Bruce Braun - Böcker

This book rejects apocalyptic pronouncements that the end of the millenium represents the 'end' of nature as well. Remaking Reality brings together contributors from across the human sciences who argue that a notion of 'social nature' provides great hope for the future. Applying a variety of theoretical approaches to social nature, and engaging with debates in politics, science, technology and social movements surrouding race, gender and class, the contributors explroe important and emerging sites where nature is now being remade with considerable social and ecological consequences. The essays are organised around two themes: 'capitalising and envisioning nature' and 'actors, networks and the politics of hybridity'. An afterword by Neil Smith reflects on the problems and possibilities of future names.For critics and activists alike, Remaking Reality provides essential theoretical and political tools to rethink environmentalism and progressive social natures for the twenty first century.

This book rejects apocalyptic pronouncements that the end of the millenium represents the 'end' of nature as well. Remaking Reality brings together contributors from across the human sciences who argue that a notion of 'social nature' provides great hope for the future. Applying a variety of theoretical approaches to social nature, and engaging with debates in politics, science, technology and social movements surrouding race, gender and class, the contributors explroe important and emerging sites where nature is now being remade with considerable social and ecological consequences. The essays are organised around two themes: 'capitalising and envisioning nature' and 'actors, networks and the politics of hybridity'. An afterword by Neil Smith reflects on the problems and possibilities of future names.For critics and activists alike, Remaking Reality provides essential theoretical and political tools to rethink environmentalism and progressive social natures for the twenty first century.

This groundbreaking collection brings together for the first time diverse geographical work on the social construction of nature. Eleven leading contributors not only discuss social nature, but look at the concrete ways in which it is made and the political implications of its construction. Brings together for the first time diverse geographical work on the social construction of nature.Eleven leading contributors not only discuss social nature, but look at the concrete ways in which it is made and the political implications of its construction.Uses international case studies to illustrate the theoretical positions.A helpful introduction by the editors sets the chapters in context.Enables teachers and students to explore the ways in which social nature is evident and to engage with the direct implications of this for human lives, ecologies and politics.

Spanning cultural and political ecology, the political economy of the environment, humanistic landscape interpretation, cultural studies of nature, and science and technology studies, this volume is the definitive guide to environmental studies in Human Geography over the past 30 years. The articles collected capture conceptual developments in the field for audiences within and beyond Geography, and illustrate the diversity and remarkable vitality of geographical research on society-environment relations.

An exciting new approach to environmental politicsSave the rainforest-not a question but a statement of fact. What good environmentalist would ever dispute it? Bruce Braun does; he goes so far as to ask, what is the rainforest? Who defines it? He examines the various practices-social, discursive, and political-through which Canada’s West Coast forests have been given meaning and made the site of intense political and ideological struggle. Departing from other work on environmental politics that assumes the "forest" is a constant, The Intemperate Rainforest traces the way West Coast landscapes have been viewed and controlled by explorers, foresters, environmentalists, artists, scientists, adventure travelers, and Native peoples.In 1993, dramatic political protests over logging in Clayoquot Sound in British Columbia propelled Canada’s temperate rainforests onto the global stage. Celebrities and rock bands joined protests that, with over eight hundred arrests, were some of the largest acts of civil disobedience in Canadian history. Moving between these events and the histories and practices that produced these forest spaces, Braun reveals a complex postcolonial landscape in which a conventional politics of wilderness preservation is found lacking. Bringing environmental studies into conversation with poststructuralist theory and postcolonial studies leads to a dynamic understanding of the forest as a historically contingent, politically charged object. Braun demonstrates how constructions of the forest are inextricably entangled with culture, race, nation, class, and colonialism in ways that trouble conventional approaches to nature and politics. Often portrayed as pristine landscape, he shows the forest to be an intensely cultural space inseparable from the primitivist fantasies, scientific discourses, and indigenous knowledges that constitute it. Displacing the language of wilderness, Braun proposes understanding the forest as a hybrid object that cannot be assigned to either "nature" or "culture" and cannot be understood apart from the relations of power that infuse it.

Taking seriously the argument that things have politics, Political Matter seeks to develop a fully materialist theory of politics, one that opens new possibilities for imagining the relationship between scientific and political practices. The contributors assert that without such a theory the profusion of complex materials with and through which we live-plastic bags, smart cars, and long-life lightbulbs, for example-too often leaves us oscillating between fearful repudiation and glib celebration.Exploring the frictions that come from linking the work of scholars in science and technology studies and political theory, these essays spark new ways of understanding the matter of politics.Contributors: Andrew Barry, U of Oxford; Jane Bennett, Johns Hopkins U; Stephen J. Collier, New School; William E. Connolly, Johns Hopkins U; Rosalyn Diprose, U of New South Wales; Lisa Disch, U of Michigan; Gay Hawkins, U of New South Wales; Andrew Lakoff, UC San Diego; Noortje Marres, U of London; Isabelle Stengers, U Libre de Bruxelles; Nigel Thrift, U of Warwick.

Futures: Imagining Socioecological Transformation brings together leading scholars to explore how we might know, enact, and struggle for, the conjoined social and ecological transformations we need to achieve just and sustainable futures. The question of transformation, and how it might be achieved, is explored across a variety of topics and geographical sites, and through heterodox analytical and theoretical approaches, in a collective effort to move beyond a form of critique that hands down judgements, to one that brings new ideas and new possibilities to life. Chapters are lively and original engagements with concrete situations that sparkle with creativity. Together, they add up to an impressive study of how to live, and what to struggle for, in the complex socioecological landscapes of the Anthropocene. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers.

Futures: Imagining Socioecological Transformation brings together leading scholars to explore how we might know, enact, and struggle for, the conjoined social and ecological transformations we need to achieve just and sustainable futures. The question of transformation, and how it might be achieved, is explored across a variety of topics and geographical sites, and through heterodox analytical and theoretical approaches, in a collective effort to move beyond a form of critique that hands down judgements, to one that brings new ideas and new possibilities to life. Chapters are lively and original engagements with concrete situations that sparkle with creativity. Together, they add up to an impressive study of how to live, and what to struggle for, in the complex socioecological landscapes of the Anthropocene. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers.

Examines how settler colonial and sexist infrastructures and narratives order a resource boomOver the past decade, new oil plays have unsettled U.S. energy landscapes and imaginaries. Settling the Boom studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms.This collection reveals the results of sustained research in Williston, North Dakota, the epicenter of the “Bakken Boom.” While the boom brought a rapid influx of capital and workers, the book questions simple timelines of before and after. Instead, Settling the Boom demonstrates how the unsettling forces of an oil play resolve through normative narratives and material and affective infrastructures that support settler colonialism’s violent extension and its gendered orders of time and space. Considering a wide range of evidence, from urban and regional policy, interviews with city officials, media, photography, and film, these essays analyze the ongoing material, aesthetic, and narrative ways of life and land in the Bakken.Contributors: Morgan Adamson, Macalester College; Kai Bosworth, Virginia Commonwealth U; Thomas S. Davis, Ohio State U; Jessica Lehman, Durham U.

Examines how settler colonial and sexist infrastructures and narratives order a resource boomOver the past decade, new oil plays have unsettled U.S. energy landscapes and imaginaries. Settling the Boom studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms.This collection reveals the results of sustained research in Williston, North Dakota, the epicenter of the “Bakken Boom.” While the boom brought a rapid influx of capital and workers, the book questions simple timelines of before and after. Instead, Settling the Boom demonstrates how the unsettling forces of an oil play resolve through normative narratives and material and affective infrastructures that support settler colonialism’s violent extension and its gendered orders of time and space. Considering a wide range of evidence, from urban and regional policy, interviews with city officials, media, photography, and film, these essays analyze the ongoing material, aesthetic, and narrative ways of life and land in the Bakken.Contributors: Morgan Adamson, Macalester College; Kai Bosworth, Virginia Commonwealth U; Thomas S. Davis, Ohio State U; Jessica Lehman, Durham U.