Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

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    COVID-19, microbiopolitics and species precarity in the anthropocene
    (Taylor & Francis, 2022-10) Haris, Susan
    The turn towards deep entanglement precipitated by the Anthropocene has seen a rise in probiotic approaches towards microorganisms that highlight human-microbe relationalities. However, COVID-19 complicates this relationality not least considering its staggering effects on human society which have reinforced notions of solidarity and common crisis, as evidenced in the various biopolitical measures or the ‘outbreak narrative’. In this regard, Heather Paxson’s formulation of microbiopolitics as the construction and evaluation of categories of microorganisms serves as a useful model to ask what kind of microbiopolitics the coronavirus pandemic makes possible and what these strategies imply for collaborative human-microbe relations or multispecies flourishing. The microbiopolitics that marks the pandemic as new mutations and strains of viruses are being identified and a future of zoonotic diseases is anticipated shows this microbial relationality as already present. However, to make sense of entanglement in the pandemic is to recognize microbiopolitics as socio-politically contingent and undercut by anthropocentric anxieties for our own well-being but also as a species precarity. This species precarity for humans shows that the pandemic is differentially experienced as a self while negotiating its relations with non-human others. It is what demands of us that we develop strategies for living along with the virus or other microbes for the foreseeable future.
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    Desertscapes in the global south and beyond anthropocene naturecultures
    (Taylor & Francis, 2024) Shekhawat, Sushila
    Embracing a rich diversity of voices, this volume seeks to explore the different facets of Anthropocene naturecultures in the desert biomes of the Global South and beyond. Essays in this collection will articulate issues of desertification, indigeneity and re-inhabitation in narratives that thread together Tibet, China, Australia, India, South Mexico, South Africa and Brazil in all their richness and complexity. Re-imaging the desert figure’s rich biodiversity, this book presents new ways to envision the human relationships to natural ecology and mindful accountability, tracing complex narrative connections and challenging hegemonic norms of its role in the co-construction of identity, affect, and gender. Essays also aim to engage in an intertextual conversation with colonial genres that influence the popular conception of these spaces, moving beyond the usual tropes to forge a topographically informed desert identity and posit a ‘natureculture’ ecosystem based on the interpenetration of landscape, culture, and history. This volume includes literary exploration of environmental injustices, analyzing motifs of deforestation, land degradation, falling crop production, toxic man-made chemicals, and extractivist practices linked to various social and economic stressors and gradients in economic and political power. This diverse volume will provide a significant contribution to desert humanities from the Global South, responding to the pressing problems of the Anthropocene and employing place-based ecocritical frameworks that help us imagine a sustainable way of life.