The Inhumanities

Social geography I: Time and temporality

“…Future research on time and temporality within social geography could deepen its engagement with postcolonial and queer theories (e.g. Chakrabarty, 2000, 2018; Rao, 2020; in geography see Oswin, 2012; Yusof, 2020). Other topics that could not be addressed within the word constraints of this report include heritage, bereavement and trauma; these convey important insights for conceptualising time and temporality in social geography too.…”

“…For social geographers, research on human–nature relations has paved new ways of thinking about how the concept of race intersects with nature/the environment, and time and temporality. Scholars such as Yusoff (2020) and Erickson (2020) argue that the Anthropocene depends upon a universal image of humanity which is itself closely associated with colonial pasts and lived colonial presents. For example, indigenous people’s lands were appropriated for resource extraction in the past (Fitz-Henry, 2020; Theriault et al, 2020) but is now also subject to disputes over whether the land should be restored to them or conserved by governments for future generations (Nustad, 2020).…”

“…racial capitalism) that characterises how human bodies are differentially positioned. Some scholars like Yusof (2020) and Kama (2020) thus argue that the extraction of geological resources constitute geosocial worlds that are connected across space-times. Yusof further proposes the ‘inhumanities’ as an analytic to critically examine how the extraction of geologic resources and value from subjugated racialised bodies maintains white supremacy.…”

Climate change and agrarian struggles: an invitation to contribute to aJPSForum

“…Political ecologists have therefore focused on the material, relational and symbolic manifestations of power in agrarian settings, alongside a non-hierarchical, dialectical focus on scale and interactions between local and global dynamics (Rangan and Kull 2009;Sayre 2015). Rejecting the Malthusian implications of some interpretations of the 'Anthropocene' (Yusoff 2021;Malm and Hornborg 2014), political ecologists have instead increasingly engaged with the 'Capitalocene' (Moore 2017), the 'racial Capitalocene' (Vergès 2019) and the 'Plantationocene' (Haraway 2015;Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019;Wolford 2020;Carney 2021), all of which centre capitalism or the world economy in understandings of environmental change. 4 Political ecology, like critical agrarian studies, recognises that capitalism, as with climate change, is not a global process that happens to local communities; rather, capitalism and climate change are social and ecological processes that are both produced and experienced at multiple sites and scales.…”

Is this the humanism we have been looking for?

“…A concern with how modern forms of government and capitalism render some ‘less-than-human’ has always been at the heart of more-than-humanism (see Philo, 2017), and this concern has only become more prominent with the growing gravity and magnitude of environmental injustice (Guthman, 2019; Hinchliffe et al, 2016). Likewise, a concern with (what Büscher terms) the ‘more-than-life’ forces that press upon and jeopardise human and nonhuman survival is ever more paramount in more-than-human geography as a result of the conceptual turn towards the consideration of elemental forces – like fire, earthquakes, and extreme weather (Clark, 2011; Yusoff, 2021). Current work in more-than-human geography shares an emphasis on specific humans’ political agency, precarity and responsibility.…”