TOPIC 1: ANTHROPOCENE – WHAT IS IT? 1. Crutzen-Stoermer (2000). The “Anthropocene”. IGBP Newsletter - he talks about how Anthropocene came to existence: during Holocene, the activity of humankind grew exponentially and probably won’t cease for the next millions of years - sustainability of such system comes to question, and the author predicts, that it will be an issue in the near and far future - now there is a cattle for every average sized family - there is more nitrogen from agriculture and fertilizing than there it is from the oceans and other natural processes - human kind is burning fossil fuels that have been created in the duration of millions of years and the burning is impacting the environment in a negative way - basically, it was just stating all the facts necessary to demonstrate that human action has big and permanent influence over the Earth and its functioning - the article states, that because of the impact of humans, there has to be some distinction between the Holocene (previous) and Anthropocene (contemporary) 2. Hamilton, C. 2020. "TOWARDS A FIFTH ONTOLOGY FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE." Angelaki 25 (4):110-119. doi: DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2020.1790839 - I found it interesting how Hamilton is talking about how civilization is trying to advance science in order to take control of the natural world. Like death – we are trying to prevent it but it’s utterly natural - Naturalism contrasts with: animalism, totemism, analogism - Yet naturalism’s critics rarely specify which of the alternative ontologies should be adopted as a better way to protect the Earth from the ravages of techno-industrial civilisation. – so they’re not ontological chauvinist - If we’re pluralist in the ontology: Are we entitled to pick and choose from distinct ontological worlds, combining the “good bits” of each to provide a formula like: modern medicine + political liberties + totemic identification with other creatures + worshipping spirits in inanimate objects = nirvana? - Polynesian ppl don’t have answers, they hope that ppl from industrial countries will have some solutions. They only plead because for them it’s important. - GUILT: Guilt over colonialism’s dispossession and violence casts a long shadow over the West’s intellectual life. Ontological pluralism’s search for answers in difference displays an admirable respect for other cultures and ways of doing things. Guilt and atonement are the proper sentiments when confronted with enormous crimes, but they are a poor guide to how humankind should understand and respond to the Anthropocene. - CRITISISM OF PLURALITY IN ONTOLOGY - we can’t produce zero emissions energy without high tech! - criticism of naturalism can be either “romantically looking into the past” or “dry looking into the present and seeing finite resources, health hazards and climate change” o latter wants to use technology, but more sustainably, and wants to keep exploiting nature, but in more sensible way - how to change ontology?: ontological revolutions take place in leaps and bounds over extended periods, a century or more, and are driven by shifts in intellectual worlds in close collaboration with the changing social and political conditions that contain them - situation regarding climate is serious, social scientists have an ethical obligation to refrain from casting doubt on the expert advice of climate scientists - EARTH’s SYSTEM: The Earth System is the Earth taken as a whole in a constant state of movement driven by interconnected cycles and forces, from the planet’s core to the atmosphere and out to the moon, a fifth ontology 112 and powered by the flow of energy from the Sun. It is a single, dynamic, integrated system, and not a patchwork of ecosystems. - ANTHROPOCENE DEFINITION: Anthropocene sprang into existence not as another term to describe the extent of human impact across the landscape, the environment or ecosystems, but emerged to capture a very recent change in the nature of human impact on the Earth as a total entity, activity of a kind and on a scale sufficient to shift the geological evolution of the planet. - The mood is no longer one of power and confidence, of the belief that we can unlock nature’s secrets in order to exploit it. - In sum, a fifth ontology will be built from the two fundamental facts of Anthropocene science: humans are so powerful that we can change the geological evolution of the Earth itself; but we can never tame the Earth and its defiance leaves us facing a dreadful future. Rather than denying human agency by emphasising human integration into the natural world, a fifth ontology accepts that human agency has been supercharged and taken on a geological temporality, even if it has rampaged across the land with self-destructive abandon. Only an ontology built on the crushing responsibility that goes with the power of our technology can save us. TOPIC 2: STS – WHAT IS IT? 1. Law, J. (2008). On sociology and STS, The Sociological review, 56(4). 623-649. - there is no epistemological certainty, it is kind of difficult to ground knowledge so there is no dominance involved, and dominance cannot be involved precisely because there is no epistemological certainty - the article clarifies, how STS came to existence in Europe: it evolved with time into a dispute between the critical voices on science and technology based in Marxism and sociology of science - science as culture could not deal with questions concerning relativity - the STS says that the social always has to be material and there is no social without the matter - as Latour explains, the dichotomy of human and non human is not natural distinction, but a distinction made possible by relations that already exist in the world - STS develops theories through case studies, it is different to sociology that has distinction between theory and empirical data 2. Law, John 2015. "What's wrong with a one-world world?" Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 16 (1):126-139. doi: DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2015.1020066. - European settlers has seen Aboriginal people as a people who did not own their land, nor did they cultivate it in a way recognizable by them - for Aboriginals, owning a land is a process, and so is land itself, it is not mere place - by rituals, they re-enact the reality of land and without it, it does not make sense - difference cannot be included in cultural research - we are looking at cultures from post colonial viewpoint - realities are enacted as practices - there is no reality and perspectives, but multiple realties, that can be hard to reconcile and to coordinate - northern (of global north) technoscience looks at multiple realities theory with distrust, but in reality it actually works with it and uses it - “one particular set of issues is thrown into stark relief by the discovery that the universe is not a universe, and that different realities are done in different ways in different places” - indigenous is not indigenous, all indigenous culture are unique in their worldviews and we cannot morph them together - technoscience tries to live in one world world, but it is hurting itself - there are multiple worlds and multiple truths and north should be inspired by different indigenous groups TOPIC 3: POLITICAL ONTOLOGY – WHAT IS IT? 1. Mario Blaser (2009) Political Ontology, Cultural Studies, 23:5-6, 873-896, DOI: 10.1080/09502380903208023 - there are other worlds that serve the purpose to be othered, to be of different ontology - even when we are trying to encompass different ontologies, we are counting with different modernities, automatically assuming it must be modernity we are looking at - Euro modernity is so prevalent that we are using it as a criterium. Either euro modernity is present or not. - western society is expecting other societies to develop and to use different resources, but actually it is only a push for similarity, comparing their culture and ontology to euro modernity - indigenous practices and resources are pushed away to make room for euro modernity - indigenous people have their worlds and have to defend it against other forces that are trying to take over - ontological conflict is a conflict between different worlds - euro modernity is still dominant, but has lost its hegemonic power TOPIC 4: QUANTUM THEORY – WHAT IS IT? 1. Juelskjaer, M., and N. Schwennesen. 2012. "Intra-active Entanglements – An Interview with Karen Barad." KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING 1-2. - she had to turn question upside down by asking about materialization of oneself when trying to talk about autobiography - she is also talking about Bohr and I don’t like Bohr - she is feminist and her work is considered to be a new material or new feminist material turn - ethics are how values matter and are materialized, and it is important to ask most important questions of ethics about social justice and social world - there is inequality between human and non human actors and the worlds they create - the interviewee agrees that theories are making her into a being she is - she is being reconfigured by a space she is in 2. Berghofer, P. , P. Goyal, and H. A. Wiltsche. 2021. "Husserl, the mathematization of nature, and the informational reconstruction of quantum theory." Continental Philosophy Review 54:413–436. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-020-09523-8. - science is no longer in touch with a reality of common man - mathematics are no longer for calculations only, but is seen as a way of communication in sciences - physical things are always given in perspectives, we are but perceiving only one version of the physical thing, the version that we see from the perspective we are in - “Accordingly, we cannot achieve an objective view on the world, our experiences are necessarily incomplete and perspectival, by engaging with the world we constitute and thereby change the sense of the objects we encounter, and we only have limited knowledge of the present and the future.” TOPIC 5: ENACTING THE ANTHROPOCENE – ANTHROPOS, THE COLLECTIVE BEING 1. Hoelle, Jeffrey, and Nicholas C. Kawa. 2021. "Placing the Anthropos in Anthropocene." Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111 (3): 655-662. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/24694452.2020.1842171. - humans are “landscape modifiers” across time and space - Anthropocene might be only and epoch for humans, and there could be more in the future - Anthropocene as a concept might be controversial, but it can aid us in expressing the effect humans have on the planet and culture and everything that is happening on Earth - because of Anthropocene, there could be an environmental crisis leading to as much as environmental collapse - Anthropocene can be linked to the beginning of industrial revolution, but there is still a debate open on its origins - Anthropocene can be observed in the Great Acceleration graph, showing how human activity accelerated many aspect of Earth functioning - what could lead to the Great Acceleration: Capitalocene and Plantationcene - there are theories that colonization of Americas has lead to the beginning of Anthropocene - capitalism can be blamed for the path of environmental destruction - people in Amazonias have broader sense of how they see humans: humans can be present even in non human forms, such as an owl being grandmother - the environmental crisis is rooted in inequality and if we don’t address the inequality there is a possibility that we will not be in a right path to overcome environmental destruction and collapse - there is a question if we can address Anthropocene and destruction caused by technology by adding more technology, or it is a completely bad approach 2. Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. London: Verso. Chapter 3, Clio, the Earth and the Anthropocenologists (pages 47-64) - by talking about Anthropocene we are trying to answer the question of how did we get into the state of the world that we see now - in the beginning, problems with climate, global warming and hostile environment were overlooked. The global north was responsible for greenhouse emissions. Nowadays the global north is trying to cut down on emissions, while global south is contributing more to the world’s pollution - by going to space humankind is being alienated from a place that they originated - we can now see the world from the space, but it is not the “real” world, it is simplified globe that is supposed to have actions on it - we started to see the Earth systemically, perceiving the Earth as a complex system that is discoverable by science 3. The Bible. Any translation. Genesis 1:28-31 - G-d is instituting sovereignty of a man, man should reproduce and together with his offspring should reign sovereign in the world - man should name all that is created on Earth, and by naming it he is reducing the creation; violence - man will have all fruit as a food to consume - G-d has seen what he has done and he thought it was good – making man a sovereign TOPIC 6: THE ONTOLOGY OF THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION AND THE NEW REAL 1. Rommetveit, Kjetil , Roger Strand, Ragnar Fjelland, and Silvio Funtowicz. 2013. What can history teach us about the prospects of a European Research Area? edited by A. Saltelli: Joint Research Centre, Institute for the Protection and the Security of the Citizen. - the article was not provided in the study materials. TOPIC 7: APPARATUSES OF THE ANTHROPOCENE 1. Urry, John. 2004. “The ‘system’ of automobility.” Theory, Culture & Society 21: 25-39. - Schmitt, Carl. 2006. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. London: Telos. Part I, Chapter 1, (pages 42-49). - there is an abundance of cars in the world, yet automobility is rarely talked about in the context of globalization - Urry sees automobility as “producing domination” - cars disproportionately occupy justice system – interesting! - an extraordinarily powerful complex constituted through technical and social interlinkages with other industries, car parts and accessories; petrol refining and distribution; road-building and maintenance; hotels, roadside service areas and motels; car sales and repair workshops; suburban house building; retailing and leisure complexes; advertising and marketing; urban design and planning; and various oil-rich nations (Freund, 1993) – such complexity built in relatively short time, also difficult to replace and has many lobbies - What is key is not the ‘car’ as such but the system of these fluid interconnections. Slater argues that: ‘a car is not a car because of its physicality but because systems of provision and categories of things are “materialized” in a stable form’, and this generates the distinct affordances that the car provides for the hybrid of the car driver (2001: 6). – this further proves that everything around us is automobility, not just cars and roads, but the system as such - the more we use cars, the more is society built around cars, so we need them more. They are altering time and space: “Most car journeys were never made by public transport. The car’s flexibility has encouraged additional journeys to be made.” - in space, automobility differentiated spaces that were unified before: places for work are in a different part of the city than for living, for leisure, for family time, shopping… - “Automobility thus produces desires for flexibility that so far only the car is able to satisfy.” - it is not an inevitable path of human kind to flexibility. It is flexibility forced upon us, making time reliant on the individual, creating the self narrative - 2. Braun, Robert, and Richard Randell. 2023. “The Political Ontology of Automobility.” Mobility Humanities 2(1): 07-22. https://doi.org/10.23090/MH.2022.07.1.2.007 - ontocracy of automobiles: they are creating their own ontology in which we live in - automobiles are not outside entities, they create the social world - the ontology of automobility is different both to the ontology of the mobility and to the general ontology of social sciences – that contradicts Urry who sees it just as one form of mobility - automobiles have power, the ontocracy is politics, and the politics is about obtaining power and being sovereign - ontosphere is defined as an ontological state and place where the state of exeption has been normalized: automobiles kill many people, they project violence towards actors and places, but we give them exception. This exception becames normalized -> ontosphere. TOPIC 8: MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLDS 1. Barad (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs , Vol. 28, No. 3, Gender and Science: New Issues (Spring), pp. 801-831 - matter is mattering - language is the tool that makes our world, it has a lot of power - simultaneously, language gives us an illusion of understanding “other” cultures - can grammatical categories reflect on the true essence of the world? Is language really the right tool to use in mattering? - world is made of things that are ontologically not the same, representationalism is concerned with a question whether it is possible to have knowledge, and whether there is some sort of linkage between the ontologies - we could say that we understand the world by thingification – thinging the things we are perceiving, making them a part of our ontological world, forcing them into existing and shape - apparatuses are not a tool that is set before the action begins, nor they are a thing in the world, but they are dynamic, they make action possible and they are action - I personally don’t like Bohr and think he should not have such say in humanities - performativity changes matter TOPIC 9: PHENOMENOLOGY, DWELLING AND PLACES 1. Kearney, Amanda. 2018. “Violence in Place: Reading Violence through Kincentric Ecology.” International Journal of Conflict and Violence (IJCV) 12:a632–a632. - violence on places has a pervasive effect - violence on one place affects other places as well - example of violence on place can be settler colonies, such as Australia - place can be physically erased, both the physical aspect of place, such as the dirt and the sand, but according to indigenous communities, place is not just a space, but an action. By removing indigenous nations from a place, the place itself is erased. - violence on place has an effect on identity and on future plans - violence can be both physical and psychological, even if it is about a place - places of worship are violated and can be turned to their opposite - places can be de-signified and that is violent - making a place toxic is a silent and non visible way of violating it - the magnitude of the violence can be extreme 2. Kearney, Amanda. 2022. Keeping Company: An Anthropology of Being in Relation. New York: Routledge. (Introduction) - the article started as a research article on interculturality, but then it morphed into another topic - author lived with Baihan ethnicity in Brazil. There is a pop song Baiana about this ethnicity, so now I have a link to this author - decolonisation is an act of not giving the West the pedestal and trying to forget the white research identity - anthropology has a problematic past because of colonization - anthropology can recolonize people and their lived experience and their identities - a person of color was critically thinking through presence when they objected to a white speaker speaking first at an event about decolonization - white Croatian person was shouting at this event about injustices happening in Australia. Everyone stayed silent. - relating is difficult. 3. Jurkevics, Anna. 2022. “Land Grabbing and the Perplexities of Territorial Sovereignty.” Political Theory 50(1):32–58. - land grabbing is when a foreign investor acquires land in a country different from his own origin - can result to displacement of native inhabitants - in the world there is a demand for land and farmland, that is growing - can lead to alienating land - has a historical precedens - ownership gives control - the ownership gives the owner a territorial sovereignty that is acquired by external means - “In both colonial ventures and metropole societies, the creation of sovereignty via state-building has justified the enclosure of commons and redistribution of land according to modern methods of surveying and titleholding.” - “Private conquests taken on in the name of the American people—that is, white settlers—were retroactively legitimized by the state, revealing twisted dynamics of collusion among the state, the popular sovereign, and private capital interests.” TOPIC 10: PHENOMENOLOGY AND STS 1. Garfinkel, H. , M. Lynch, and E. Livingston. 1981. "The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar." Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11 (2):131–158. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/004839318101100202 - the recording was supposed to tape only the results of their discoveries, but the tape went on and recorded a whole evening of conversation - we cannot understand discovery in social sciences just as a work of empirical data, but must see the social processes behind that - it is quite interesting to see the process behind discovery in social sciences, somehow it resembles Latour’s observations in the laboratory 2. Lynch, Michael. 2019. "Ontography as the Study of Locally Organized Ontologies." ZMK Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung: Ontography. - there has been a turn to ontology in social sciences and STS - it could mean that the turn was made to get away from perceiving only humans as capable of action and as a source of live world - ontography comes to the rescue for a sense of the word “ontology” that was used before, because ontology has lost its meaning when it was used a lot and incorrectly - there is a question of ontography and epistemography, whether they should mean something different or not - ontography goes away from western metaphysics in a way that there is no subject object dichotomy TOPIC 11: QUANTUM SOCIAL SCIENCE, QUANTUM PHENOMENOLOGY 1. Rovelli, Carlo. 2006. "The disappearance of Space and Time." In The Ontology of Spacetime, edited by Dennis Geert Bernardus and Johan Dieks. London: Elsevier. - the article was not provided in the study materials.