The island has become a key figure of the Anthropocene – an epoch in which human entanglements with nature come increasingly to the fore. For a long time, islands were romanticised or marginalised, seen as lacking modernity’s capacities for progress, vulnerable to the effects of catastrophic climate change and the afterlives of empire and coloniality. Today, however, the island is increasingly important for both policy-oriented and critical imaginaries that seek, more positively, to draw upon the island’s liminal and disruptive capacities, especially the relational entanglements and sensitivities its peoples and modes of life are said to exhibit.

Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds explores the significant and widespread shift to working with islands for the generation of new or alternative approaches to knowledge, critique and policy practices. It explains how contemporary Anthropocene thinking takes a particular interest in islands as ‘entangled worlds’, which break down the human/nature divide of modernity and enable the generation of new or alternative approaches to ways of being (ontology) and knowing (epistemology). The book draws out core analytics which have risen to prominence (Resilience, Patchworks, Correlation and Storiation) as contemporary policy makers, scholars, critical theorists, artists, poets and activists work with islands to move beyond the constraints of modern approaches. In doing so, it argues that engaging with islands has become increasingly important for the generation of some of the core frameworks of contemporary thinking and concludes with a new critical agenda for the Anthropocene.

Did you know that the book is open access? Let’s read at least the first chapter of Anthropocene Islands, Entangled Worlds together and discuss your ideas with Jonathan Pugh at the talk! Access the book here

DISCUSSANTS

MAYA KÓVSKAYA (Femme/They/Them)

MAYA KÓVSKAYA (PhD in Political Science at UC Berkeley, 2009) teaches Multispecies Anthropocene Studies; Science, Technology, and Society (STS); and Political, Social, Semiotics, and Visual Cultural Theory at Chiang Mai University in the Faculty of Social Science. She has published widely on the intersection of the political, cultural, semiotic, and ecological with performative and visual culture under the Anthropocene condition. Current research entails "rethinking the human in a more-than-human world" towards conceptualizing a "politics beyond the human and a multispecies polity," and a conceptual examination of the etiologies of the "Anthroposupremocene" through its philosophical underpinnings. Interrogating the workings of the invidious, hierarchical, dualist division between humans and the more-than-human world, Maya's current work traces the historical, contingent, constitutive species-rupturing alienation of Western Humanist "Man/Anthropos" from "Nature," and the unfolding catastrophic consequences for the planet. Maya has also been a curator, and award-winning art critic since 2005. She has lived and done research in St.Petersburg Russia in the early 90s, China (1996-2009), and India (2009-2018) before moving to Chiang Mai. Maya founded and heads the AMOR MUNDI Multispecies Ecological Worldmaking Lab.

CHAYA VADDHANAPHUTI (He/Him)

CHAYA VADDHANAPHUTI is a lecturer in geography at Chiang Mai University, Thailand. His research primarily engages in the human dimensions of climate change, from human geography and science & technology studies (STS) perspective. His PhD thesis focused on Thai farmers’ perception and meaning making of the changing weather and seasons, as well as the social and scientific construction of climate knowledges in Thailand. Other ongoing research includes developing tools for communicating climate risks via board games, and understanding the construction of knowledge and risk governance of PM2.5 haze pollution in Chiang Mai. After learning more about posthuman studies, Chaya and his students wrote some experimental writing on the making of fishery products in Sukhothai province and the relationship between macaque and the macaque caretakers in Chiang Mai.