This text offers the first book-length introduction to more-than-human geography, exploring its key ideas, main debates, and future prospects.
An opening chapter traces the origins and emergence of this field of enquiry and positions more-than-human geography as a response to a set of intellectual and political crises in Western thought and politics. It identifies key literatures and thinkers and reflects on the varying usages and meanings of the idea of the more-than-human. Three subsequent sections explore cross-cutting themes that draw together the disparate strands of more-than-human geography: examining new materialisms developed in the field, analysing knowledge practices and methodologies, and finally reflecting on the political and ethical implications of a more-than-human approach. A final chapter examines the tensions between this approach and cognate work in environmental geography to review the strengths and the limitations of more-than-human geographies, and to speculate as to their near future development.
Introducing the key idea of more-than-human geography, this book will be an important resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of human geography, environmental geography, cultural and social geography, and political geography.
Introduction
I.1 Are humans exceptional?
I.2 Five beginnings
I.3 More-than-human geography
I.4 Multinaturalism
I.5 Why ‘more-than’ human?
I.6 The structure of the book
1. Humanism and its problems: Situating the emergence of more-than-human geography
1.1 Humanism
1.2 Humanism’s dualist ontology: putting the Human on a pedestal
1.3 Challenges to humanism’s dualist ontology: Scientific revelations
1.4 Humanism’s rationalist epistemology: the mind in a vat
1.5 Challenges to humanism’s epistemology
1.6 Humanism’s politics: human rights, freedom, and progress
1.7 Challenges to the politics of humanism
1.8 Summary: Humanism in binaries
2. More-than-human materialisms
2.1 Human bodies
2.2 Animals, plants, and other organisms
2.3 Biological processes
2.4 Technologies and infrastructure
2.5 The elements: Earth, Fire, Air and Water
2.6 Key characteristics of more-than-human materialisms
2.7 Conclusions
3. More-than-human knowledge practices
3.1 Learn to be affected
3.2 Follow the things
3.3 Experiment
3.4 Engage publics to redistribute expertise
3.5 Make an alliance with science
3.6 Conclusions
4. More-than-human politics and ethics
4.1 The (anti-)Politics of Nature: a case study
4.2 A politics of materials: technologies, elements and organisms
4.3 A politics of multiple knowledges
4.4 A politics of relations and processes
4.5 The normative commitments of more-than-humanism
4.6 Conclusions
5. The tensions within and prospects for more-than-humanism
5.1 With Marxist political ecology: Dithering while the planet burns!
5.2 With black and indigenous studies: Provincialising and decolonising more-than-humanism
5.3 With critical animal studies
5.4 With advocates for Science and Progress
5.5 Conclusions
Epilogue
Appendix: Interview with Professor Dame Sarah Whatmore
Biography
Jamie Lorimer is Professor of Environmental Geography in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. He completed a PhD at the University of Bristol in 2005 and has since lectured at Kings College London, before moving to Oxford in 2012.
Timothy Hodgetts is Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, where he is the Course Director of the MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance.
