ABSTRACT While processes of ruination can help understand urban ecologies and make sense of today’s urban nature, ruins as dynamic entities rather than objectified matters are still absent from ecological narratives. By engaging with the urban ruins of 19th century Manchester, known as Cottonopolis – that was paradoxically a botanical field of study and site of pleasurable excursions while transforming as an industrial city of polluting mass production – architectural, botanical, environmental, and legal entangled stories of unnoticed but constructed urban ruin are unravelled. However, these stories are narrated by plants as witnesses of the city’s industrial ruination. The research draws on a multidisciplinary archival material, aiming to disentangle the colonial practice and knowledge underlying ruination indicated by native and neophyte plants. The archival findings speculate on the legal rights of urban nature and its collaborative agency with the nonhuman ruin in a historical context in which theories of ecology, multispecies justice and posthumanism were non-existent. This contemporary re-reading of 19th century Manchester will allow first the construction of a just eco-historical narrative of the ruin in its architectural discourse and beyond, and then, potentially to ideate on ways of bringing together practices and disciplines to provide future ruins with epistemic ecological agency.
ABSTRACT This paper presents a new philosophical rendering of the concept “domestication”. Updated from its use in anthropology and biology, domestication is examined not as a fixed biological or cultural category but as a critical tool for examining colonial power, ecological loss and relational ways of being. In this paper the concept is introduced in dialogue with Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger’s thinking on dwelling and habitation, broadening their critiques of modernity by attending to modernity’s colonial underside. Domestication is defined as the naming, taming, and maintaining of relations of dependence and difference. With the historical contextualization of modernity as coloniality in place, domestication as a dialectic of nature and culture is brought into dialogue with Thom Van Dooren’s account of snail extinction in Hawai’i. Domestication is employed as a heuristic to trace the repression and representation of nature and culture in colonial modernity, providing a generative way to consider anti-colonial practices of inhabitation in this era of ecological devastation.
ABSTRACT Editor’s note: This text is an edited rendition of Timothy Morton’s keynote. It condenses, rearranges, and lightly stylizes oral remarks for readability while preserving the voice and argument. Any errors of interpretation are the editor’s.
ABSTRACT This article examines how Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action as intrinsically queer dismantles human exceptionalism and fosters more fluid relationships between self and others. By emphasizing boundaries and identities as fluid and performative, embracing radical kinship, reworking environmental ethics, and fostering new modes of community, queer posthuman ecology offers a theoretical framework that problematizes normative notions of human subjectivity in relation to the ecological realm. Drawing from queer theory’s critique of heteronormativity and posthuman thought’s challenging of anthropocentrism, this article argues that environmental ethics can be deepened by making explicit the queerness inherent in our relationality with the non-human world. This contributes to conversations surrounding environmental ethics and human/non-human relationality. Queerness operates at the intersection of self and other, in conversation and co-constituted within the structures of cisgender-heteronormative patriarchy. Within a queer posthuman ecology, the human entity is not separated from animal, plant, or inorganic entities. In order to dissolve perceived boundaries that contribute to ecological degradation and extractivist perspectives, queerness must intervene to question such delineations on an intrinsic level. Just as queer identity and subjectivity is always in flux and in relationship to larger hegemonic structures, queer posthuman ecology disrupts and reorients existing conversations.
