Using updates to the entry for octopus in a classic work of marine biology as an example, Cohen explores how people and the physical planet are intertwined, and argues that their entanglement opens the opportunity to bridge long-standing disciplinary divisions.
The authors begin by tracing the epistemological break between nature and society that took place in the nineteenth century, paying particular attention to the role of the emerging human and social sciences. They then go on to examine the return of Earth history into world history, and the concomitant need to reintegrate nature and the Earth system into our conception of freedom and our practice of democracy.
Syperek and Wade document the plethora of recent curatorial projects that take the sea as a subject, positioning this work as a rich repository of innovative thought and practice. They reflect on the inherent entanglements of art and science, climate and colonialism, humans and nonhumans, space and place, and past, present, and future in various instances of oceanic curating.
Chris Gratien examines how the yayla was integral to the local ecology of Ottoman Cilicia as a shared temporal and spatial dimension of culture. This local ecology, in turn, shaped society, politics, and the historical evolution of the region up until the Tanzimat reforms.
In 1968 Tatsumi Hijikata, the instigator of the Japanese avant-garde movement form known as butoh, engaged in a collaboration with photographer Eikoh Hosoe. This project, titled Kamaitachi, consisted of a striking set of images created as what Hosoe called a “subjective documentary” of their youth...
What does desire mean for Darwin and then for Freud? How do they understand the capacity to desire across species lines? and, What ethical quandaries result?
Authors such as A. E. Benson, Edward Carpenter, Aleister Crowley, and Michael Field explored the place of the humanist individual in a nature-centred belief system that stands in opposition not only to scientific materialism, but also to the industrialism and consumerism of the age. In so doing, they offered an early queer formulation of what today might be recognized as a post-human eco-spirituality.
Stanford Humanities Center
