Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene

Living on a damaged planet challenges who we are and where we live. This timely anthology calls on twenty eminent humanists and scientists to revitalize curiosity, observation, and transdisciplinary conversation about life on earth.

As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent “arts of living.” Included are essays by scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics who posit critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. The essays are organized around two key figures that also serve as the publication’s two openings: Ghosts, or landscapes haunted by the violences of modernity; and Monsters, or interspecies and intraspecies sociality. Ghosts and Monsters are tentacular, windy, and arboreal arts that invite readers to encounter ants, lichen, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste—in short, the wonders and terrors of an unintended epoch.

Contributors: Karen Barad, U of California, Santa Cruz; Kate Brown, U of Maryland, Baltimore; Carla Freccero, U of California, Santa Cruz; Peter Funch, Aarhus U; Scott F. Gilbert, Swarthmore College; Deborah M. Gordon, Stanford U; Donna J. Haraway, U of California, Santa Cruz; Andreas Hejnol, U of Bergen, Norway; Ursula K. Le Guin; Marianne Elisabeth Lien, U of Oslo; Andrew Mathews, U of California, Santa Cruz; Margaret McFall-Ngai, U of Hawaii, Manoa; Ingrid M. Parker, U of California, Santa Cruz; Mary Louise Pratt, NYU; Anne Pringle, U of Wisconsin, Madison; Deborah Bird Rose, U of New South Wales, Sydney; Dorion Sagan; Lesley Stern, U of California, San Diego; Jens-Christian Svenning, Aarhus U.

• Are We All Scientific Experts Now? (New Human Frontiers)
• How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human
• Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies
• Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
• The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception
• Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies)
• A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Forerunners: Ideas First)
• Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime
• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
• Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures)