Save the date for Kentucky's Political Ecology conference

(I didn't know saving the date for conferences was a thing we were doing now, but, the conference looks cool, so I am posting it anyway).

Please Save the Date for the 5th Annual

Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference

at The University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY

February 27 - March 1, 2015

The University of Kentucky Political Ecology Working Group (UKPEWG) is pleased to announce that the 5th Annual Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference will be held February 27 - March 1, 2015 in Lexington, Kentucky, USA.

In addition to paper sessions, panel presentations, field trips and various social events, we are pleased to announce that the 2015 keynote speaker will be:

Dr. Kimberly TallBear (Anthropology, University of Texas)

Details of further keynote speakers and panellists to follow in the coming weeks!

DOPE 2014 featured a huge increase in overall attendance with more than 450 participants and 70 panel sessions across myriad disciplinary and research affiliations from all over the world. The conference included two keynote addresses from Drs. Laura Pulido (University of Southern California) and Bruce Braun (University of Minnesota) and a plenary panel with discussion from Drs. Melanie DuPuis (UC Santa Cruz), Carolyn Finney (UC Berkeley), Rebecca Lave (Indiana University), Sharlene Mollett (University of Toronto, Scarsborough), Laura Ogden (Florida International University) and Dianna Rocheleau (Clark University).

If you are interested in organizing a session at DOPE 2015, please plan to circulate your session proposal or a call for papers on listsevs beginning in August, since conference registration will open in September (exact date TBA). Each session is 100 minutes long, and due to space and time constraints, we cannot accept more than two sessions per proposal/CFP. Session organizers are responsible for finding their own chairpersons. Please send your CFP or session proposal to ukpewg@gmail.com so that we are able to post it on the website and in the final program for the conference. All participants in your session must be registered by the deadline in November (exact date TBA) and by that date all session details must be forwarded to the email address stated above by that date. Please do not feel restricted to traditional paper session formats! Be creative and feel welcome to think beyond the 4 papers and a discussant or 5 paper session style (though if you want to stick to this style that is also welcome). You might want to also organize discussions, workshops, lightning sessions (i.e. short presentations of five minutes from more participants) or other alternative session styles.

If you are interested in submitting a paper, please try to find a compatible session by looking through the CFPs posted on the website, politicalecology.org.

If you want to submit a paper, but don't see a session that it would fit into, consider organizing your own session if you think you might find others with similar interests. Alternatively, submit your paper directly to us, and we will try to place it in a relevant session, or create a new session with similar papers.

All participants will need to register for the 2015 DOPE conference. Registration will open in September and close in November (exact date TBA). Each participant will be limited to submitting one abstract.

Please visit politicalecology.org for more information.

Questions? Email ukpewg@gmail.com.

Plants, Again (or, ethics, still). Part I

Planted, An Introduction.

This post tries to think issues of veganism and vegetarianism alongside issues of the active nature of plants. The first part of the post will respond broadly to this question, and lay out my general ethical framework for these issues. For those of you have diligently read this blog for at least a few years, you might find part one repetitive (also, wow, thank you). The second part of the blog post (which will be posted another day) engages theorists forwarding these arguments, particularly Ian Bogost in his Alien Phenomenology, and Michael Marder in his Plant-Thinking, his article "Is it Ethical to Eat Plants?," and his debate with Gary Francione (Marder also has a forthcoming book I haven't read, The Philosopher's Plant).

Plants I:

This is not the first time I have addressed our ethical relationships to plants. See this post, and this post (and several more asides in other posts). This most recent post is immediately caused by a new scientific study that shows that "Plants respond to leaf vibrations caused by insect herbivore chewing." This has caused a variety of news sources to frame this recent discovery as being some sort of unique challenge or cause of concern for vegetarians and vegans. See, for example, this Gizmodo article which actually ends with this line, "Either way, we do know one thing for sure: The world just got a little less smug for the vegan set." Okay then. So, here is the relevant question, why? Why is it each time that some new study comes out expressing the idea that plants are more active and intentional than previously considered, there are a flurry of articles that seem to see this as somehow an argument against vegans? If you are concerned about plants, and any sort of suffering that may come from consuming them, wouldn't adopting a vegan diet be a first step to lowering that suffering? This is true because it takes from more plant protein to produce animal protein, and because that much of animal agriculture includes polluting and destroying lands. And of course, some people concerned with our ethical obligations to plants have made this very point. Near the end of Matthew Hall's Plants as Persons, he makes this very argument:

A third very significant driver of harm to individual plants, plant species, and plant habitats is the unnecessary, unthinking use of plants. Perhaps the most prominent of these is the use of plants to feed massive numbers of animals for the world’s wealthiest nations to consume. Recent estimates suggest that humankind farms and eats over thirty billion animals each year. In a plant context, this live- stock rearing is important because it accounts for more than 65 percent of the total global agricultural area. It also accounts for large volumes of grains and soya beans which are used as feed. In 2002, approximately 670 million tons of grains were fed to livestock, roughly a third of the global harvest. They were also fed 350 million tons of protein-rich products such as soya and bran. The areas cleared to rear animals and feed them on such a huge scale are natural plant habitats such as tropical forests, savannahs, and grasslands. The rearing of livestock on such large scales is one of the major drivers of habitat loss. Basing diets on meat consumption excessively inflates the area of land that is put under human cultivation. Reducing the amount of consumed meat is a direct way of reducing harm done to plants, animals, and human beings. Not least because this large industry is also responsible for generating 18 percent of global carbon emissions—which to provide an idea of scale, is more than all forms of transport combined. (p. 165)

So, rather than seeing plant sentience as a unique challenge to vegans, it seems vegans are already doing something to limit harm to plants. Rather than making the vegan set less smug, wouldn't this make the vegan set more smug? Actually, wait a second, don't you assume that the author of the Gizmodo article probably eats plants herself? So, there is no reason that plant sentience is at all something particular to vegans. This argument could be used against literally any social justice movement. For example, imagine this conversation:

Person 1: Would you like to help out to end genocide against X human population?
Person 2: Did you know plants might be sentient? So, I can't help you.
Person 1: Uhm... okay...?
Person 2: Well, see you are trying to expand our ethical obligations to X human population. But there are still groups you haven't expanded our ethical concern to. And until you figure out a way to respond ethically to all beings, you really haven't done anything yet, have you?
Person 1: I'm pretty sure that's not how ethics work. 

Okay, I hear your objections. This scenario ignores that maybe there is something particular combining our thinking about eating ethically. In other words, the failure to create a completely harm free eating experience negates trying to reduce harm in other ways. But again, if we aren't talking about veganism, would that objection really hold any water? Imagine this conversation:

Person 1: No thank you, I try to avoid X product because I try to avoid products produced by slave labor.
Person 2: Well, all capitalist labor comes from a system of exploitation (surplus value is theft), so there is no need to fight against products produced by slave labor.
Person 1: ... . So are you doing anything to stop either slave labor or capitalist exploitation?
Person 2: What? No, I am just saying stop being so smug, I don't have to feel guilty for using slave labor because of capitalist exploitation.
Person 1: I'm pretty sure that's not how ethics work. 

So, plant sentience is not an argument against veganism because (1) veganism already reduces harm against plants, and (2) if plants present an ethical call, it is an ethical call for all of us, not just vegans. There are, of course, other arguments we can explore. For example, while the research that plants are active beings seem undeniable, what that means in terms of how sentience is expressed seems to be a fairly open question at this point (see this article by Oliver Sacks, and this blog post from Scientific America). And even if sentience was answered, it would not always be a guide about what interests plants have. For example, I am concerned about voting rights being denied felons, but I am not worried about getting voting rights for my cats. And while I am concerned about what Lori Gruen calls the "ethics of captivity" in prisons and zoos, I have trouble believing there are similar issues in botanical gardens. But let us, for now, bracket these broader questions about our ethical obligations toward plants.
So, if there is no reason that vegans are uniquely implicated in the ethics of plants, why is it that we are constantly bombarded with arguments that plant sentience undermines ethical veganism? First, as I have long contended, there is a confusion between ethics and innocence. If there was the possibility for innocence, we wouldn't need ethics. Ethics exist because we have to try to figure out ways to live a good life out of a bad life. What are the ways we can live and act in a world where innocence is impossible? And as in the conversations above, the argument that there is no way to eat without harm is a way of removing responsibility. Universal guilt becomes its own form of innocence, a way of avoiding ethical calls. People don't want responsibility, so they figure out a series of ways to push ethical obligations away. Problems are seen as systematic, so individual change is not called for. Because no solution will be perfect, we know that any change and tactic can be co-opted, so we don't do anything. You only want to help these individuals who are in pain and suffering, and because it focuses on individuals, it is neoliberalism and we don't have to help those in pain. Because there is no innocence, we might as well go ahead and do what we wanted to do anyway. And suddenly, enough excuses pile up so that we somehow have managed to be radical and ethical without ever having to change who we are. It is hard, after all, to be responsible (even just for those lives in front of you). It is confusing to know that we will have politics that will be tainted, that we will communications that fail, and that we will have actions that will cause harm. Spinoza defined conatus as the striving to preserve oneself, and he called that joy. So, perhaps it is sadness to be haunted by others, perhaps it is despair to have to change for others. No wonder we want to create excuses to not act and still pat ourselves on the back. So, maybe we need some other definition of joy. One that finds in our vulnerability the basis of sociality, of laughing together, and of mourning. Perhaps we can find joy (as well as frustration and love) in the difference of others, and with the creative impulse to build a different world. To yearn, and to act, together.

Speculative Realism vs. New Materialism, a question

Following up on a discussion I was having about the new books forthcoming on speculative realism, I have a question for everyone. Yeah, yeah, you don't come to my blog for homework, I get it. But this is quick. Make a list of thinkers (no longer than 10) that you associate with speculative realism. Now, make a list of thinkers (no longer than 10) that you associate with new materialism. These lists cannot overlap (you can't put the same thinker in both list, you have the choice, no matter how arbitrary that choice that is). Feel free to post answers in comments (it is open, and anonymous comments are welcome), feel free to email me, or post it to my facebook.

EDIT: You can just make the lists, don't worry about providing justifications. You can, if you want. But I am much more interested in your first impression lists.

Becoming-vegan as ethical transformation.

Adam Kotsko recently had a post over at his place, "Why am I not a vegetarian?". This will not be a direct response to all his concerns, excuses, and explanations. I will mostly be talking about vegetarianism and veganism here in its ethical dimensions. There are, of course, environmental reasons, labor reasons, etc. that one might want to be a vegetarian or a vegan. However, I do want to highlight a couple of his points:

Another reason: a distrust of ethical consumer choices. Yes, factory farming is an abomination. If there were laws proposing to outlaw it, I would support those laws, regardless of their effect on the cost or availability of meat. In the meantime, I purchase organic meat when possible. Yet I just don’t have it in me to make a big deal out of it or insist on it, just like I don’t have it in me to move heaven and earth to make sure my garbage is recycled. I make my token gesture, but systemic problems have systemic solutions. I’m part of the society in which I live, and no amount of ritualistic keeping my hands clean is going to change anything. [...] For me, it seems like becoming a vegetarian would mean changing into a different kind of person, and I don’t want to make that particular change. Maybe something will happen to make that change plausible and even urgent at a gut level, but it hasn’t happened yet.

I want to say that his rejection of personal responses to systemic issues is a legitimate critique. Though, of course I am not sure I want to go so far as Adam does in his rejection of the ability of personal decisions to change the conditions for other animals. But, in general, the factory farm is exactly the sort of thing that individual consumer choices will most likely not have dramatic effects. Indeed, it would be important, particularly in relation to abolitionist discourses, to consider the limitations of voluntarism and vanguardism. So, if the idea of vegetarianism and veganism as boycott is not functionally sound, why promote it? And I think this is where I also, even more strongly, agree with Adam, when he states that "becoming a vegetarian would mean changing into a different kind of person." Veganism and vegetarianism in this sense is a kind of askesis, a practice of self-production. This pretty clearly drawing upon the work of the later Foucault, and I am by far not the only one to make this argument (you might want to look at Tanke's "The Care of the Self and Environmental Politics," Taylor's "Foucault and the Ethics of Eating," my "Towards a Dark Animal Studies," and Dean's "You Are How You Eat?"). One of the things I find interesting in Foucault's argument is that the cartesian understanding of how a self changes is challenged. Under the usual, what we will call cartesian, view, first you understand the world correctly, and from that correct understanding, you will do what you should do. Right knowledge precedes right action. Under this view of the world, the biggest hurdle to societal arrangements and policy decisions is that people don't know what is true. In other words, the biggest reason we haven't confronted global warming is global warming deniers. Not, you know, that even if we somehow all agreed that global warming was happening and bad, we might still have right action. In Foucault's turn to classical philosophy, we get a different understanding against the cartesian view. In his view, we have to have certain practices that then produce the ability to access certain truths or understandings of the world. Action precedes knowledge, or at least understanding. So, if we want to mitigate the unthinkable suffering of the factory farm, if we want to divert the environmental global suicide pact that is being driven by the expropriation of animal labor and lives, then I think vegetarianism and veganism is going to be key. It will be key not just as an end reality (the end result of challenging the systemic violence to animals will probably be vegetarianism and veganism), but also as a way of producing the sorts of subjectivities that bring about systemic change in the first place. In other words, we need vegetarianism and veganism not because of a consumer boycott, but because we need a different kind of persons.

This gets to a different part of Adam's post:

I also don’t want to be a pain in the ass for hosts. I don’t want to constrain the choice of meal someone can prepare me in their home or the choice of restaurant. This is one key principle from Pauline Christianity on which I will not budge: always be a good guest, always accept what’s put before you. I don’t want them to experience my dietary preference as a moral judgment on them — which will likely happen at least sometimes, whether I intend it that way or not. It’s not as though they or I can do anything about the system of food production, so why create bad feelings?

While not a direct answer, it reminds me of Leela Gandhi's excellent book, Affective Communities. In her chapter "Meat"she recounts the story of Mahatma Gandhi's vegetarianism. When he left for England to study law, he made a promise to his mother to be vegetarian. He had not particularly been a vegetarian before that promise, and felt it was a superstition. He was often made fun of in England among his peers, but he kept his promise. In so doing he found himself in different communities than he would have otherwise. He became radicalized on issues of socialism and anti-colonialism. Along with being a different kind of person, there is always the chance that our vegetarianism and veganism will put us in different communities, perhaps produce different kinds of communities (I take it as a sort of given that host/guest relations are constitutive of community).

Now, none of this is given as a good transformation.  Along with her story of M.K. Gandhi, Leela Gandhi also replays another story happening at the same time, the story of the first animal welfare law passed in the West, and the animal welfare support of James and John Stuart Mill. Gandhi shows how both the Mills and the animal welfare laws come deeply from places of colonialism, and the policing of of the underclasses (I address some of this in a little more detail in this old blog post). Even with those risks, I still feel we need changes.  I do think we need new kinds of persons, we need new relations to other animals, we need new communities. And all of this means that the issues of veganism and vegetarianism are sorts of attempts at Humeian political problems, that is to say, they are attempts at extending partial sympathies.

Top Humanists of the last century, plus a contest.

Over at Adrian's place, he has created a not super scientific but still super interesting list of the most cited 'humanists' who wrote and lived in the last century. The number one hit will surprise exactly no one. Go check it out. He has also announced a contest (which I am currently winning) of finding names who are not on his original list. Read the post and comments to learn more about both.

CFP: Transgender Studies Quarterly special issue on Tranimalities

CALL FOR PAPERS

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2.2

Tranimalities

Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein, eds.

It has long been argued that Humanism has reached its breaking point and no longer possesses critical purchase (if ever it did); it would seem that it has not advanced our understanding of what it means to be “human,” especially if the humans we are theorizing do not fit neatly into well-known binary categories sanctioned by Humanism.  Further, Humanism delineates a normative standard of legibility by which all others are read, measured, controlled, disciplined, and assigned to fixed and hierarchical social statuses. This administration of norms is the justificatory linchpin of (often violent) practices of exclusion, discrimination, and oppression.

Since so many among us have been excluded from the elite status of being considered fully human in the restricted and universal sense that Humanism has articulated, researchers across a multitude of disciplines continue to unpack the underlying frameworks that provide for the standardizing force privileging the anthro-ontological Humanist human over all others. And this is one area in which transgender/trans theory, too, can make a significant intervention.

However, Tranimalities does not strive to provide yet another critique of Humanism simply by adding trans insights into the mix, or as yet another vector in intersectional critique. The abundance of theoretical interventions against Humanism’s investment in regulating and controlling sex/gender/sexuality has already made considerable headway on this front. Instead, Tranimalities wishes to focus on trans-infused apprehensions and engagements with the expansive world of possibility opened up by nonanthropocentric and posthumanist perspectives. In this way, Tranimalities aims to entangle and enmesh trans and the nonhuman in a generative tension leading to alternate ways of envisioning futures of embodiment, aesthetics, bio-politics, climates, and ethics.

As such, at the enfoldment of transgender/trans theory, critical animal studies, and posthuman theory lies a rich field of research that has to date been largely unconsidered. Tranimalities thus seeks to attend to the trans-dimensions of recent critical moves beyond the human. With works like Queering the Non/Human (Nora Giffney and Myra Hird, eds., 2008), Animal Others (special issue of Hypatia, 2012; Lori Gruen and Kari Weil, eds.), the Queer Inhumanisms (special issue of GLQ, forthcoming, Mel Y. Chen and Dana Luciano, eds.), and Tranimacies: Intimate Links Between Affect, Animals, and Trans* Studies; forthcoming, Eliza Steinbock, Marianna Szczygielska, and Anthony Wagner, eds.) providing some of the groundwork, TSQ’s special issue Tranimalities aims to contribute a specifically trans intervention into the discussion of the anti-, non-, in-, and posthuman.

We invite submissions of scholarly essays that address these and related issues.

Potential topics might include:

Transgendered posthumous life– what becomes of trans not only in the death of Man but also in the death of life?
“Transbiologicial body”: How are nonhumans contingent forms of trans bodies? Or, how does the trans body disrupt “the human”?
The animalization of trans populations as intersected with race, sexuality, nation, ability, and class
Transgendered anthropocene
Trans-species forms of hormonal and surgical lives
Becoming (with) trans-species
Transecologies and transenvironmentalisms: Does trans reinvigorate commitments to critiquing environmental racisms and classisms?
Posthuman trans embodiment and/or materiality – How does a special focus on matter and materiality transform trans understandings of bodies?
Is there a particular trans concept of affect?
Globalization and colonization, and the problematic of transing human/animal life?
The transanimal dimensions of political injustice and exploitation
What becomes of gender and, in turn, transgender in the absence of a human perspective?
Tranimalities and socialities
Trananimalities and engagement with disability studies
Multispecies ethnographies of transspeciation
What can transgender theory offer to scholarship about other Others and, in particular, nonhuman animals?
How does the position of transgender as other than in-, non- or posthuman give theorists a unique perspective from which to reconsider earthly life?
Trans-fat, transdermal, transfection, transfusion, and transposons, the undoing/redoing of “the human”
Bestiality/zoophilia/ “furries” as tranimal erotic formations?
Could the move to transgenre and away from transgender provide a productive opening to theorize posthuman or posthumous transgender
Transgenics/transplantations—How does the social aesthetic of transness shape and reshape biopolitical life?
Species differences as sexual differences?
Please note that this list is not intended to be exhaustive.

To be considered for publication, please submit full articles by June 1, 2014 to tsqjournal@gmail.com. The expected range for scholarly articles is 5000 to 7000 words. Peer review will be conducted on all accepted submissions. Please prepare submissions for anonymous peer review by including your name, a brief bio, postal address, email address, and any institutional affiliation on a separate cover sheet. Please do not make references to yourself in the text, footnotes, or citations. We expect to give authors a response by August 15, 2014.  Final revisions will be due by October 15, 2014.

Any questions should be addressed by e-mail sent to both guest editors: Eva Hayward evahayward@gmail.com, and Jami Weinstein jami.weinstein@liu.se, and cc’d to tsqjournal@gmail.com.

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is published by Duke University Press; Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker are general co-editors. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies, and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. Every issue of TSQ is a specially themed issue that also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces. To learn more about the journal, or to propose future issues, visit TSQ’s editorial page at https://lgbt.arizona.edu/tsq-main.

Books forthcoming on Speculative Realism

While we are frequently reminded that speculative realism doesn't, on some level, exist, it certainly hasn't stopped there being a out pouring of speculative realism books. And several of these look very exciting.

There is Tristan Garcia's recently translated and massive tome, Form and Object: A Treatise on Things.

Furthermore there are three books coming out very closely together, that all attempt to engage systematically with speculative realism, while also advancing their own argument.

Coming out in late July from Edinburgh University Press, there is Tom Sparrow's The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism.

There is Peter Gratton's Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects, due out in September from Bloomsbury Academic. You can read the actually pretty funny intro to his book here.

And lastly, but probably not least, there is Steven Shaviro's The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, which is due out in October from the University of Minnesota Press.


And the thing is, regardless on your position of speculative realism, all the books listed are probably going to be worth your time. None of the books, based on the bits and parts I have read or have talked about with the author, are some sort of fawning engagement with speculative realism. At the same time, all of them treat the this strand of thinking as serious, interesting, and, well, actually existing.