Full Description
The purpose of Communicating in the Anthropocene: Intimate Relations is to tell a different story about the world. Humans, especially those raised in Western traditions, have long told stories about themselves as individual protagonists who act with varying degrees of free will against a background of mute supporting characters and inert landscapes. Humans can be either saviors or destroyers, but our actions are explained and judged again and again as emanating from the individual. And yet, as the coronavirus pandemic has made clear, humans are unavoidably interconnected not only with other humans, but with nonhuman and more-than-human others with whom we share space and time. Why do so many of us humans avoid, deny, or resist a view of the world where our lives are made possible, maybe even made richer, through connection? In this volume, we suggest a view of communication as intimacy. We use this concept as a provocation for thinking about how we humans are in an always-already state of being-in-relation with other humans, nonhumans, and the land.
Contents
Table of Contents
Foreword: Undisciplined Stories
Acknowledgments
Carol J. Adams
1. Introduction: Intimate Relations for Earthly Survival
Alexa Dare and C. Vail Fletcher
Part I: Grief, Resilience, and Storytelling
2. Vigilant Mourning and the Future of Earthly Coexistence
Joshua Trey Barnett
3. Presence and Absence in the Watershed: Storytelling for the Symbiocene
Emily Plec
4. The Trouble with Resilience
Jessica Holmes
5. Solastalgia and Art Therapy in Climate Change
Chelsea Call
6. Living (in) Spider Webs: More-than-Human Intimacy in Installation Art by Tómas Saraceno
Katharina Alsen
Part II: Nonhuman Collaborators: Oysters, Birds, and Elephants
7. The Permeable Heart: Mindfulness in Animal-Human Communication
Peggy J. Bowers
8. Intimacy on the Half-Shell: Place, Oysters, and the Emerging Narrative of Virginia Aquaculture
Anne K. Armstrong, Richard C. Stedman, and Marianne E. Krasny
9. i am naiad: Becoming Benthic
laura c carlson
10. Ada Clapham Govan and "Birds I Know:" Ecologica
