Exeter Studies in Environmental Humanities – serie

Minerals and metals underpin our everyday existence, woven into the creation of nearly all consumer products. Yet the extraction process of ripping them from the earth fuels often toxic global geopolitical relationships, colonization, and conflict. Despite their fundamental importance, these materials are too often unseen, unappreciated, and unnoticed. This lack of awareness occludes critical opportunities for researchers, educators, and students to engage with the complex relationships between people, products, and the environment.Spatial Woundings: Entanglements of Minings, Metals, and Extractions explores how extractivist logics continue to cultivate devastation, plunder, and ecological precarity, focusing on the concept of spatial wounding—the myriad ways landscapes and living systems are subjected to the violence of extraction. This damage is comprehensive, encompassing alterations to the physical landscape as well as injury inflicted upon people, animals, plants, and atmospheres.Featuring a collection of international scholars, this urgent book surveys the contours of these devastating outcomes alongside crucial efforts to resist the logics that perpetuate them, ultimately reimagining the role of metals and extraction in cultural, popular, and social contexts. The volume is structured in three sections: Part I details historical experiences and intimate stories of spatial wounding; Part II offers analytical engagements with mining as a metaphor in media and technology; and Part III considers the broader empires, extraction, and more-than-human damage, addressing colonial legacies and anticolonial ethics in resource governance.

As lands burn, oceans boil, species go extinct and cultural conflicts multiply, Our Multispecies Futures urgently calls for a paradigm-shift in humanity’s relationship to life on Earth.This timely volume argues that the delusion of human exceptionalism stokes colonial and hierarchical relationships with our animal, plant, fungal, and microbial companions. It undertakes multi-scalar explorations of life, ranging from vast oceanic currents down to intricate psychic mechanisms that fuel our personal fears, desires and fantasies to reveal both the damage of this delusion and the rewards of overcoming it. We discover how multispecies harm is amplified by the digital revolution which has rapidly accelerated opportunities to control life (both human and non) for profit. The book proposes the Cybercene as a new framework to study this moment, where digital ‘realities’ and representations are rapidly transforming identities and substituting the value of actual bodies and living habitats.Rather than focusing on doomsday scenarios, however, readers are invited to explore pragmatic alternative pathways for ecocultural care and kinship. We embark on a global journey, mapping diverse entangled lives—from mini-foxes and mysterious underground fungal networks to seemingly sentient chatbots and the American Bison. Through these stories, the book suggests ways to jam and ‘glitch’ capture-and-control practices, and how to care differently for our multispecies kin.Accessible to a broad audience, Our Multispecies Futures serves as both an introduction to the young field of Multispecies Studies and a manual showcasing new interdisciplinary research methods like multispecies thick-mapping and naturalcultural discourse analysis. It offers a vital guide for reimagining a shared future.