‘We will change’

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-412
Author(s):  
Christy Tidwell
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Natural World ◽  
First Century ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
Glacier Change ◽  
New Combinations ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Western Values ◽  
The Many

One of the many threats accompanying climate change is that of deadly viruses being revived or uncovered when the permafrost melts, as in the 2016 uncovering of anthrax in Siberia. Blood Glacier (Kren Austria 2013, originally Blutgletscher) addresses this in creature feature form, telling the story of something nasty emerging from the natural world (in this case, microorganisms emerging from a melting glacier) to threaten humans and human superiority. Blood Glacier reflects a larger twenty-first-century creature-feature trope of prehistoric creatures emerging from thawing ice as well as an expansion of ecohorror beyond familiar nature-strikes-back anxieties or fears of humans becoming food for animals. Instead, the microorganisms discovered within the glacier change people (and other animals), causing mutations and leading to the creation of new combinations of species. The film juxtaposes these environmental concerns with one character’s past abortion, which comes to represent another, more personal, challenge to Western values. As a result, the film asks questions not addressed by other similar creature features: Which life has value? What does the future look like, and who decides that? The film therefore addresses the ethics of bringing life into being, gesturing toward the responsibilities inherent both in bearing children and in choosing not to bear children. These questions are addressed in the end of the film, with the birth and then adoption of a mutant baby. By bringing these issues of reproduction and environmental futures together, the film asks us to consider how our past and current choices help shape the future - both personal and planetary. The conclusion of the film serves in part to reinforce heteronormativity and reproductive futurism, both of which stake the future on the replication of the past through traditional relationships and by reproducing ourselves and our values through our children. Simultaneously, however, it gestures toward new possibilities for queer, nonhuman, mutant kinship and care.

Architects of fact and fiction

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hill
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Natural World ◽  
First Century ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The Future ◽  
Art Forms

Conceiving a design as both a history and a fiction is not exclusive to the analogy of architecture to landscape. But it is central to this tradition because of the simultaneous and interdependent emergence in the early eighteenth century of new art forms, each of them a creative and questioning response to empiricism's detailed investigation of subjective experience and the natural world: the picturesque landscape, analytical history and English novel, which its early advocates conceived as a fictional autobiography and characterised as a history not a story. The conjunction of new art forms stimulated a lyrical environmentalism that profoundly influenced subsequent centuries, and is increasing relevant today due to anthropogenic climate change, which is now the principal means to consider the relations between nature and culture.While a prospect of the future is implicit in many histories and novels, it is explicit in a design, which is always imagined before it is built. Creative architects have often looked to the past to imagine the future, studying an earlier architecture not to replicate it but to understand and transform it, revealing its relevance to the present. Twenty-first century architects need to appreciate the shock of the old as well as the shock of the new.

Denouement: World Politics, Systemic Leadership, and Climate Change

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. Thompson ◽  
Leila Zakhirova
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
World Politics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Climate Fluctuations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Agrarian Economy ◽  
Historical Processes

In this final chapter, we conclude by recapitulating our argument and evidence. One goal of this work has been to improve our understanding of the patterns underlying the evolution of world politics over the past one thousand years. How did we get to where we are now? Where and when did the “modern” world begin? How did we shift from a primarily agrarian economy to a primarily industrial one? How did these changes shape world politics? A related goal was to examine more closely the factors that led to the most serious attempts by states to break free of agrarian constraints. We developed an interactive model of the factors that we thought were most likely to be significant. Finally, a third goal was to examine the linkages between the systemic leadership that emerged from these historical processes and the global warming crisis of the twenty-first century. Climate change means that the traditional energy platforms for system leadership—coal, petroleum, and natural gas—have become counterproductive. The ultimate irony is that we thought that the harnessing of carbon fuels made us invulnerable to climate fluctuations, while the exact opposite turns out to be true. The more carbon fuels are consumed, the greater the damage done to the atmosphere. In many respects, the competition for systemic leadership generated this problem. Yet it is unclear whether systemic leadership will be up to the task of resolving it.

Gaining a Past, Losing a Future: Web 2.0 and Internet Historicity

2012 ◽  
Vol 143 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Allen
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Web 2.0 ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Web 3.0 ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Or Practice ◽  
The Web

This article explore how, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the internet became historicised, meaning that its public existence is now explicitly framed through a narrative that locates the current internet in relation to a past internet. Up until this time, in popular culture, the internet had been understood mainly as the future-in-the-present, as if it had no past. The internet might have had a history, but it had no historicity. That has changed because of Web 2.0, and the effects of Tim O'Reilly's creative marketing of that label. Web 2.0, in this sense not a technology or practice but the marker of a discourse of historical interpretation dependent on versions, created for us a second version of the web, different from (and yet connected to) that of the 1990s. This historicising moment aligned the past and future in ways suitable to those who might control or manage the present. And while Web 3.0, implied or real, suggests the ‘future’, it also marks out a loss of other times, or the possibility of alterity understood through temporality.

Health and natural landscapes: concepts and applications

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Traditional Ecological Knowledge ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Ecological Knowledge ◽  
Positive Outcomes ◽  
Natural Landscapes ◽  
The Many ◽  
Over Time

Abstract This book contains 8 chapters that discuss and explore these positive outcomes by delving into how humans perceive and respond to the natural world. It also looks at the different stages of human development and how societal perspectives regarding natural landscapes have changed over time. These perspectives influence our responses to current issues such as climate change and pandemics. Examining our worldviews is critical to developing a deeper understanding of human beliefs and relationships with natural landscapes. Moreover, empirically based theories and models can be useful in enhancing that understanding, but other realities are also important such as traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and a rekindling of a sense of connection with nature. Whether empirically derived in recent decades or handed down through the generations, this knowledge can be useful as we consider the many forms of human well-being, including physical, mental, spiritual, and social.

Media Hot and Cold

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Starosielski
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
New Media ◽  
Thermal Environment ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
First Century ◽  
Air Conditioners ◽  
History Of ◽  
Infrared Cameras ◽  
The Many ◽  
And Control

In Media Hot and Cold Nicole Starosielski examines the cultural dimensions of temperature to theorize the ways heat and cold can be used as a means of communication, subjugation, and control. Diving into the history of thermal media, from infrared cameras to thermostats to torture sweatboxes, Starosielski explores the many meanings and messages of temperature. During the twentieth century, heat and cold were broadcast through mass thermal media. Today, digital thermal media such as bodily air conditioners offer personalized forms of thermal communication and comfort. Although these new media promise to help mitigate the uneven effects of climate change, Starosielski shows how they can operate as a form of biopower by determining who has the ability to control their own thermal environment. In this way, thermal media can enact thermal violence in ways that reinforce racialized, colonial, gendered, and sexualized hierarchies. By outlining how the control of temperature reveals power relations, Starosielski offers a framework to better understand the dramatic transformations of hot and cold media in the twenty-first century.

David Mitchell’s Inefficiency

2021 ◽  
pp. 149-183
Author(s):  
Thom Dancer
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Global Problems ◽  
The Future ◽  
Massive Scale ◽  
And Function ◽  
Prior State ◽  
Cultural Force

David Mitchell’s fiction provides an opportunity to reconsider the claims of modesty in the context of globalization. This chapter draws upon the arguments of the previous ones to put critical modesty to its most difficult test. Are minor achievements enough given the massive scale of planetary life and of urgent global problems facing humanity, not the least of which is environmental ruin? I argue that Mitchell’s novels directly face the problems of scaling that cast into doubt the place and function of the novel as a relevant cultural force in the twenty-first century and beyond. Mitchell’s work helps us to reconcile realism as a kind of modest speculation. Where the novel has long been understood as a form that easily scales from the local to the global, Mitchell emphasizes the discontinuity afforded by novelistic thinking. The efficient causality that has subtended literary realism aims to retroactively recreate the events that lead inevitably from the past to the future. Mitchell’s formal investment in discontinuity resists the tyranny of the inevitable by narrating moments of bifurcation in which a new possibility for action suddenly and unexpectedly emerges. Thus, his novels adopt an inefficient causality that give expression to the feeling that things might be different than they are, that inevitability (optimistic or pessimistic) is a dangerous trap. The challenge that Mitchell poses for himself and other novelists is to imagine a disposition modest enough to nurture and shepherd into being these moments of bifurcation when, by definition, there is nothing in the prior state that predicts them.

The past and future of human rights

2021 ◽  
pp. 183-224
Author(s):  
Gráinne de Búrca
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Support ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
The Past ◽  
Human Rights Movement ◽  
The Future ◽  
Human Rights Advocacy ◽  
Advocacy Campaigns

This chapter reflects on the lessons to be derived from the advocacy campaigns in Pakistan, Argentina, and Ireland discussed in earlier chapters. Insights drawn from those campaigns are used to refine the experimentalist account of human rights advanced in Chapter 2, particularly as regards the importance of social movements and of building broad social support for human rights campaigns. The remainder of the chapter describes five major challenges of the current era—illiberalism, climate change, digitalization, pandemics, and inequality—and considers the difficulties they pose for the experimentalist account of human rights advocacy. It argues that the experimentalist practice of human rights advocacy is reasonably resilient and adaptive, and that internal contestation from within the human rights movement as well as external critiques have already helped to catalyze reform and to push activists and advocates to think more innovatively about the changes needed to strengthen the ability of the movement to engage with these major challenges in the future. It concludes that in a turbulent era, rather than abandon human rights, we should redouble our efforts to bolster, renew, and reinvigorate a movement that has galvanized constituencies and communities around the globe to mobilize for a better world.

Epilogue

2016 ◽  
pp. 119-122
Author(s):  
Christian W. McMillen
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
The Past ◽  
Public Health Infrastructure ◽  
Health Infrastructure ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Face ◽  
New Challenges

There will be more pandemics. A pandemic might come from an old, familiar foe such as influenza or might emerge from a new source—a zoonosis that makes its way into humans, perhaps. The epilogue asks how the world will confront pandemics in the future. It is likely that patterns established long ago will re-emerge. But how will new challenges, like climate change, affect future pandemics and our ability to respond? Will lessons learned from the past help with plans for the future? One thing is clear: in the face of a serious pandemic much of the developing world’s public health infrastructure will be woefully overburdened. This must be addressed.

(No) future music?

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Reynolds
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Finish Line ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Many

One of the many memorable memes and thought slogans associated with the late theorist Mark Fisher is “the slow cancellation of the future.” What does this evocative and melancholy phrase signify? In this talk Fisher’s blogging comrade and Retromania author Simon Reynolds reexamines the belief that the 21st century so far has been a Zeit without a Geist: an atemporal time of replicas, reenactments, reissues, revivals, and other syndromes of cultural recycling that put the “past” into pastiche. Are there reasons to be cheerful about music and pop culture as the 2010s limp to the finish line, if not so sanguine about politics or the environment? If society is deadlocked or, worse, heading in reverse, can we even expect music to surge forward like it once did?

scholarly journals Living Life as Inquiry – a Systemic Practice for Change Agents

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Rose Gearty ◽  
Judi Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Action Research ◽  
Data Gathering ◽  
Change Agents ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
First Person ◽  
Extensive Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
Systemic Practice ◽  
The Many

Abstract The practical orientation of action research, together with its embedded and participative principles, means it is particularly suited to complex, interconnected questions and ‘real life’ systemic issues. In the realm of first-person action research, Judi Marshall’s (1999) influential article “Living Life as Inquiry” described how such research can extend to one’s whole life whereby professional and personal questions can be set within politically relevant frames. Over the past two decades, many students and researchers have worked with and drawn much imaginative inspiration from the idea of living life as inquiry (LLI). However little has been written to describe how the practice develops and the many forms it can take. This article draws on our extensive experience as inquirers ourselves and as educators, working with students and change agents motivated to address social and environmental concerns. Twenty years after the original article we have conducted a reflective review that included surveying the literature, and working in depth with a range of stories and current practices. From this comes a textured expansion of the language and practice of living life as inquiry as it is approached from the specificity of people’s lives. Through narrative and visual textures, we present views into the many different ways LLI is developed through day-to-day practices of experimentation, data gathering, artistic exploration, intervention and reflection. We explore what this means for quality in the enactment of inquiry. The article draws particular attention to the embodied nature of inquiry and seeks to capture its fleeting, processual quality.

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