The articles in this Special Collection engage directly with the realities of water as they simultaneously explore its intellectual potential in various genres of medieval writing, from crusade chronicles to medieval romance. In this way they shed new light not only on the literature and history they explore but also on medieval conceptions of…[Read more]

This short article offers a perspective on the social organization of repair and re-use of public infrastructures in the UK today by focusing on an former public library now transferred to a social enterprise which also hosts a repair centre for the processing of used household goods.

The British State has been terraformed over recent decades through the changing spatio-temporal dynamics of capital accumulation in the world-system entailed in financialisation, neoliberalsiation, and the emergence of global cities. A new post-industrial constellation of political domination has thus emerged in that state that requires urgent…[Read more]

Discussing ecological justice in conservation and environmental ethics.

This paper explores how everyday religious narratives in post-disaster contexts can be interpreted as key sites of agency articulated in resistance to dominant discourses of disaster relief. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among affected communities after the 2010 floods in Pakistan, we argue that religious discourses code everyday actions with…[Read more]

In many US cities, especially those in the Rust Belt, the environmental goods and services (EGS) industry has played a significant role in restructuring local economies to promote new, flexible, and “creative” forms of service-based labour. And yet much of the environmental work conducted in these cities has been directed at an industrial pas…[Read more]

The United Nations cited the 2010 monsoon floods in Pakistan as the largest
humanitarian crisis in living memory. The environmental catastrophe effected
twenty million people and highlighted the complicated relationship between nature
and society. The lives of extremely vulnerable groups such as subsistence farmers
and unskilled labourers were…[Read more]

On scholarly traditions, quantitative assessments and academic malpractices in Italy, and how these factors affect Italian scholarship in the history of science.

Subject of the study are intentional communities with a strong emphasis on sustainable development. The study explores ecovillages and other socio-ecological communities in their role as lifestyle avant-gardes and as pioneers of sustainable development. Main interest is both the sustainability and the innovation potential of such communities.…[Read more]

Book review of the book by Marco Leonardi (“Renaissance Quarterly,” Volume 71, n. 4, 2018, pp. 1489-1491).

This paper examines the agency of the dogs used to develop the Soviet manned space flight programme by considering what the dogs did as experimental subjects, as dog technologies, and as individual dogs in the context of the historically conditioned practices of Soviet science. Looking at how Soviet space researchers refined Pavlovian behaviourism…[Read more]

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The foundational gesture of New Materialism and Speculative Realism dismisses vast swaths of past philosophy and theory in order to signify their own avant-garde status. The violence of this gesture, which tries to corral difference within past texts in order to feign its own purity, can be considered as a theoretical quarantine. Examples of…[Read more]

A review of the Bill Viola exhibition at the Stavanger Kunstmuseum including Man Searching For Immortality / Woman Searching for Eternity (2013) and Tristan’s Ascension (2005) in conversation.

The Line of Control arbitrarily bifurcates Neelum valley, Kashmir into Pakistan and India. While the border attempts to constrain and categorize, the daily movements and flows of human and more-than-human bodies via “unofficial” routes and routines generate an understanding of Kashmir that is not dependent on geopolitics. Neelum as sculpted and…[Read more]

Shortly after the United States announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, mayors of global cities committed to addressing climate change via urban-scale projects aimed at promoting liveable, sustainable, and healthy communities. While such projects are taken for granted as serving the common good, this paper addresses the…[Read more]

This essay is an attempt to think about melancholy as a shared creative endeavor, as a trans-corporeal blue (and blues) ecology that would bind humans, nonhumans, and stormy weather together in what Tim Ingold has called a meshwork. In this enmeshment of the “strange strangers” of Timothy Morton’s dark ecology, “[t]he only way out is down” a…[Read more]

This essay argues for the consideration of energy and an energy-based humanities model in the study of water in the Middle Ages. It also proposes that ‘energy’, when discussed in the context of the Middle Ages, is in fact a study of ‘energies’, derived from technology, material culture, and intellectual culture in equal measure. It propose…[Read more]

Christina McPhee’s ‘commonplace book’ draws from a palimpsest of handwritten notes, lists, quotations, bibliographic fragments, and sketches, from an artist whose voracious reading practice is a direct feed into her life and art — all set to a visual and textual design-as-score, as prominent writers on painting, media arts, performance, video i…[Read more]