Griffith Taylor Lecture,Geographical Society of New South Wales, 2004: Australia and the ‘State of Nature/Native’

This account sets itself against the binarism of physical versus cultural determinism that drives population–environment debate over people's place on the Australian continent. In reading back into colonial times, it evokes ‘our’ unresolved sense of relation to nature on a continent that has pressed awkward buttons since the time the botanist on Cook's Endeavour, Joseph Banks, first mused over the apparent contradiction on the east coast of human presence and uncultivated land. Australia's ‘state of nature’, including its inhabitants, elicited tensions in Anglo-Celtic peoples’ ambiguous relation with nature that have never gone away or been resolved. Indeed, I argue, against the background of what was considered in eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought to be a distinctly human separation from, and capacity to rise above, nature, that the Australian state of nature/native precipitated a crisis in prevailing ideas of ‘the human’. As consternation grew into the nineteenth century about the very capacity of Aboriginal people for improvement, and particularly for cultivation, I argue they challenged the basis upon which the unity of humankind had been assumed in Enlightenment thought. They could not be comprehended, according to the prevailing conception of racial difference, as a mere variety of the human. The radical idea of innate human difference may thus be understood as arising out of this incomprehension, as an attempt to account for the ontologically inexplicable difference of the Australian Aborigine. This lecture's excursion into the origins of ‘race’ is by way of highlighting the uncertainty of the divide between the human and non-human worlds. Imagining an entangled world of living things may help to craft fresh lines of debate about modes of environmental belonging and becoming on this continent that overcome the stale binaries and blind spots of Australia's population–environment debate.     

The Posthuman City: San Diego'S Dead Animal Removal Program

Abstract

Nonhuman animals are part of the dynamism that typifies cities, yet prior research has obscured this condition by focusing upon a limited subset of animals and the privatized spaces that contain them. Consequently, previous research provides little guidance in developing a post-human conception of cities. This paper redresses this deficiency by redefining conceptions of “the public” and analyzing data from San Diego's Dead Animal Removal Program (DARP). Commensurate with modern political conceptions, “the public” is defined simultaneously as a spatial formation and (akin to democracies) a quantitative body of bodies. The DARP data indicate the pervasive presence of nonhuman animals in urban environments and the difficulties they face. As a nexus, the DARP illustrates how urban practices and bureaucratic systems reinstantiate “the public” in humanized form through the death and disposal of nonhumans. These hybrid relations challenge geographic methods.     

后人文主义视角下的中国地缘政治话语研究

援引后人文主义地理学作为批判地缘政治学的一个延续,以《人民日报》纸媒和官方微博为例,采用NVivo分析和对比分析的方法探讨了“美国反恐”这个当代热点地缘政治话题在两个不同媒体空间被呈现的形式。基于后人文主义思潮对物质的关注,讨论了“人”及其地缘环境认知是否受“物质”(在文中具化为网络技术)影响而动摇其在理解“人地关系”过程中的支配地位。研究发现：一方面网络技术多线参与和呈指数型信息传播的特征使得网络空间出现了多元化的声音并最终呈现出多元和复杂的网络地缘政治景观;另一方面,网络技术迫使当代媒体追求“快”和“新”从而摒弃了传统媒体所强调的权威、真实和逻辑性,取而代之的是情绪化的话语表述,呼应了后人文主义地理学对人以外的要素的关注,讨论了网络技术作为一种物质要素对“人地关系”认知的影响。研究证实,受网络技术及其带来的信息革命的影响,它在一定程度上确实能够对具有主体性的人的地缘认识产生影响。