Unfolding climate change inequities through intersectionality, Barad's new materialism, and post/de-colonial Indigenous perspectives

2022 ◽  
pp. 268-295
Author(s):  
Laurel Steinfield
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Indigenous Perspectives

Vibration, Difference, and Solidarity in the Anthropocene

Resonance ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-241
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Chung
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Moral Standing ◽  
Departure Point ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Black Skin

Taking the new materialist and climate change themes of Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things: an Opera for Objects as a departure point, this article examines sound studies’ recent invocations of new materialist philosophy alongside this philosophy's foundational concern toward the Anthropocene ecological crisis. I argue that new materialist sonic thought retraces new materialism’s dubious ethical program by deriving equivalencies of moral standing from logically prior ontological equivalencies of material entities and social actors rooted in their shared capacities to vibrate. Some sonic thought thus amplifies what scholars in Black and Indigenous decolonial critique have exposed as the homogenizing, assimilative character of new materialism’s superficially inclusional and optimistic ontological imaginary, which includes tendencies to obscure the ongoingness of racial inequality and settler-colonial exploitation in favor of theorizing difference as a superfice or illusion. As I argue in a sonic reading of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, some of new materialism’s favored analytical and ecological terms such as objecthood, vibrationality, and connection to the Earth are also terms through which anti-Blackness, colonial desire, and the universalization of Whiteness have historically been routed. This historical amnesia in new materialism enables its powerfully obfuscating premises. As a result, I argue that new materialist sound studies and philosophy risk amplifying the Anthropocene’s similarly homogenizing rhetorics, which often propound a mythic planetary oneness while concealing racial and colonial climate inequities. If sound studies and the sonic arts are to have illuminating perspectives on the Anthropocene, they must oppose rather than affirm its homogenizing logics.

Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 224-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle P. Whyte
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Viewing Time ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Parallel Universes ◽  
Indigenous Perspectives ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Climate Crisis

Portrayals of the Anthropocene period are often dystopian or post-apocalyptic narratives of climate crises that will leave humans in horrific science-fiction scenarios. Such narratives can erase certain populations, such as Indigenous peoples, who approach climate change having already been through transformations of their societies induced by colonial violence. This essay discusses how some Indigenous perspectives on climate change can situate the present time as already dystopian. Instead of dread of an impending crisis, Indigenous approaches to climate change are motivated through dialogic narratives with descendants and ancestors. In some cases, these narratives are like science fiction in which Indigenous peoples work to empower their own protagonists to address contemporary challenges. Yet within literature on climate change and the Anthropocene, Indigenous peoples often get placed in historical categories designed by nonIndigenous persons, such as the Holocene. In some cases, these categories serve as the backdrop for allies' narratives that privilege themselves as the protagonists who will save Indigenous peoples from colonial violence and the climate crisis. I speculate that this tendency among allies could possibly be related to their sometimes denying that they are living in times their ancestors would have likely fantasized about. I will show how this denial threatens allies' capacities to build coalitions with Indigenous peoples. Inuit culture is based on the ice, the snow and the cold…. It is the speed and intensity in which change has occurred and continues to occur that is a big factor why we are having trouble with adapting to certain situations. Climate change is yet another rapid assault on our way of life. It cannot be separated from the first waves of changes and assaults at the very core of the human spirit that have come our way. Just as we are recognizing and understanding the first waves of change … our environment and climate now gets threatened. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, interviewed by the Ottawa Citizen. (Robb, 2015) In North America many Indigenous traditions tell us that reality is more than just facts and figures collected so that humankind might widely use resources. Rather, to know “it”—reality—requires respect for the relationships and relatives that constitute the complex web of life. I call this Indigenous realism, and it entails that we, members of humankind, accept our inalienable responsibilities as members of the planet's complex life system, as well as our inalienable rights. ( Wildcat, 2009 , xi) Within Māori ontological and cosmological paradigms it is impossible to conceive of the present and the future as separate and distinct from the past, for the past is constitutive of the present and, as such, is inherently reconstituted within the future. (Stewart-Harawira, 2005, 42) In fact, incorporating time travel, alternate realities, parallel universes and multiverses, and alternative histories is a hallmark of Native storytelling tradition, while viewing time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like currents in a navigable stream is central to Native epistemologies. ( Dillon, 2016a , 345)

Calls to Action: Climate Change and Indigenous Food Sovereignty in Arctic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ranjan Datta
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Impact Assessment ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Indigenous Community ◽  
Assessment Policy ◽  
Policy Guideline ◽  
Indigenous Perspectives ◽  
Indigenous Elders

<p>This study is responding reconciling Indigenous climate change and food sovereignty in Arctic<strong>.</strong> We will explore, how recent climate change (and interpretation) is challenging to Indigenous food sovereignty sources; and what is at stake in processes such as hunting consultation, impact assessment, regulatory hearings, approvals (including negotiation of benefits), monitoring? and what reformed processes can build Indigenous community capacity and supports robust decisions? The outcomes will assist policy makers and communities to guide future consultations and impacts assessment guideline and climate change planning initiatives. We (as an interdisciplinary research team of Indigenous Elders, knowledge-keepers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars) will focus on Indigenous understanding of Indigenous philosophies of climate change and the connectivity between climate change and food sovereignty and sustainability related to the interactions and inter-dependencies with health security, Indigenous environmental and cultural value protection. Indigenous knowledge-ways have much to offer in support of resiliency of climate change and water infrastructure in Indigenous communities, intercultural reconceptualization of research methodologies, environmental sustainability, and educational programs which support Indigenous communities.</p><p><strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Action Plan: Objective: </strong>Supporting Indigenous perspectives on climate change impact management and food sovereignty. This includes involving members of Indigenous community to offer insight into Indigenous cultural and community responsibilities of Indigenous climate change impacts management to inform food sovereignty performance review policy development. <strong>Contribution: </strong>The designing, coordinating, and hosting an interdisciplinary Focused Dialogue Session on the relationship between climate change impacts management and food sovereignty. This Dialogue Session creates new scholarly knowledge about pipeline leak impacts and food sovereignty processes. <strong>Objective:</strong> Developing effective and trustful engagement dialogs to build capacity among Indigenous Elders, Knowledge-keepers, and scholars. <strong>Contribution: </strong>This objective supports Indigenous perspectives through specific, policy-orientated research that positively impacts their vision and allow them to develop new ways of climate change impacts and food sovereignty. This reveals climate change impacts management and food sovereignty policy and practices in Arctic. <strong>Objective: </strong>Mobilize knowledge and partnership for reconciliation (specifically translate research results into evidence for policy-making) through developing an impact assessment policy guideline. <strong>Contribution: </strong>The impact assessment policy guideline shares knowledge and implications of climate change impacts management policy documents local, provincially, and nationally and assist in the articulation and practice of food sovereignty source protection, as culturally and community informed.</p>

Un/Limited Ecologies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vicki Kirby
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Interest In Science ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
To Come ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology

It seems fair to say that Jacques Derrida’s critical legacy has waned with the restyling of the humanities as science friendly. The term posthumanism, for example, accommodates broad themes in ecology, animal studies, evolution and climate change—even the nature of Life itself. This turn toward physical reality attests to a growing interest in science and its methodologies, as we see in popular accounts of affect theory, new materialism, and object-oriented ontology. Indeed, it is often argued that the waning of the linguistic turn and its apparent hermeticism has enabled this recent fascination with the materiality of bodies and things. However, is Derrida’s “no outside of text” about closure, or its im/possibility? And if the limit segregates nothing at all, if the limit is itself no-thing, then is grammatology an open ecology that already includes what it is defined against, including what is yet to come?

The Weird, the Ontological, and the Normal

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-355
Author(s):  
Andrew Strombeck
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
A Site ◽  
Nonhuman Agency

Abstract Benjamin J. Robertson’s None of This Is Normal (2018) addresses the entire fictional project of the New Weird writer Jeff VanderMeer. In doing so, Robertson intervenes within recent discussions of new materialism, accounts of which have been entwined with the New Weird. Robertson finds VanderMeer querying the normalizing discourses of capitalism and colonialism, showing how the New Weird can serve as a site to extend and challenge the sometimes-limiting frameworks of the new materialisms. As its critics have shown, object-oriented ontology and other new materialisms risk reinforcing problems of primitivism and positivism. For Robertson, VanderMeer evades such problems by foregrounding the liberal, humanist frameworks marginalizing planet and colonized subject alike. Examining what he calls VanderMeer’s fantastic materiality, Robertson contends that VanderMeer supersedes what Darko Suvin calls cognitive estrangement; VanderMeer asks readers to encounter a world that is estranged but not cognitively recoverable. And yet, by reminding readers of VanderMeer’s poststructuralist attention to language and narrative, Robertson avoids the often-masculinist tendency to posit a primitive world beyond human cognition. None of This Is Normal will be useful to scholars interested in pushing past new materialism’s limits while retaining the field’s insights for questions of climate change and nonhuman agency.

scholarly journals ‘A change of heart’: Indigenous perspectives from the Onjisay Aki Summit on climate change

2021 ◽  
Vol 164 (3-4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Cameron ◽  
Dave Courchene ◽  
Sabina Ijaz ◽  
Ian Mauro
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Indigenous Knowledge ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Cultural Shift ◽  
Address Climate Change ◽  
Community Based Research ◽  
Indigenous Perspectives ◽  
International Climate ◽  
Cultural Dialogue

AbstractIn June 2017, the Turtle Lodge Indigenous knowledge centre convened the Onjisay Aki International Climate Summit, an unparalleled opportunity for cross-cultural dialogue on climate change with environmental leaders and Indigenous Knowledge Keepers from 14 Nations around the world. In collaboration with Turtle Lodge, the Prairie Climate Centre was invited to support the documentation and communication of knowledge shared at the Summit. This process of Indigenous-led community-based research took an inter-epistemological approach, using roundtable discussions within a ceremonial context and collaborative written and video methods. The Summit brought forward an understanding of climate change as a symptom of a much larger problem with how colonialism has altered the human condition. The Knowledge Keepers suggested that, in order to effectively address climate change, humanity needs a shift in values and behaviours that ground our collective existence in a balanced relationship with the natural world and its laws. They emphasized that their diverse knowledges and traditions can provide inspiration and guidance for this cultural shift. This underscores the need for a new approach to engaging with Indigenous knowledge in climate research, which acknowledges it not only as a source of environmental observations, but a wealth of values, philosophies, and worldviews which can inform and guide action and research more broadly. In this light, Onjisay Aki makes significant contributions to the literature on Indigenous knowledge on climate change in Canada and internationally, as well as the ways in which this knowledge is gathered, documented, and shared through the leadership of the Knowledge Keepers.

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