Traces the history of municipal solid-waste disposal at Bakersfield California from 1872-1992

This paper proposes that we can reimagine insular literatures and medieval islescapes as commodious seas of cultural and intellectual loci that span time, culture, and text alike. By moving beyond the rhetoric of insular separation or connectivity, we can see that islands connect even when medieval minds saw separation. The essay focuses on the…[Read more]

This article is a discussion of the “discourse on the unthinkable” surrounding potential future democratic engagements with rivers as non-human persons or natural objects. In the context of the Asia–Pacific region, this article suggests that the developments in material philosophy entitled “new materialism” are essential tools in the reconcept…[Read more]

This article explores the diagram found on the recto side of Pierpont Morgan, M. 982, a single leaf from a twelfth-century manuscript held by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, and believed to originate in the scriptorium of Saint Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg, Austria. The diagram represents knowledge as an ‘ecodiagrammatic’ pattern, depic…[Read more]

Gathering into lively conversation scholars in medieval, early modern and object studies, Inhuman Nature explores the activity of the things, forces, and relations that enable, sustain and operate indifferently to us. Enamored by fictions of environmental sovereignty, we too often imagine “human” to be a solitary category of being. This col…[Read more]

In the context of the global water crisis, we seek an understanding of the histories of water management, their fashioning, and their legacy today. We juxtapose temporally diverse narratives to explore the premodern imaginings that have shaped our inheritance of hydrological thought. Rather than conceptualize their historical influence as a linear…[Read more]

Recent years have seen an infusion of new ideas into material philosophy through the work of the so-called ‘new materialists’. Poignant examples appear within two recent books: the first, Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett (2010), sets out to “enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us” (2010: 4). The second, Element…[Read more]

Zusammenfassung und Aufruf zur Teilnahme an einem Workshop auf dem Kritischen Kongress der Geographie September 2017, Tübingen.

Este nuevo trabajo, dentro de la fecunda labor intelectual de Oscar Martínez Peñate,
alcanza un doble objetivo: por una parte nos recuerda el déficit en la construcción de
nuestra identidad cultural, entendida ésta más allá de la “madeja de significados”
elaborados por nosotros mismos, como lo afirma Weber, sino como el conjunto
de valores, t…[Read more]

El Ministerio de Obras Públicas, Transporte y de Vivienda
y Desarrollo Urbano (MOP)1 es una de las instituciones
del Estado que históricamente ha sido señalada por
la ciudadanía como centro de corrupción y, como otra
dependencia más del Poder Ejecutivo que no cumplía
con las funciones que por ley estaba obligada a realizar

Esta obra coordinada por el Máster Oscar Martínez Peñate reúne los puntos de vista y la experiencia de connotadas personalidades de la vida nacional, quienes, en conjunto, aportan una visión crítica, importante para arribar a la comprensión de la sociedad salvadoreña, de cómo está organizada, de cuáles son sus intereses, intenciones y proyectos,…[Read more]

Con esta obra el autor pretende que se conozca la historia vista desde los de abajo, es una nueva perspectiva de analizar los hechos desde dos puntos de vista, los que dieron las órdenes y los que las acataron.
Se describen hechos que por su crueldad y salvajismo resultan más que repugnantes; difíciles de creer que hayan sucedido, por otra pa…[Read more]

This essay develops interrelations and mutual implications foremost among Bernie Sanders’ book Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In, Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home, and David Fideler’s Restoring the Soul of the World: Our Living Bond with Nature’s Intelligence. It proposes that the evolution of contempla…[Read more]

Studies of ethnic minority peoples in Asia have long focussed on the relations between ethnic minority communities and the modern state and on the role of development in shaping these relations. This paper is concerned with how ethnic minorities respond to the state-led development. While there are numerous studies focussing on the collective…[Read more]

Bans on coal mining have been implemented in two tribal majority states in India’s north-east frontier; Nagaland and Meghalaya. In Nagaland the state government imposed the ban in an attempt to capture control of coal extraction and trade, while in Meghalaya India’s National Green Commission imposed the ban over concern for the environment and…[Read more]

In this chapter we explore the pedagogical effects of collective movement on bicycles grounded in our direct experiences, personal reflections, group discussions and the notes we took during a trans-European, self-organized educational activity called Cycling Alternatives in 2013 and 2014. We thereby engage with non-representational and…[Read more]

The vernacular online videos produced by the Arab revolutions constitute an unprecedented (though not unproblematic) historical resource for understanding the subjective experience of the ordinary people who find themselves on the front line of revolutionary struggle. But they also effect a sea-change in the way in which we view and understand…[Read more]

Lecture/class notes on Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.” I’m sharing my teaching notes (rough) for works that may be helpful to others and are widely taught.