Ecologies of Violence: Crimes Against Nature in the Contemporary Cultural Imagination

The Ecoviolence Syllabus

Required readings:

  • Danielle Celermajer, “On the Prevention of Everyday Torture: An Ecological Approach” ABC Religion & Ethics, Online: https://www.abc.net.au/religion/on-the-prevention-of-everyday-torture-an-ecological-approach/10094734 
  • Shela Sheikh, “Violence”, In: Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, eds. The Posthuman Glossary (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 448–452
  • Claudia Brunner, “Un/Doing Epistemic Violence while Trying to Change the World” Journal für Entwicklungspolitik XXXIX, ½ (2023): 5–29
  • Vandana Shiva, “Reductionist Science as Epistemological Violence” In: A. Nandy (Ed.), Science, Hegemony and Violence. A Requiem for Modernity (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), pp. 232–256 https://archive.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu05se/uu05se0i.htm 
  • Rob Nixon, ‘Introduction’, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2011)
  • Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6:3 (1969)

Recommended readings:

  • Stacy Alaimo, ‘States of Suspension: Trans-corporeality at Sea’ Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2012) 19:3, pp. 476-493 
  • Winston, C. 2021. “Maroon Geographies.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111 (7): 2185–2199 
  • Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007) 
  • Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climactic Regime (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015) pdf on Teams. the short introduction and 1st Lecture: “On the instability of the (notion of) nature” 
  • Michelle Murphy, ‘Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations,’ Cultural Anthropology (2017) 32:4, online: https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/ca32.4.02  

Required readings:

  • Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London: Athlone Press, 2000)
  • Malcolm Ferdinand, “Prologue: A Colonial and Environmental Double Fracture” In Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022)
  • Stacy Alaimo, “Oceanic Origins, Plastic Activism, and New Materialism at Sea” (Chapter 5 in her monograph Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
  • Astrida Neimanis, ‘Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water,’ in Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Fanny Söderbäck (eds.) Undutiful Daughters: Mobilizing Future Concepts, Bodies and Subjectivities in Feminist Thought and Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
  • Bruno Latour, ‘Extending the Domain of Freedom, or Why Gaia Is So Hard to Understand’ with Timothy Lenton, Critical Inquiry, 2018.

Recommended readings:

  • Stacy Alaimo, ‘States of Suspension: Trans-corporeality at Sea’ Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2012) 19:3, pp. 476-493 
  • Winston, C. 2021. “Maroon Geographies.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111 (7): 2185–2199 
  • Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007) 
  • Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climactic Regime (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015) pdf on Teams. the short introduction and 1st Lecture: “On the instability of the (notion of) nature” 
  • Michelle Murphy, ‘Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations,’ Cultural Anthropology (2017) 32:4, online: https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/ca32.4.02  

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Required readings:

  • David Zierler, “Introduction” The Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the Scientists who Changed the Way we Think about the Environment (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).
  • Richard Falk, ‘Environmental Warfare and Ecocide: Facts, Appraisals, and Proposals,’ Bulletin of Peace Proposals 4:1(1973): 80-96.
  • Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide (2021)
  • Hannah Meszaros Martin “Defoliating the World: Ecocide, Visual Evidence and ‘Earthly Memory’” Third Text 32.2-3 (2018): 230-253.
  • Mark Griffiths & Henry Redwood, Late Modern War and the Geos, International Political Sociology (2024) 18, 1-18.

Recommended readings: