A Conversation with Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz: Reassembling the Geo-Social

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 215-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakob Valentin Stein Pedersen ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Nikolaj Schultz
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Ongoing Work ◽  
Climatic Regime

Including empirical examples and theoretical clarifications on many of the analytical issues raised in his recently published Down to Earth (2018), this conversation with Bruno Latour and his collaborator, Danish sociologist Nikolaj Schultz, offers key insights into Latour’s recent and ongoing work. Revolving around questions on political ecology and social theory in our ‘New Climatic Regime’, Latour argues that in order to have politics you need a land and you need a people. This interview present reflections on such politics, such land and such people, and it ends with a call for a sociology that takes up the task of connecting the three by investigating what he and Schultz call ‘geo-social classes’. The interview was conducted by Jakob Stein in Paris in November 2018.

Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean

2021 ◽  
pp. 139-194
Author(s):  
Emily Anne Parker
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
The Third ◽  
Adequate Response

The third chapter looks to the work of Bruno Latour and Frantz Fanon, each of whom offers a way of bridging the concerns of Barad and Hartman. Latour and Fanon are often read as primary sources in political ecology and performativity respectively. And yet political ecology and social construction each represent a polarization explored in different ways by Latour and Fanon themselves. This chapter argues that Latour’s denunciation of the modern is helpful, but it does not offer an adequate response to ecofascism. This chapter argues that Fanon’s exposition offers a better framework for bridging the ecological and the political. Although Fanon’s work concurs, with Latour, that that which is biological is polarized with respect to the political, Fanon suggests that the biological is not understood to be without agency so much as it is problematically agential. This chapter completes the philosophy of elemental difference begun in Chapter 1.

Intimate with your junk! A waste management experiment for a material world

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 318-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Blanca Callén Moreu ◽  
Daniel López Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Waste Management ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Management Systems ◽  
The Political ◽  
Everyday Objects ◽  
Material Turn

The material turn in social theory has put the study of objects at the centre of any attempt to comprehend the production of social order, but only recently has their affectivity become an important issue. Even in Science and Technology Studies (STS) where objects have been approached as ‘actants’ that actively participate in the material composition and decomposition of various socio-natural orderings, their affectivity has seldom been explored. Diverse scholars from feminist and STS areas stand out for bringing to the fore the affective entanglements between humans and non-humans as constitutive of various ecologies of knowledge production. Our contribution here aims to pursue this further in relation to practices of maintenance, conservation of, and the discarding of everyday objects. We propose the notion of ‘intimate entanglements’ to explore how objects come to matter to us, what makes us care for them, and how they might become companions and our mutual interdependent supporters. Through an artistic research project called ‘Objections’, we asked participants to donate discarded everyday objects and interrogated them about their reasons for keeping, and the conditions under which they chose to keep and maintain, certain objects, while discarding others. We hoped that the notion of intimate entanglements would enable us to approach various ‘objectual’ biographies as stories of companionship and becoming with these objects, where the self is accounted for as a figure that holds and is affected by encounters with the multiple. The consequences that this material shift may have for the political ecology of waste and maintenance studies will be explored in this article, which promises to elucidate some of the ways that waste management systems operate today and perhaps suggest some alternatives.

Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime by Bruno Latour

2020 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-247
Author(s):  
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Keyword(s):  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Climatic Regime

scholarly journals Who gets the HANPP (Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production)? Biomass distribution and the bio-economy in the Tana Delta, Kenya

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Temper
Keyword(s):  
Primary Production ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Sugar Cane ◽  
East Coast ◽  
Net Primary Production ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Mangrove Forests ◽  
Biomass Distribution ◽  
Plantation Economy ◽  
Induced Changes

The Tana Delta, on the east coast of Kenya near Somalia, comprises riverine mangrove forests, wetlands and rangelands and is home to a range of indigenous pastoralist, farmer and fisher communities, whose traditional multi-user livelihood strategies have helped preserve exceptional local biodiversity. This study assesses conflicts over biomass through an analysis of Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (HANPP), an indicator used by system ecologists that quantifies human-induced changes on the productivity and harvest of biomass flows. HANPP is calculated by seeing how much of the net primary production (NPP) of biomass flows created through solar energy are appropriated by human activity, and how much is left in the ecosystems for other species. In this article we introduce calculations of the HANPP in political ecology by studying not only the distribution of biomass between humans and non-humans but also (and this is the main point) between different groups or social classes of humans. We also ask what alliances are being made to protect biodiversity and keep livelihoods intact. In a sugar cane plantation economy, biomass production and the proportion appropriated by humans may increase, the Orma pastoralists and the Pokomo farmers would be dispossessed, less biomass would be available for local 'wild' biodiversity, and a much larger proportion of the NPP would be exported as sugar or ethanol.Key words: Human appropriation of biomass; bioeconomy; biodiversity; property rights; pastoralists; sugar cane; wetlands.

scholarly journals Political praxis, social analysis and western modernization: a theoretical-political route for critical social theory

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-173
Author(s):  
Leno Francisco Danner ◽  
Fernando Danner
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Critical Social Theory ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
Erich Fromm ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Praxis ◽  
Critical Social

This paper criticizes the emphasis placed by contemporary social theory and political philosophy on institutionalism as the basis for the understanding, legitimation and changing of institutions, or social systems, and society as a whole. The more impactful characteristic of institutionalism is its technical-logical structuring, based on an impartial, neutral and formal proceduralism that autonomizes social systems in relation to political praxis and social normativity, depoliticizing these social systems. Here, they are no longer depoliticized, but assume political centrality as the fundamental social subjects of the legitimation and evolution of institutions and society. The paper’s central argument is that it is necessary to re-politicize the institutions and the social subjects or social classes in order to ground and streamline a direct political praxis and the civil society’s social-political subjects as the basis for framing and legitimizing the current process of Western modernization. Recovering the politicity and the carnality of institutions, of social classes and of the evolution of society, is the fundamental task for a contemporary critical social theory that faces the strong institutionalism based on systemic theory. Such politicization is the unforgettable teaching of Karl Marx and Erich Fromm: the institutions have political content and political subjects, they are the result of social struggles for hegemony between opposed social classes which are political. Now, such politicity-carnality must be unveiled and used for an emancipatory democratic political praxis as the route for social analysis and political change, in opposition to the technical-logical understanding both of the institutions and of the social subjects.

scholarly journals Critical political ecology and the seductions of posthumanism

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fayaz Chagani
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
Natural Domains ◽  
Modes Of Existence ◽  
Conceptual Resources

"Posthumanist" theories have become increasingly popular among scholars in political ecology and other fields in the human sciences. The hope is that they will improve our grasp of relations between humans and various nonhumans and, in the process, offer the means to recompose the "social" and the "natural" domains. In this paper, I assess the merits of posthumanisms for critical scholarship. Looking specifically at the work of Bruno Latour (including his latest book, An inquiry into modes of existence) and Donna Haraway, I argue that posthumanist thinking offers not only analytical but normative advantages over conventional and even Marxian approaches. But these newer frameworks contain their own ethico-political limitations and, to the extent that they are useful for addressing conditions of injustice, they continue to depend upon conceptual resources from their precursors. For this reason, a critical political ecology would best be served by preserving a tension between humanist and posthumanist methods.Keywords: posthumanism, critical theory, political ecology, human-nonhuman relations, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway

scholarly journals Political ecology of Bruno Latour

2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-125
Author(s):  
Ana Biresev
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Collective Representation ◽  
Political Implications

The paper explores Latour?s conception of political ecology and its theoretical and political implications. The first part of the paper shows Latour?s critique of theoretical frameworks of scientific and political practices, which, in his opinion, constrain a true discussion on ecological crises by simplifying them and putting them into readymade interpretative models. The second part of the paper examines the notions - the collective, representation, propositions, articulation, and parliament of things - central to understanding Latour?s idea of involvement of humans and non-humans in politics. Finally, the paper explores the potentials and constraints of Latour?s idea of political community of new political subjects (hybrid entities), which is constituted in controversies and through controversies.

The theological uses of sociology

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 274-278
Author(s):  
Scott R Paeth
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Ongoing Work ◽  
Constructive Work ◽  
Theological Concept ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way in which theological concept has been both utilized and criticized within the discipline of theology. It considers recent attempts to “end the dialogue between theology and social theory” and the flaws of that approach, while arguing that sociology can make a significant contribution to the ongoing work of theological analysis. It ends by asking whether this is a one-way relationship, or whether there is a way that theological concepts can be useful in the ongoing constructive work of sociology.

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