A prominent animal rights activist in New Delhi, explaining her relentlessness on behalf of animals, said to me the following: “I only wish there were a slaughterhouse next door. To witness that violence, to hear those screams . . . I would never be able to rest.” She was not alone among animal welfare activists in India in linking the witnessing of violence against an animal to the creation of a profound bond that demanded from her a life of responsibility. I argue in this article that this moment of witnessing constitutes an intimate event in tethering human to nonhuman, expanding ordinary understandings of the self and its possible social relations, potentially blowing the conceit of humanity apart. But I also consider another reading, which is how this act of intimacy exacerbates the species divide as the witness hyper-embodies herself as human, “giving voice” for the animal other which cannot speak. Throughout the article, I consider how posthumanist perspectives might trouble both these interpretations and ask what it would it mean to take seriously the animal activist’s “becoming animal.”

In this article, I demonstrate how a new social world of lesbian activists emerged in India around the text of a sign reading “Indian and Lesbian,” which was held aloft at a demonstration and then pictured in newspapers the following morning. I argue that the efficacy of this sign lay not in its commensuration of “Indian” and “lesbian” but, rather, in its introduction of an incommensurability that now had to be resolved. I understand incommensurability as affect, or the participation of the unknown in the world of norms such that something new emerges that struggles between multiplication and closure.

No abstract

Excessive sediment is a major pollutant to surface waters worldwide. In some watersheds, streambanks are a significant source of this sediment, leading to the expenditure of billions of dollars in stabilization projects. Although costly streambank stabilization projects have been implemented worldwide, long-term monitoring to quantify their success is lacking. There is a critical need to document the long-term success of streambank restoration projects. The objectives of this research were to (1) quantify streambank retreat before and after the stabilization of 18 streambanks on the Cedar River in North Central Nebraska, USA; (2) assess the impact of a large flood event; and (3) determine the most cost-efficient stabilization practice. The stabilized streambanks included jetties (10), rock-toe protection (1), slope reduction/gravel bank (1), a retaining wall (1), rock vanes (2), and tree revetments (3). Streambank retreat and accumulation were quantified using aerial images from 1993 to 2016. Though streambank retreat has been significant throughout the study period, a breached dam in 2010 caused major flooding and streambank erosion on the Cedar River. This large-scale flood enabled us to quantify the effect of one extreme event and evaluate the effectiveness of the stabilized streambanks. With a 70% success rate, jetties were the most cost-efficient practice and yielded the most deposition. If minimal risk is unacceptable, a more costly yet immobile practice such as a gravel bank or retaining wall is recommended.

This article tries to locate the missing something that enables radical social projects to persevere, in this case, the social project of animal activism in India. The author argues that we will find the missing something buried in and by the tyranny of consistency (or contradiction thinking), which demands that any ethics in an oppositional or oblique relationship to the way things are account for its apparent inconsistencies or contradictions. The tyranny of consistency steals the something actors need by collapsing something with everything, so that what we are left with (because everything is impossible) is nothing, which is both impossible and extinguishing. The author argues through her ethnography that the creative lived response to the tyranny of consistency is immanent ethics, an ethics that is committedly, if inconsistently, inconsistent.