Browsing by Subject "Assemblage"
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Item Environmental participation: immanence, cosmopolitics, and the agency of environmental assemblages.(2010-02) Nordquist, Michael AndrewOver the past fifty years, environmental issues have dominated political concerns of political actors around the world. Political theorists have begun to address these novel issues, critically analyzing the dramatic transformations of people's relationships with the environment. Yet much of this emerging environmental political theory relies upon an understanding of environmentalism where "nature" and "society" are conflicting, opposite terms: nature is a collection of passive, mechanical objects and processes that must be saved and protected by a society that consists of active, political human subjects. This predominant understanding of environmental questions restricts political participation to humans only, ignoring the activities of nonhumans involved in shaping political outcomes. This dissertation challenges the framework of understanding environmental political question through the lens of nature against society, human against nonhuman. The first chapter asks what it would mean to understand the activities of environments of humans and nonhumans as political, and by examining what a politics composed of environments looks like. In doing so, I question the centrality of the human being to politics, focusing attention on the attachments to nonhuman entities that make possible the activities of what have appeared to be discrete human political actors. The second chapter turns to the concept of immanence as a means of theoretically conceptualizing environments as actors composed of various beings. Drawing inspiration from science studies scholars Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, the third chapter develops the concept of "cosmopolitical practices" to represent a redefined politics in which the actions of environments can be theorized and exercised together. Cosmopolitical practices, the sets of activities involved in the political organization of a shared cosmos of beings of all sorts, offers an understanding of agency in which environments participate in the contested political practices that create our shared conditions of existence. The final chapter combines theoretical inquiry with critical analysis of contemporary debates around food, offering an empirical example of cosmopolitical practices in the constitution of resistant food networks. This dissertation reassesses what participates in political practices to force a rethinking of the untheorized activities that nonhumans contribute to seemingly human-only political projects.Item Technocenosis: As assessment of efforts to identify the sources of derelict trawl nets in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands(2011-03) Handler, Nicholas MaxThis research assesses the feasibility of a method, currently being tested by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), to identify the sources of derelict trawl fishing nets in the North Pacific Ocean. NOAA's method seeks to use the design parameters of each recovered fragment of netting to identify the originating trawl net from which it was torn. The feasibility of NOAA's efforts depend on the relationship between an entire trawl net and its individual parts or fragments. This relationship can take one of two basic forms: the object may be organized in the manner of an organism, in which case its parts are diagnostic of the whole, or it may be organized in the manner of an assemblage, in which case the parts bear no clear relationship to the whole. The question is: which kind of object are trawl nets? This research answers that question empirically and theoretically. Empirically, it analyzes the design and construction process for trawl nets. To do so it employs a small number of interviews with trawl net manufacturers in Seattle, and exhaustively reviews the literatures on trawl engineering, trawl design, and fish-trawl interactions. It then theoretically examines whether trawl nets are organismic objects, as described in Gilbert Simondon's influential mid-century theory of technical objects, or whether they are assemblages, as described in the more recent work of Manuel DeLanda. Because because trawl nets are technical assemblages, they cannot be identified using NOAA's current source identification method.