Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality

Hypatia ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 558-575 ◽  
Author(s):  
Astrida Neimanis ◽  
Rachel Loewen Walker

In the dominant “climate change” imaginary, this phenomenon is distant and abstracted from our experiences of weather and the environment in the privileged West. Moreover, climate change discourse is saturated mostly in either neoliberal progress narratives of controlling the future or sustainability narratives of saving the past. Both largely obfuscate our implication therein. This paper proposes a different climate change imaginary. We draw on feminist new materialist theories—in particular those of Stacy Alaimo, Claire Colebrook, and Karen Barad—to describe our relationship to climate change as one of “weathering.” We propose the temporal frame of “thick time”—a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past—in order to reimagine our bodies as archives of climate and as making future climates possible. In doing so, we can rethink the temporal narratives of climate change discourse and develop a feminist ethos of responsivity toward climatic phenomena. This project reminds us that we are not masters of the climate, nor are we just spatially “in” it. As weather‐bodies, we are thick with climatic intra‐actions; we are makers of climate‐time. Together we are weathering the world.

Author(s):  
Christian W. McMillen

There will be more pandemics. A pandemic might come from an old, familiar foe such as influenza or might emerge from a new source—a zoonosis that makes its way into humans, perhaps. The epilogue asks how the world will confront pandemics in the future. It is likely that patterns established long ago will re-emerge. But how will new challenges, like climate change, affect future pandemics and our ability to respond? Will lessons learned from the past help with plans for the future? One thing is clear: in the face of a serious pandemic much of the developing world’s public health infrastructure will be woefully overburdened. This must be addressed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-427
Author(s):  
Leonie Holthaus ◽  
Nils Stockmann

In this essay, we consider the role of academics as change-makers. There is a long line of reflection about academics’ sociopolitical role(s) in international relations (IR). Yet, our attempt differs from available considerations in two regards. First, we emphasize that academics are not a homogenous group. While some keep their distance from policymakers, others frequently provide policy advice. Hence, positions and possibilities of influence differ. Second, our argument is not oriented towards the past but the future. That is, we develop our reflections on academics as change-makers by outlining the vision of a ‘FutureLab’, an innovative, future forum that brings together different world-makers who are united in their attempt to improve ‘the world'. Our vision accounts for current, perhaps alarming trends in academia, such as debates about the (in)ability to confront post-truth politics. Still, it is a (critically) optimistic one and can be read as an invitation for experimentation. Finally, we sympathize with voices demanding the democratization of academia and find that further cross-disciplinary dialogues within academia and dialogues between different academics, civil society activists and policymakers may help in finding creditable solutions to problems such as climate change and populism.


Philosophies ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Giovanbattista Tusa

In this essay, I suggest that we are currently witnessing a mutation, which disrupts the mythical imaginary that had confined viruses, climate change, and atmospheric turbulences to an immutable background in the all-too-human narrative of the struggle against nature. I argue that the incapacity of translating this mutation in cultural and social terms, and the repression of this traumatic experience, are the cause of the perturbation that haunts our time. Disorientation pervades philosophy when the entire imaginary to which it had anchored its power to change the world seems to dissolve in the air, when what was silent and distant turns out to be vibrant, more familiar to us than any known proximity. Precisely for this reason, philosophy must rediscover its ability to inhabit times and spaces different from those oriented by the hegemony of capitalist progress, with its correlate of regular catastrophic emergencies and calculated risk. In this essay, I aim to present a perspective in which, instead of coming back straightforwardly ‘down to earth’, philosophy accepts inhabiting the fluctuating disorientation of its own time, itself populated by intermittent and uncertain opportunities of experiencing differently the past and the future—to encounter different relationships with the times that change.


2002 ◽  
Vol 357 (1420) ◽  
pp. 581-581
Author(s):  
Crispin Tickell ◽  
Semir Zeki

Human migration is an activity that is as old as humanity itself. Yet it remains a sensitive and politically charged subject, creating tensions in societies that experience it. It is closely linked to economic, environmental, demographic and political factors. It has become a conspicuous feature of the world political and demographic scene, with an estimated number of 22 million migrants in the past year. It shows every sign of accelerating in the future, not only because of poverty, civil war and politics, but also from environmental reasons that, in the future, may cause still larger–scale migration. Migration will be influenced by a host of such factors as climate change, sea–level rise, desertification, and environmental degradation generally.


The Eye ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (128) ◽  
pp. 19-22
Author(s):  
Gregory DeNaeyer

The world-wide use of scleral contact lenses has dramatically increased over the past 10 year and has changed the way that we manage patients with corneal irregularity. Successfully fitting them can be challenging especially for eyes that have significant asymmetries of the cornea or sclera. The future of scleral lens fitting is utilizing corneo-scleral topography to accurately measure the anterior ocular surface and then using software to design lenses that identically match the scleral surface and evenly vault the cornea. This process allows the practitioner to efficiently fit a customized scleral lens that successfully provides the patient with comfortable wear and improved vision.


Author(s):  
Donald C. Williams

This chapter is the first of this book to deal specifically with the metaphysics of time. This chapter defends the pure manifold theory of time. On this view, time is just another dimension of extent like the three dimensions of space, the past, present, and future are equally real, and the world is at bottom tenseless. What is true is eternally true. For example, it is now true that there will be a sea fight tomorrow or that there will not be a sea fight tomorrow. It is argued that the pure manifold theory does not entail fatalism and that contingent statements about the future do not imply that only the past and present exist.


Author(s):  
Mahesh K. Joshi ◽  
J.R. Klein

The world of work has been impacted by technology. Work is different than it was in the past due to digital innovation. Labor market opportunities are becoming polarized between high-end and low-end skilled jobs. Migration and its effects on employment have become a sensitive political issue. From Buffalo to Beijing public debates are raging about the future of work. Developments like artificial intelligence and machine intelligence are contributing to productivity, efficiency, safety, and convenience but are also having an impact on jobs, skills, wages, and the nature of work. The “undiscovered country” of the workplace today is the combination of the changing landscape of work itself and the availability of ill-fitting tools, platforms, and knowledge to train for the requirements, skills, and structure of this new age.


2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-248
Author(s):  
Engin Yilmaz ◽  
Yakut Akyön ◽  
Muhittin Serdar

AbstractCOVID-19 is the third spread of animal coronavirus over the past two decades, resulting in a major epidemic in humans after SARS and MERS. COVID-19 is responsible of the biggest biological earthquake in the world. In the global fight against COVID-19 some serious mistakes have been done like, the countries’ misguided attempts to protect their economies, lack of international co-operation. These mistakes that the people had done in previous deadly outbreaks. The result has been a greater economic devastation and the collapse of national and international trust for all. In this constantly changing environment, if we have a better understanding of the host-virus interactions than we can be more prepared to the future deadly outbreaks. When encountered with a disease which the causative is unknown, the reaction time and the precautions that should be taken matters a great deal. In this review we aimed to reveal the molecular footprints of COVID-19 scientifically and to get an understanding of the pandemia. This review might be a highlight to the possible outbreaks.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Rachel Wagner

Here I build upon Robert Orsi’s work by arguing that we can see presence—and the longing for it—at work beyond the obvious spaces of religious practice. Presence, I propose, is alive and well in mediated apocalypticism, in the intense imagination of the future that preoccupies those who consume its narratives in film, games, and role plays. Presence is a way of bringing worlds beyond into tangible form, of touching them and letting them touch you. It is, in this sense, that Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward observe the “re-emergence” of religion with a “new visibility” that is much more than “simple re-emergence of something that has been in decline in the past but is now manifesting itself once more.” I propose that the “new awareness of religion” they posit includes the mediated worlds that enchant and empower us via deeply immersive fandoms. Whereas religious institutions today may be suspicious of presence, it lives on in the thick of media fandoms and their material manifestations, especially those forms that make ultimate promises about the world to come.


2002 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 133-144
Author(s):  
Judith Middleton-Stewart

There were many ways in which the late medieval testator could acknowledge time. Behind each testator lay a lifetime of memories and experiences on which he or she drew, recalling the names of those ‘they had fared the better for’, those they wished to remember and by whom they wished to be remembered. Their present time was of limited duration, for at will making they had to assemble their thoughts and their intentions, make decisions and appoint stewards, as they prepared for their time ahead; but as they spent present time arranging the past, so they spent present time laying plans for the future. Some testators had more to bequeath, more time to spare: others had less to leave, less time to plan. Were they aware of time? How did they control the future? In an intriguing essay, A. G. Rigg asserts that ‘one of the greatest revolutions in man’s perception of the world around him was caused by the invention, sometime in the late thirteenth century, of the mechanical weight-driven clock.’ It is the intention of this paper to see how men’s (and women’s) perception of time in the late Middle Ages was reflected in their wills, the most personal papers left by ordinary men and women of the period.


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