1st Edition
Resilience in the Anthropocene Governance and Politics at the End of the World
This book offers the first critical, multi-disciplinary study of how the concepts of resilience and the Anthropocene have combined to shape contemporary thought and governmental practice.
Faced with the climate catastrophe of the Anthropocene, theorists and policymakers are increasingly turning to ‘sustainable’, ‘creative’ and ‘bottom-up’ imaginaries of governance. The book brings together cutting-edge insights from leading geographers, international relations scholars and philosophers to explore how the concepts of resilience and the Anthropocene challenge and transform prevailing understandings of Earth, space, time and knowledge, and how these transformations reshape governance, ethics and critique today. This book examines how the Anthropocene calls into question established categories through which modern societies have tended to make sense of the world and engage in critical reflection and analysis. It also considers how resilience approaches attempt to re-stabilize these categories – and the ethical and political effects that result from these resilience-based efforts.
Offering innovative insights into the problem of how environmental change is known and governed in the Anthropocene, this book will be of interest to students in fields such as geography, international relations, anthropology, science and technology studies, sociology, and the environmental humanities.
List of Contributors 1. Introduction: The Power of Life Stephanie Wakefield, Kevin Grove and David Chandler; 2. Resilient Earth: Gaia, Geopolitics and the Anthropocene Simon Dalby; 3. Security for a Fragmented World: Ecology and the Challenge of the Anthropocene Madeleine Fagan; 4. The End of Resilience? Rethinking Adaptation in the Anthropocene David Chandler; 5. Colliding times: urgency, resilience and the politics of living with volcanic gas emissions in the Anthropocene Sébastien Nobert, Harold Bellanger Rodríguez and Xochilt Hernandez; 6. Resilient Arts of Government: The Birth of a ‘Systems-Cybernetic Governmentality’ Sara Nelson; 7. Destituting Resilience: Contextualizing and Contesting Science for the Anthropocene Kevin Grove and Allain Barnett; 8. Ironies of the Anthropocene Lauren Rickards; 9. ‘Primordial Wounds’: Resilience, Trauma, and the Rifted Body of the Earth Nigel Clark; 10. More of the same? Life beyond the liberal one world world Stephanie Wakefield; 11. What Would you Do (and who would you kill) in Order to Save the World?: Dialectical Resilience Claire Colebrook; Index
Biography
David Chandler is Professor of International Relations, University of Westminster, UK. His recent monographs include Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene (with Julian Reid, 2019) and Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and Hacking (2018).
Kevin Grove is Associate Professor of Geography at Florida International University. His research explores the politics of disaster management and resilience in the Caribbean and North American cities. He is the author most recently of Resilience (Routledge Key Ideas in Geography series, 2018).
Stephanie Wakefield is an Urban Studies Foundation International Postdoctoral Fellow based at Florida International University. Her work explores experimental practices for living in and governing the Anthropocene. Her book Anthropocene Back Loop: Experimentation in Unsafe Operating Space is forthcoming.
