scholarly journals POROUS SKINS: Life beyond Immunity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharina Donn
Keyword(s):  
Organic Matter ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Human Skin ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Third Way

What does it mean to be human in a world that isboth viral and vulnerable? The current pandemic has made clear that we liveporous lives in a porous world of bacteria, microbes, viruses, organic bodies,and non-organic matter. Tracing the motif of human and posthuman skin in MargePiercy’s Science Fiction, this article argues that simply equating porositywith threats to life, and with such dangers only, is a dangerous misconception,albeit one which can offer a pragmatic last resort in a situation of pandemicemergency. Yet as the touch of the held-out hand is more and more sorelymissed, it might be time to open our horizons of imagination beyond thesimplistic notion that human life is in need of constant containment in skins,walls and borderlines, lest it spill out and expose its vulnerability. Skin isour most natural but also most ambivalent border which protects as much as itenmeshes us. It can open our horizons of imagination to ways of existence thatare not solely reliant on immunity and insulation. This article travels intoMarge Piercy’s dystopian future and back to a year 2020 in which the illusionof immunity has been shattered. It acknowledges the porosity of human skin as areminder that life is always a threat to itself, even whilst survival at thecost of life is just another form of death. Yet skin, so naturally ambivalent,offers a third way to seek a future-bound human life that might be sustainablein all its precariousness. Working within an ecocritical framework, thisarticle aims to re-assess the concept of immunity from a position of porosityand enmeshment in the natural world. 

A Digital Nexus

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-218
Author(s):  
Nicola Green ◽  
Rob Comber ◽  
Sharron Kuznesof
Keyword(s):  
Human Computer Interaction ◽  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Consumption ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
Household Resource ◽  
Computer Interaction

Humans beings in the 21st century face significant social and global change. Ever-evolving digital technologies are increasingly embedded in the material, economic, and socio-cultural milieu; while global crises in climate change present challenges to human and global security and resilience. Social science and human-computer interaction research has investigated how digital systems might help to understand current environmental changes and intervene in the problematic human relationships to scarce resources of the natural world. This chapter reviews research contributions of sustainable human-computer interaction (HCI) and the social sciences on human consumption of resources most crucial to human life: water, energy, and food (WEF). Briefly outlining the current and ongoing evolution of digital technologies particularly concerned with embedded urban digital infrastructures in “smart” and automated technologies and the Internet of Things, it then touches on the scope and scale of the simultaneous environmental challenges posed by population growth and urbanization. It introduces sustainable HCI as one approach that directly addresses both trends. The chapter then outlines the most significant approaches that have informed the development of “sustainable HCI,” and reviews important empirical contributions underpinning the developing interdisciplinary research in the field. It outlines the current understanding of household resource use and considers how developing digital technologies might support domestic resource conservation and mitigate intensive domestically based resource consumption. The chapter closes with observations on the shifting relationships (and sustainable HCI research into them) that might constitute future ways of being in a sustainable digital age.

scholarly journals Rat Cities and Beehive Worlds: Density and Design in the Modern City

2011 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 722-756
Author(s):  
Jon Adams ◽  
Edmund Ramsden
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Social System ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Efficient Operation ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Nestled among E. M. Forster's careful studies of Edwardian social mores is a short story called “The Machine Stops.” Set many years in the future, it is a work of science fiction that imagines all humanity housed in giant high-density cities buried deep below a lifeless surface. With each citizen cocooned in an identical private chamber, all interaction is mediated through the workings of “the Machine,” a totalizing social system that controls every aspect of human life. Cultural variety has ceded to rigorous organization: everywhere is the same, everyone lives the same life. So hopelessly reliant is humanity upon the efficient operation of the Machine, that when the system begins to fail there is little the people can do, and so tightly ordered is the system that the failure spreads. At the story's conclusion, the collapse is total, and Forster's closing image offers a condemnation of the world they had built, and a hopeful glimpse of the world that might, in their absence, return: “The whole city was broken like a honeycomb. […] For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky” (2001: 123). In physically breaking apart the city, there is an extent to which Forster is literalizing the device of the broken society, but it is also the case that the infrastructure of the Machine is so inseparable from its social structure that the failure of one causes the failure of the other. The city has—in the vocabulary of present-day engineers—“failed badly.”

The Observer Effect: The Artistic Image as a Metaphor for Scientific Interpretations of the Natural World

Leonardo ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-78
Author(s):  
Elena Gubanova
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Observer Effect ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Artistic Images ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Artistic Image ◽  
The Universe

In this article, the author presents some of her artworks in which she created artistic images and interpretations of time, space and light that define human life on Earth. In her multimedia installations of the last 10 years, her interest in the scientific study of the universe has been interwoven with her experience as the daughter of an astronomer. The author and her husband collaborate to express their thoughts on science and philosophy through a combination of art and engineering solutions and technologies.

Distortion

Dismantlings ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 93-111
Author(s):  
Matt Tierney
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Transformative Change ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fiction Writer ◽  
As If

This chapter talks about distortion as a form of dismantling. It describes distortion as the historical and theoretical technique by which readers learn to approach political documents as if they were science fiction. When considered as a vehicle of distortion, literature is measured for its potential to alter exploitative conditions, like those of war, patriarchy, and racism. The science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany insists that transformative change takes shape neither in utopian nor in dystopian visions of the future, but rather in efforts toward significant distortion of the present. This attitude, which is also a theory and practice of literature, is one way to describe the inheritance of cyberculture in the works of writers and activists who employed speculative language to repurpose the thought of Alice Mary Hilton and the Ad Hoc Committee. These writers and activists focused not on the machines that would unveil the myth of scarcity, but instead isolate the forms of human life and relation that would follow the act of unveiling.

Discovering Maine’s Intangible Cultural Heritage

2019 ◽  
pp. 283-294
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Intangible Cultural Heritage ◽  
Ongoing Research ◽  
Cultural Rights ◽  
Boat Building ◽  
Fiddle Music ◽  
The Impact

This chapter reviews the historic and ongoing research of the state of Maine's intangible cultural heritage and shows how this work addresses the need for conservation, advocacy, education, and stewardship of this heritage. Maine is especially rich in intangible cultural heritage including the knowledge involved in crafting fine Native American basketry, boat building, fiddle music and dance, knowledge of the natural world among fishermen, woodsmen, millworkers, and farmers, folk singing, storytelling and much more. Cultural rights and ownership, the role of community scholars, and the impact of tourism is considered. The chapter concludes by suggesting that culturally-sensitive and engaged research has strengthened our understanding of how the ecosystem is essential to human life and culture.

Natural landscapes and human health: an introduction and overview.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Alan W. Ewert ◽  
Denise S. Mitten ◽  
Jillisa R. Overholt
Keyword(s):  
Human Health ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Bottom Line ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
Natural Landscapes ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Natural Settings

Abstract This book chapter approaches the linkage between natural landscapes and human health through the lens of two guiding questions, the first considering the various ways nature benefits human health from both historic and contemporary perspectives, and the second considering the mechanisms through which this relationship occurs. In doing so, we consider the ways societies and cultures have mediated our relationship with the natural world over time, and the ways human health and planetary health are intertwined. It also examines these influences by providing an overview of what is currently known about specific variables, such as physical activity in natural landscapes, as well as discussing some of the past and current theories that seek to explain how these connections actually work. The book provides a bridge between what we do (individually and collectively) in natural settings and how those actions impact our health and our relationships with the natural world. The hope is that the information presented here empowers students and professionals to learn more and to be part of the rich dialogue occurring in many disciplines to help find ways to increase well-being for all people. The aim is for the readers to think critically about research and be able to analyse and evaluate the results. The bottom line, based on the undertaking of this book and the experience of the authors, is that nature has been and continues to be essential and incredibly positive for human life, and that mutualistic and reciprocal connections with nature will positively influence human development, health, and wellbeing.

3. Animals and the environment

2020 ◽  
pp. 31-47
Author(s):  
Damien Keown
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Meat Eating ◽  
Plant Life ◽  
The World ◽  
The Buddha

Is Buddhism truly an ‘eco-friendly’ religion? ‘Animals and the environment’ examines the implications of Buddhist teachings such as that human beings can be reborn as animals and vice versa. While the Buddhist ‘sublime attitudes’ such as kindness and compassion seem at first to favour animals to a greater degree than we find in Christianity, human life still takes precedence in the hierarchy of living beings. Rules about plant life are unclear, with Buddhist writers acknowledging the beauty of both the wilderness and civilization. Vegetarianism is largely seen as a morally superior diet, but meat-eating was common at the time of the Buddha and is widely practised by monks today. Buddhist attitudes toward the natural world are complex and are to some extent overshadowed by the belief that the world as we know it is fundamentally flawed.

Historical materialism as mediation between the physical and the meaningful

2020 ◽  
pp. 019145372091991
Author(s):  
Jeff Noonan
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Scientific Understanding ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Scientific Models ◽  
Philosophical Significance ◽  
German Ideology

The article argues that historical materialism is not only a theory of historical change but more generally a mediation between the natural foundations of human life and its meaningful symbolic expressions. The article begins with an interpretation of the general philosophical significance of the basic premises of historical materialism as they are sketched in the German Ideology. I argue that these premises point us in two different directions: down, towards a scientific understanding of the natural world, and up, towards interpretations of meaningful human expressions. Reductionist scientific models are appropriate for the understanding of natural forces, but these reveal their own limitations when applied to social life. Social life cannot be understood outside its symbolic expressions, but these are not free floating ideal abstractions, but remain connected to fundamental human purposes and must be understood as such.

scholarly journals “A Fourfold Vision: Nature Religion and the Wages of Scientism in Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘Newton’s Sleep’”

Religions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 279
Author(s):  
Catherine Newell
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Space Station ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Religious Intolerance ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
Nature Religion ◽  
Near Future

Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1991 short story ‘Newton’s Sleep’ begins in a utopic society that escaped the environmental and social calamity of a near-future Earth and created an enlightened culture on a space station. The group, led by a scientific elite, pride themselves on eradicating the irrational prejudices and unempirical mentality that hamstringed Earth; but chaos blossoms as the society struggles with the reappearance of religious intolerance, and becomes confused by an outbreak of mass hallucinations of the Earth they left behind. This narrative trope of the necessity of nature for the survival of humanity—physically, mentally, and spiritually—represents a new and relatively common allegory in contemporary science fiction in an era distinguished by separation from the natural world.

“Evidences of Decadent Humanity”: Antianthropocentrism in Early Science Fiction

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan L. Moore
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Aldo Leopold ◽  
World War ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Land Community

Early science fiction (SF) is noted for, among other things, its conservatism and lack of interest in ecology. Brian Stableford, a well-known SF writer and critic, writes that "there are very few early stories with ecological themes" (1993, 395). This article shows that, in fact, many early SF works (those written between the Enlightenment and World War II) employ ecological themes, especially as applied to questioning our anthropocentrism. These works suggest that humans are but one species among many, that we are not the end of nature/history, that the natural world may be better off without us, and, in some cases, that humanity is fated to go extinct, the result of its own hubris. Such views are undoubtedly pessimistic, yet these works may also be read as warnings for humans to seek a more humble view of ourselves as members of what Aldo Leopold calls the land community.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document