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This edited collection, Affective intimacies, provides a novel platform for re-evaluating the notion of open-ended intimacies through the lens of affect theories. Thus, this collection is not about affect and intimacy, but affective intimacies. Instead of foregrounding certain predefined categories of affects or intimacies, the book focuses on processes, entanglements and encounters between humans as well as between human and non-human bodies that provide key signposts for grasping of affective intimacies. Throughout, Affective intimacies addresses the embodied, affective and psychic aspects of intimate entanglements across various timely phenomena. Rather than assuming that we could parse affective intimacies in a pre-defined way, the collection asks how the study of affect enables us to rethink intimacies, what affect theories can do to the prevailing notion of intimacy and how they renew and enrich theories of intimacy. Affective intimacies brings together a selection of original chapters which invite readers to follow and reconsider affective intimacies as they unfold in the happenings of everyday lives and in their mobile, affective and more-than-human intricate predicaments. In this manner, the edited collection makes a valuable contribution to the social sciences and humanities which have yet to recognise and utilise the potential to imagine affective intimacies in alternative ways, without starting from the already familiar terrains, theories and conceptualisations. By so doing, it advances the value of interdisciplinary perspectives and creative methodologies in thinking in terms of affective intimacies.
: 7). But ecoGothic also suggests that the nonhuman and more-than-human worlds are themselves active parts of the world they co-constitute, creating an uncanny and often unsettling sense of their proximity to the human. This is a strangeness with which we are intimately entangled, but also strangely familiar: it is, as Sigmund Freud suggested in his discussion of the uncanny experience, that which ‘has been repressed and now returns’ (Freud 2003 : 147). In light of the material turn in the humanities – a turn associated with the work of, among
conditions of empathic entanglement that act as the basis for societal formation and the radical loving-caring praxes which underpin many contemporary struggles. Next, by extending popular conceptions of the commons to include these more-than-human psycho-socio-material relations, the deep commons will be proposed as a ground through which this (r)evolutionary love might circulate in
: A Journal of Cultural Ecology , 8 , 1–25 . Puig de la Bellacasa , M. ( 2017 ) Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds . Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press . Pollock , G. ( 2010 ) Aesthetic wit(h)nessing in the era of trauma . EurAmerica , 40 , 829–886 . Trigger , D. S. and Mulcock , J. ( 2005 ) Native vs exotic: cultural discourse about flora, fauna and belonging in Australia . In A. G. Kungolos , C. A. Breddia and E
, more-than-human entanglements, and extended urbanisation. As extended urbanisation and violent ‘feral’ suburban development (Shields, 2012 ) lead to new waves of destruction, the role of cities and urbanisation has become central in recent years in local and international policymaking and discussions on how to cope with the climate emergency. The fires that burned in Alberta’s tar sands in 2016, across
acknowledge ‘regional-scale improvements in some indicators of poverty, food supplies and the environment’, they argue that these are ‘overshadowed by ongoing deterioration of key biophysical indicators at the global scale’, especially with regard to biodiversity loss and global warming (Fischer et al. 2007: 621). In view of the evident failure of existing approaches to sustainability to redress such dire threats to more-than-human life on Earth, Fischer et al. recommend a redirection of sustainability research, policy and management along two main axes. Firstly, in place
vision have expressed a profound sense of connection to nature – an intimate entanglement with(in) a more-than-human plurality as opposed to more commonly held core beliefs relating to the separation of humans and the natural world. Such ways of seeing, thinking and feeling align with a contemporary posthumanist worldview 10 – that all bodies, human and non-human, come to being
meanings. Furthermore, by discussing their material properties and material engagements, I consider the ways in which stamps, and their impressions, were involved in the creation of more-than-human communities; ones that also included animals, plants, fluid materials, vital things and animate places, as well as shifting assemblages of all these (see Bennet 2010; Harris 2014; Prijatelj and Skeates 2018). The main theoretical tool employed in this exercise is that of an assemblage – a pliable concept which denotes an ensemble of heterogeneous components that mesh, and in
but challenges us to delve into the complex and often disturbing material interconnections between the human body and the more-than-human world. Her thinking, like that of Bennett and Tuana, undermines the separability of the ‘three pillars of sustainability’ since it draws attention to the ‘often invisible, but nonetheless material, flows of substances and forces between people, places, and economic/political systems’ (Alaimo 2010: 9). Recycling materials, recycling lives 79 In a more recent article, Alaimo (2012) engages with the discourse of sustainability
al., 2014 ; Simone, 2019 ; Robinson, 2014 , 2022 ), and the understanding of human and more-than-human actors in the production of space (Connolly, 2019 ). 1 The political-ecological component of the climate crisis is understood as the reduction of the planet’s habitability resulting from a continuous dialectic capital–nature relationship. It is mirrored in what Eric