant spaces such as waterways and woodlands. This gathering of energies has found expression in unprecedented policy investment in what has become known as the ‘urban green’. Good examples include, the report of the Urban Green Taskforce (2002) Green Spaces: Better Places (www.dtlr.gov.uk); English Nature’s new magazine Urbio on ‘urban biodiversity and human culture’ (March 2002) and the Government policy Science as Culture Vol. 15, No. 2, 123–138, June 2006

Mapping knowledge controversies: science, democracy and the redistribution of expertise

Reflecting on conversations between geography and science and technology studies (STS) over the last 15 years or so, this paper addresses their shared interest in knowledge controversies as generative political events. It explores how such events give rise to new ways of practising relations between science and democracy focusing on the case of environmental knowledge claims and technologies. This exploration interrogates three mobilizations of environmental knowledge controversies that have different implications for redistributing expertise, including that of (social) scientists, in the composition of knowledge polities. The first version sets out to map the language commitments of contributors to a controversy with the aim of enabling interested citizens to trace the ‘partisanship’ of scientific knowledge claims. The second is also a cartographic exercise designed to teach students how to account for the political force of technoscientific controversies by mapping the intense entanglements of scientific knowledge claims with legal, moral, economic and social concerns on the web. The third is concerned less with mapping knowledge controversies from an analytical distance than with an experimental research methodology that sets out to intervene in extant controversies in ways that map researchers’ own knowledge claims into what is at stake.

Metabolising risk: food scares and the un/re-making of Belgian beef

In this paper we explore the event of foodscares as an example of what Callon calls ‘hot situations’, in which the landscape of competing knowledge claims is at its most molten, and alternative production and consumption practices galvanise new modes of sense-making against the market and state-sanctioned rationalities of industrialisation. Through a case study of the Belgian cooperative Coprosain and its meat products, we examine the ‘stuff’ of food as a ready messenger of connectedness and affectivity in which ‘risk’ is transacted as a property both of the growing distance between the spaces of production and consumption and of the enduring metabolic intimacies between human and nonhuman bodies.

Flood apprentices: an exercise in making things public

Abstract Taking our lead from Stengers’ experimental constructivism, this paper reports on the invention of a research apparatus – the ‘competency group’ (CG) – that aims to put things capable of forcing thought and attachment to work in the exercise of new knowledge polities. It draws on the work of one such group based in Pickering, a town in the catchment of Ryedale with long experience of flooding. This group involved social and natural scientists working collaboratively with people affected by flooding over a twelve-month period, to interrogate the science that informs local flood management and intervene in the public controversy to which it had given rise. The paper focuses on the ways in which various artefacts that mediated our collective flood apprenticeship in Ryedale were recharged as publicity devices through which the working practices and knowledge claims of what became the Ryedale Flood Research Group gathered political force in the wake of the groups work.

Elephants on the Move: Spatial Formations of Wildlife Exchange

In this paper we explore tensions between the notions and spaces of social agency mobilised in actant network theory and feminist science studies by focusing on their implications for the status and treatment of nonhuman animals, in this case the African elephant. The notion of a spatial formation of wildlife exchange (SFWE) is deployed to trace the diverse modalities and spatialities of social networks in which such creatures are caught up and the ways in which these practical orderings work through the bodies of elephants, both in the sense of their energies being variously transduced and of their experiences being reconfigured in the process. These themes are pursued through two contemporary global networks of wildlife conservation/science. The first, characterised as a mode of ordering of foresight, is a network concerned with ‘captive breeding’ and configured through the coding and exchange of computerised information on the lineages and breeding properties of animals held in zoological collections worldwide. The second, characterised as a mode of ordering of authenticity, is a network concerned with ‘in-situ’ conservation projects and configured through the recruitment of paying volunteers, corporate donors, and field scientists to a global programme of research expeditions. Our account traces three simultaneous moments in the patterning of elephants in each network—as virtual bodies, as bodies in place, and as living spaces.

Coproducing Flood Risk Knowledge: Redistributing Expertise in Critical ‘Participatory Modelling’

This paper suggests that computer simulation modelling can offer opportunities for redistributing expertise between science and affected publics in relation to environmental problems. However, in order for scientific modelling to contribute to the coproduction of new knowledge claims about environmental processes, scientists need to reposition themselves with respect to their modelling practices. In the paper we examine a process in which two hydrological modellers became part of an extended research collective generating new knowledge about flooding in a small rural town in the UK. This process emerged in a project trialling a novel participatory research apparatus—competency groups—aiming to harness the energy generated in public controversy and enable other than scientific expertise to contribute to environmental knowledge. Analysing the process repositioning the scientists in terms of a dynamic of ‘dissociation’ and ‘attachment’, we map the ways in which prevailing alignments of expertise were unravelled and new connections assembled, in relation to the matter of concern. We show how the redistribution of knowledge and skills in the extended research collective resulted in a new computer model, embodying the coproduced flood risk knowledge.

Life cycle or patriarchy? Gender divisions in family farming

Abstract The paper critically examines traditional ‘explanations’ of the gender division of labour on the family farm as a function of the life cycle — which poses a ‘compensatory’ relationship between womens domestic household labour responsibilities and their participation in other areas of work on and off the farm. It seeks to demonstrate, at a theoretical and empirical level, the inadequacy of this explanatory framework for the analysis of the position of women as ‘farm wives’ in ‘family farming’. The paper draws on survey and ethnographic evidence from two study areas in southern England. It argues that to understand the position of women as farm wives requires a theory of gender relations as power relations within which ideologies of appropriate gender roles are shaped and reshaped in the everyday work practices of the family farm.