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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Sara HeitlingerORCiD
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Haraway (2015, p. 160) suggests, “One way to live and die well as mortal critters in the Chthulucene is to join forces to reconstitute refuges, to make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and recomposition, which must include mourning irreversible losses.” Losses constitute themselves in time and space. Over time, species that have gone extinct leave gaps in the ecological system of living beings that biological sciences are still trying to fully disentangle. Yet, the infinity of small and large scales may render this work forever incomplete. Therefore, it is imperative to widen our appreciation for the methodological possibilities and limitations being considered in our collective, transdisciplinary endeavour to what Haraway describes as “making kin” and “stay with the trouble” of entanglements between human and nonhuman beings. Although we agree with the call to find ways to decenter the human towards a post-anthropocentric worldview (Forlano, 2016, 2017; Light, Powell, & Shklovski, 2017), we want to critique some of the repercussions and implications that are emerging. We will use the recent bestowal of legal personhood on the Whanganui River in New Zealand, and the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers in India as a case to illustrate our argument. While introducing legal rights for nature is a welcome move, the very notion of personhood is problematic. Not only does it give a natural entity, which we perceive as “river,” legal rights akin to a corporate citizen to “enter and enforce contracts, and the ability to hold property” (O’Donnell & Talbot-Jones, 2017), the river’s delineation as “person” also risks overlooking the very entanglement of and with nature. As a result, we want to explore an alternative perspective: the merits of spatial and temporal losses, that is, gaps, as a way to approach a methodological advancement in more-than-human worlds. Other parts of academia have come to peace with the ontological impossibility to account for the complex fidelity of reality’s entanglements. In historiography, losses and gaps are studied as a way to approximate a distributed (and often political and thus contentious) world narrative over time (Hewitson, 2014). In this paper, we seek to learn from historiographic methods applied to the study of historic gaps as a way to approach an appreciation of the way gaps and absence can be studied to draw attention to the fallacy of human exceptionalism. At the horizon of this line of thought lie a myriad of pathways, some of which may resemble theology, yet others offer prospects for a new epistemological understanding of the symbolic that focuses on both the aesthetics and the ethics of the invisible.
Author(s): Foth M, Light A, Heitlinger S, Rodriguez A
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Published
Conference Name: 4S – Society for Social Studies of Science Annual Conference
Year of Conference: 2018
Online publication date: 01/09/2018
Acceptance date: 25/03/2018
URL: https://4s2018sydney.org/
