Creative Measures Of The Anthropocene

This book proposes that creative and participatory modes of measuring, knowing, and moving in the world are needed for coming to grips with the Anthropocene epoch. It interrogates how creative, affective and experiential encounters that traverse the local and the global, as well as the mundane and the everyday, can offer new perspectives on the challenges that lay ahead. This book considers the role of the arts in exploring geographical concerns and increasing human mobility. In doing so, it offers ways to counteract the unstable, shifting and disorienting impacts and debates surrounding human activity and the Anthropocene. The authors bring together perspectives from mobilities, creative arts, cultural geography, philosophy and humanities in an innovative exploration of how creative forms of measurement can assist in reconfiguring individual and collective action.

What can creativity achieve in an era of ecocide? How are people using creative and artistic practices to engage with (and resist) the destruction of life on earth? What are the relationships between creativity and repair in the face of escalating global environmental crises? Across twelve compelling case studies, this book charts the emergence of diverse forms of artistic practice and brings together accounts of how artists, scholars and activists are creatively responding to environmental destruction. Highlighting alternative approaches to creativity in both conventional art settings and daily life, the book demonstrates the major influence that ecological thought has had on contemporary creative practices. These are often more concerned with subtle processes of feeling, experience and embodiment than they are with charismatic 'eco-art' works. In doing so, this exploratory book develops a conception of creativity as an anti-ecocide endeavour, and provides timely theoretical and practical insights on art in an age of environmental destruction.

This open access book provides a detailed example of arts-based knowledge translation from start to finish for any scholar interested in communicating research findings through art. Firmly grounded in the GeoHumanities, a field at the intersection of cultural geography and the arts, this book explores the theory and practice of research exhibitions. Commencing with an overview of arts in health and art-science collaborations, this book also explores the concept of ‘affective knowledge translation’. In doing so, it describes the creative co-production, staging, and evaluation of the Finding Home exhibition which toured Australia during 2021. As a demonstration of the power of art to engage audiences, raise awareness of social issues, communicate lived experience, and extend the reach of cultural geographic research, this book is relevant to academics from any discipline who are keen to increase the societal impact of their work.

This book offers the first systematic study of how the 'Anthropocene' is reported in mass media globally, drawing parallels between the use (or misuse) of the term and the media's attitude towards the associated issues of climate change and global warming. Identifying the potential dangers of the Anthropocene provides a useful path into a variety of issues that are often ignored, misrepresented, or sidelined by the media. These dangers are widely discussed in the social sciences, environmental humanities, and creative arts, and this book includes chapters on how the contributions of these disciplines are reported by the media. Our results suggest that the natural science and mass media establishments, and the business and political interests which underpin them, tend to lean towards optimistic reassurance (the 'good' Anthropocene), rather than pessimistic alarmist stories, in reporting the Anthropocene. In this volume, contributors explore how dangerous this 'neutralizing' of the Anthropocene is in undermining serious global action in the face of the potential existential risks confronting humanity. The book presents results from media in more than 100 countries in all major languages across the globe. It covers the reporting of key environmental issues, such as the impact of climate change and global warming on oceans, forests, soil, biodiversity, and the biosphere. We offer explanations for differences and similarities in how the media report the Anthropocene in different regions of the world. In doing so, the book argues that, though it is still controversial, the idea of the Anthropocene helps to concentrate minds and behaviour in confronting ongoing ecological (and Coronavirus) crises. The Anthropocene in Global Media will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental studies, media and communication studies, and the environmental humanities, and all those who are concerned about the survival of humans on planet Earth.

This handbook brings together leading international academic experts to provide a comprehensive and authoritative survey of global environmental politics. Fully revised, updated and expanded to 45 chapters, the book: • Describes the history of global environmental politics as a discipline and explains the various theories and perspectives used by scholars and students to understand it. • Examines the key actors and institutions in global environmental politics, explaining the roles of states, international organizations, regimes, international law, foreign policy institutions, domestic politics, corporations and transnational actors. • Addresses the ideas and themes shaping the practice and study of global environmental politics, including sustainability, consumption, expertise, uncertainty, security, diplomacy, North-South relations, globalization, justice, ethics, public participation and citizenship. • Assesses the key issues and policies within global environmental politics, including energy, climate change, ozone depletion, air pollution, acid rain, transport, persistent organic pollutants, hazardous wastes, rivers, wetlands, oceans, fisheries, marine mammals, biodiversity, migratory species, natural heritage, forests, desertification, food and agriculture. This second edition includes new chapters on plastics, climate change, energy, earth system governance and the Anthropocene. It is an invaluable resource for students, scholars, researchers and practitioners of environmental politics, environmental studies, environmental science, geography, globalization, international relations and political science.

The Routledge Handbook of the Digital Environmental Humanities explores the digital methods and tools scholars use to observe, interpret, and manage nature in several different academic fields. Employing historical, philosophical, linguistic, literary, and cultural lenses, this handbook explores how the digital environmental humanities (DEH), as an emerging field, recognises its convergence with the environmental humanities. As such, it is empirically, critically, and ethically engaged in exploring digitally mediated, visualised, and parsed framings of past, present, and future environments, landscapes, and cultures. Currently, humanities, geographical, cartographical, informatic, and computing disciplines are finding a common space in the DEH and are bringing the use of digital applications, coding, and software into league with literary and cultural studies and the visual, film, and performing arts. In doing so, the DEH facilitates transdisciplinary encounters between fields as diverse as human cognition, gaming, bioinformatics and linguistics, social media, literature and history, music, painting, philology, philosophy, and the earth and environmental sciences. This handbook will be essential reading for those interested in the use of digital tools in the study of the environment from a wide range of disciplines and for those working in the environmental humanities more generally.

This book delves into the everyday spaces, diverse mobilities and affective potency of weather. It presents cutting-edge research into the multiplicity of weather phenomena and analyses the lived experiences of humans in conjunction with contemporary issues, notably climate change. The book considers how everyday experiences of weather in the mundane lives of people are linked to broader changes in weather patterns and climate change. Heat, dust, ice, snow, precipitation, sunlight, clouds, tides and fog are states of weather that impact on the ways in which humans become intertwined with landscapes. Our experiences with weather are diverse and ever-changing, and engaging with weather entangles humans with mobilities, materials and landscapes. This book thus explores affective and sensory resonances, drawing upon a variety of theoretical, empirical and creative material to investigate how weather is perceived in different social and cultural contexts. Key themes focus on the mobilities generated by weather, the affective and sensual potency of weather, and the diverse cultural forms and practices that exemplify how weather is historically, geographically and artistically represented. Offering a social and cultural understanding of weather events, this book contributes to a growing literature on weather across various disciplines, including human geography and cultural geography, and will thus appeal to students and scholars of geography, sociology, humanities, cultural studies and the arts.

This Handbook provides the knowledge and tools needed to understand how displacement is lived, governed, and mediated as an unfolding and grounded process bound up in spatial inequities of power and injustice. The handbook ensures, first, that internal displacements and their everyday (re)occurrences are not overlooked; second, it questions ‘who counts’ by including ‘displaced’ people who are less obviously identifiable and a clearly circumscribed or categorised group; third, it stresses that while displacement suggests mobility, there are also periods and spaces of enforced stillness that are not adequately reflected in the displacement literature; and fourth, it re-evokes and explores the ‘place’ in displacement by critically interrogating peoples’ ‘right to place’ and the significance of placemaking, unmaking, and remaking in the contemporary world. The 50-plus chapters are organised across seven themes designed to further develope interdisciplinary study of the technologies, journeys, traces, governance, more-than-human, representation, and resisting of displacement. Each of these thematic sections begin with an intervention which spotlights actions to creatively and strategically intervene in displacement. The interventions explore myriad meanings and manifestations of displacement and its contestation from the perspective of displaced people, artists, writers, activists, scholar-activists, and scholars involved in practice-oriented research. The Handbook will be an essential companion for academics, students, and practitioners committed to forging solidarity, care, and home in an era of displacement.