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People have always been makers, creatures of poiesis. However, in a time where many are growing sceptical about the desirability ofHomo Faber's gifts due to the ecological destruction they so often cause, this article investigates the emergent possibilities offered by co-creation or sympoiesis. In order to understand the implications of this shift from poiesis to sympoiesis, the article offers a hermeneutic attempt to come to grips with the essence and nature of the human making-event (poiesis), and the kind of thinking that lets this creative process unfold in a particularly revealing way. The article relies on the influential writings of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) to plumb the depths of mortal making. For Heidegger, all making stands under the sway of the ancient Greek notion of poiesis. Despite sounding like the word used for poetry, poets merely practice one form of poiesis. This article attempts a more encompassing approach to mortal making by appreciating the ontological associations of poiesis as it relates to Heidegger's understanding of people as beings of care (Sorge). In order to elaborate on the richness and depth of mortal poiesis, and to show how a heroic understanding of poiesis may undermine the potential for sympoiesis, the article will study various making-narratives posited in the novel by Etienne van Heerden, The long silence of Mario Salviati, originally published as Die swye van Mario Salviati (2000). Drawing on the circular (hermeneutic) tendencies Heidegger identifies in mortal existence, and the role played by angels in the novel (and in the Duino Elegies of Rainer Maria Rilke), the article presents four spiralling flights dipping into aspects of poiesis as developed in Van Heerden's novel. The article is structured in three sections. The first section sketches an overarching interpretation of Heidegger's understanding of mortal poiesis and his formulation of inceptual thinking (das anfangliche Denken^) as alternative for the shortcomings of representational thinking (das vorstellende Denken) In the second section, the Heideggerian interpretation of mortal making is elaborated by interpreting various making-events in Van Heerden's novel. It is shown that the characters in The long silence of Mario Salviati carry an unnecessarily heavy burden when they attempt creative endeavours, because they misunderstand (and are not able to endure) the silent openness imbuing mortal poiesis. In an attempt at challenging their understanding of making, it is argued that Heideggerian Gelassenheit implies an additional move from poiesis to sympoiesis (making-with). The third section serves as conclusion and speculates briefly on the implications of this sympoietic augmentation of poiesis. As such, the article considers the way poietic thinking and poiesis are interwoven in the moment of creation, augments this interpretation by studying several making-narratives in Van Heerden's novel, and uses the resulting understanding to reappraise the way people think about making in terms of sympoiesis. Consequently, the article can be seen as a retrospective reflection on human making amid the harbingers of sympoiesis. The article is both an attempt at making-sense (of poiesis) and making-ready (for sympoiesis). Ultimately, drawing on the latent implications of Heidegger's notion of Gelassenheit, it is proposed that people need to abdicate their claim of being the sole authors of poiesis. To shift from poiesis to sympoiesis is to acknowledge that making is an open yet entwined endeavour: iterative, contingent, impure, awaiting yet guilty, dense, ecstatic-leaping, and fundamentally, care-full. In the same way that Heidegger challenged Cartesian dualism by proposing that people are intimately entangled in the world, making is also shaped by entanglements steeped in mortal care. Sympoiesis, by granting creative agency to these entanglements, is even more open and entangled than poiesis. Therefore, it could be argued that sympoiesis is more in tune with the way people live as beings of care than poiesis, since it engages more kinds of mattering. The article concludes that sympoiesis is the more venturesome form of making that Being seems to be calling us towards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual paper seeks to unravel the processes of assigning rights to nature (RoN) in the polar context through recognising how current efforts of assigning these are steeped in property relations and express an inherent anthropocentrism. The paper critically synthesises ideas from across the disciplines of environmental law, geography and cultural theory to understand how the process of assigning rights to nature takes place – or effectively how rights of nature makes for Antarctic geographies today and into the future. The Antarctic is currently promoted, depicted and popularly imagined as a pristine wilderness. As such, it represents the final frontier of techno industrial capitalism on the planet. In this context, the wilderness qualities of the region need to be confronted as places of our making. This calls for a radical realignment of the assignation of rights to nature, whereby any diminutive apprehensions of nature or objective measures of wilderness need to be countered. Any assignation of rights needs to be informed by how values and representations are continually relationally constituted and have a planetary dimension. This reframing implies that places do not possess some inherent or authentic value, or rights. The way they are valued is made here and now, there and then, in the moments we make sense of and relate to place. In this frame of ongoing valuing, this paper explores how RoN takes place in the polar regions, revealing the Antarctic as a planetary hydrocommons. Underpinned by notions of geopower and sympoietic earth jurisprudence these planetary hydrocommons are illustrated through ice and the question posed is how our ongoing relation configuration to place can feature in Antarctic policy and governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Twelve Moons: A Year Under a Shared Sky (2023) by Caro Giles and Cacophony of Bone (2023) by Kerri ní Dochartaigh are both memoirs written by “northern women” during the Covid-19 global pandemic. Caro Giles is based in Northumberland while Kerri ní Dochartaigh is from the North of Ireland and their memoirs both deal with motherhood, loss, and isolation while foregrounding uplifting connections between human animals and the natural environment which surrounds them. Their “northernness” is central to the orientations of Twelve Moons and Cacophony of Bone, which toy with the tensions between losing one’s bearings, bearing the brunt of loss, traumatic past events, isolation, and political uncertainty, and re-engaging with what Donna Haraway calls ‘making kin’ (Haraway, 2016). This article aims to tease out these tensions alongside Haraway and to interrogate the ways in which both these non-fiction writers, who paradoxically emphasize their northern anchoring, foreground loss of bearings as simultaneously uncomfortable and as a prerequisite for healing. Loss of bearings, they show, is what facilitates a reconnection between themselves and the natural environment and is what makes the pain of traumatic events more bearable.

Organisms are now seen as holobionts, consortia of several species that interact metabolically such that they sustain and scaffold each other’s existence and propagation. Sympoiesis, the development of the symbiotic relationships that form holobionts, is critical for our understanding the origins and maintenance of biodiversity. Rather than being the read-out of a single genome, development has been found to be sympoietic, based on multigenomic interactions between zygote-derived cells and symbiotic microbes. These symbiotic and sympoietic interactions are predicated on the ability of cells from different kingdoms of life (e.g., bacteria and animals) to communicate with one another and to have their chemical signals interpreted in a manner that facilitates development. Sympoiesis, the creation of an entity by the interactions of other entities, is commonly seen in embryogenesis (e.g., the creation of lenses and retinas through the interaction of brain and epidermal compartments). In holobiont sympoiesis, interactions between partners of different domains of life interact to form organs and biofilms, wherein each of these domains acts as the environment for the other. If evolution is forged by changes in development, and if symbionts are routinely involved in our development, then changes in sympoiesis can constitute an important factor in evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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My paper wishes to delve into concepts such as assemblage and sympoiesis and examine them within the framework of my ethnographic fieldwork on beekeeping in the Western chain of the Italian Alps. I believe that the implications of notions such as sympoiesis and assemblage can be seen to surface in the context of beekeeping and bee culture, as they emerge as multispecies activities where everything and everyone involved can be regarded as a social actor. In this respect, the most relevant issues I would like to tackle are referred to knowledge production and know-how among beekeepers who keep their apiaries in the plains for most part of the year and move them to mountain areas for the summer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organisms are now seen as holobionts, consortia of several species that interact metabolically such that they sustain and scaffold each other’s existence and propagation. Sympoiesis, the development of the symbiotic relationships that form holobionts, is critical for our understanding the origins and maintenance of biodiversity. Rather than being the read-out of a single genome, development has been found to be sympoietic, based on multigenomic interactions between zygote-derived cells and symbiotic microbes. These symbiotic and sympoietic interactions are predicated on the ability of cells from different kingdoms of life (e.g., bacteria and animals) to communicate with one another and to have their chemical signals interpreted in a manner that facilitates development. Sympoiesis, the creation of an entity by the interactions of other entities, is commonly seen in embryogenesis (e.g., the creation of lenses and retinas through the interaction of brain and epidermal compartments). In holobiont sympoiesis, interactions between partners of different domains of life interact to form organs and biofilms, wherein each of these domains acts as the environment for the other. If evolution is forged by changes in development, and if symbionts are routinely involved in our development, then changes in sympoiesis can constitute an important factor in evolution.

Nowadays, multivocality has been discussed as if it were a criterion for evaluating the quality of qualitative research, as well as if it were the practice, style, or format of narrative research itself. Grounded in Bakhtin's legacy, the need to incorporate multivocality as a key element of critical qualitative inquiry as a whole is raised. Thus, multivocal critical qualitative inquiry (MCQI) is proposed as an opportunity to build democratic possibilities for a practice that operates on the threshold of new realities that emerge through the conjunction of alternative interpretive methodologies and emerging social movements of protest. MCQI is then outlined as an avenue for the gestation of public policies despite the fact that the real links between citizen actions of protest and government responsiveness have hardly been rigorously explored. Sympoiesis and pluriversal politics are the theoretical and epistemological perspectives of such conjunction nourished by inquiry practices such as creative subversion, creative activism, and militant research. To exemplify the ways in which MCQI practices can be thought, seven projects were selected from a worldwide production: two projects on ecological issues and environmental care, three in the area of urban planning and democratization, and two around the sensitive problems of refugees, exiles, and migrants. MCQI may constitute a crossroad for the best and most committed inquiry practices nurtured by the interpretive traditions of the social sciences in its ties to struggles for the destruction of all kinds of epistemic, social, political, racial, economic, ecological, cognitive, and legal injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

> Context • Much of early cybernetics and most systems theories uncritically embrace the object of their attention, celebrating the theorists' superior understanding of the complexities in the social systems they observe, dismissing the narratives that circulate among human participants of such systems. > Problem • While second-order cybernetics was promoted as an observer-centered approach, one that recognizes the indisputable role of human beings in describing and theorizing about their observations, it remains stuck in theorizing about and describing observations, of necessity confined to uncritical accounts of the realities constructed by an observer. > Method • I exemplify the emancipatory effort of critical cybernetics to overcome epistemological pathologies in the narratives that construct unequal power relationships, which forces those who do not possess the resources to reconceptualize their situation into compliance with those in command of them. In particular, I focus on pathologies due to the use of epistemologically misleading metaphors, but do not limit myself to such tropes, and discuss several other epistemological pathologies, often overlooked, and naively complied with, yet worthy of examining for their inhuman consequences. > Results • Critical cybernetics starts from a conception of social realities as networked communications among their linguistically competent human constituents, making commitments to one another, drawing distinctions, and acting on their own and others' differences thus created. It employs a sympoietic conception of social organizations that prioritizes their human constituents, rendering the viability of the whole secondary to the well-being of its human constituents. Criticality is not observable, nor are the alternative realties it implicates. Therefore, criticism can occur only in language, but may well have noticeable consequences if enacted socially. It follows that the discourse of critical cybernetics has to practice a conception of language capable of altering existing realities. > Implications • The primary concern of critical cybernetics is emancipatory. As a result, concerns arise whenever identifiable epistemological problems become systemic pathologies, defined as unwanted constraints on the agency of human beings, leading to feelings of being entrapped in untenable social conditions, undue burdens, frustrations, injustices, oppression, enslavement, and helplessness. Entrapment entails the inability to know what to do next except to comply with untenable situations, often blaming others for one's painful conditions. Because of this inability, the empathetic aim of critical cybernetics is to make people aware of the role they are playing in perpetuating their own confinements through the narratives they tell one another. As an interdisciplinary discourse, the emancipatory aim of critical cybernetics is to encourage those suffering from systemic pathologies to adopt new language, language that opens previously unseen paths of action leading out of their confinements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deborah Bird Rose uses the Aboriginal Yol'ngu term bir'yun – shimmer – to describe the inherent capacity to experience nature's ancestral and ongoing power (2022). Using Rose's concept as a leitmotif, this article investigates contemporary figurations of the animal spirit as it moves through the margins of contemporary science, philosophy, and literature. Using becoming figurations like sympoiesis, Gaia, the holobiont, and the Body without Organs (BwO), my argument is underpinned by Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) philosophical attempts to subvert the dogmatic anthropocentric image of thought via becoming-animal/becoming-intense concepts. Beginning with an exploration of how science is beginning to overturn its own mechanistic view of the animal via new figurations of the animal assemblage, the article turns to a literary example – Robert Holdstock's Lavondyss (1988) – to examine how we might go about addressing the nature of the becoming-animal assemblage to recapture the experience of shimmer as an ecologically aesthetic praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Il presente saggio si interroga sul ruolo che la poesia può avere nell’adattamento al cambiamento climatico in atto. Come primo passo si inquadra la questione in un contesto politico, chiarendo quali siano i margini di intervento disponibili alla scrittura letteraria e poetica. Si rivendica un ruolo militante per la scrittura poetica, ma lo si distingue da una funzione propagandista. La poesia può aiutare a riflettere su quello che Jameson chiama “narrative pensée sauvage”, cioè a dire quei costrutti narrativi necessari alla giustificazione dello status quo creato dal sistema capitalistico. A tali costrutti narrativi, si dovranno aggiungere dei costrutti metaforici, operativi in poesia. A titolo di esempio si esplora uno di tali costrutti, la metafora “fiumana del progresso” di origine verghiana, e si osserva come un manipolo di poeti neovanguardisti (Manganelli, Celli, Majorino) la critichi all’interno dei loro versi. Un’ultima riflessione investe la comunità (sia politica, che letteraria) che si costituisce come “noi”, soggetto responsabile del cambiamento climatico. Sfruttando le idee di “sympoiesis” e “holoent” proposte da Donna Haraway, si rileggono alcuni esiti della riflessione teorica ed estetica all’interno della poesia di ricerca del secondo Novecento, e si conclude con l’idea di “transcreazione” cannibale, elaborata dal poeta e critico brasiliano Haroldo de Campos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I will discuss Donna J. Haraway’s notion of sympoiesis and examine different modes of cohabitation or hybridization with nonhuman others. Such concepts as sympoiesis, or holobiont, question the notion of the biological individual and also change our understanding of what it means to be human. As Richard Grusin pointed out, “we have never been human” because “the human has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman—and that the human is characterized precisely by this indistinction from the nonhuman” (ix–x). We have never been human because we have always been dependent on other species living within or beyond our bodies. However, the question which still needs to be answered is whether all forms of coexistence are profitable and welcomed. How does one define the limit at which this co-existence is collaborative and productive (“posthuman”), and beyond which it becomes damaging and lethal (in other words, “posthumous,” e.g., coming after life)? For this reason, the interrelations between different life forms should be discussed together with the concepts of contagion and immunity. The notion of immunity expresses an ambivalent character of life: on the one hand, it protects the organism against everything that is beyond its boundary; on the other hand, it helps to collaborate with other organisms and to create an ecosystem. In this sense, immunity can be thought as a field of negotiations between human and nonhuman beings.

Drawing upon ethnographic research on human living and producing with fungi, and Haraway's theorization of sympoiesis and the model ecosystems of mycorrhizae developed in current mycological research, we offer a concept of sympoietic growth. Sympoiesis is a concept that suggests a way of thinking about growth as a more-than-human process and provides an alternative political imaginary both to current forms of economic growth and to the idea of "degrowth." We explore human-fungi co-operation in forests, an urban park, and a shopping mall, on a miso production farm, and in a Catholic parish to provide insights into the logic and relationships involved in sympoietic growth in the field of agriculture and food production. We argue that this form of food provision has a sustainable, (re)generative potential not only in ecological and social but also economic terms. In conclusion, we highlight three patterns of sympoietic growth: the absence of any urge to "take (back) control" over the multispecies dynamic on the part of the humans; a non-instrumental passion for more-than-human life; and a combination of intellectual and manual labor as a form of attachment to the more-than-human world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the work of the American microbiologist Lynn Margulis, this paper proposes an overview of the ontological, epistemological and methodological contribution made by scientific and anthropological analyses concerning bacteria. The aim is to show how attention to bacterial microfauna has led to a renewed understanding of both the living world and materiality, opening up a horizon of thought for living matter. Bacteria transform organic and inorganic matter and appear therefore to be capable of agentivity, of doing and acting. In order to understand, from their point of view, the meaning of materials, and to think about matter through the prism of its particular combinations and specific transformations, an alchemist reading of the bacterial world, based on the new materialisms, allows us to underline the entanglement of matter and interactions, and to deepen the decentring in a more-than-human direction.

This article examines the intersections between technologies of the self, posthumanism, and gender by means of a literary analysis of Olga Flor's 2015 novel Ich in Gelb. A reading of the novel shows how Flor discusses the immunotherapy practice of helminthic therapy in connection with different 'monsters' like Medusa, bearded women, and mermaids, motifs that carry certain gender representations. However, the novel not only plays on old representations but also deconstructs traditional gender divisions and dissolves the illusion of a fixed self in employing posthumanist ideas. Applying Haraway's concept of sympoiesis in the analysis of the relationship between human and worm as well as between text and worm, the examination of Flor's novel shows that there is a correspondence between the 'forming' of the self and the literary form of the novel. Therefore, literature has an epistemological function in understanding posthuman technologies of the self.

In this essay I will discuss Donna J. Haraway's notion of sympoiesis and examine different modes of cohabitation or hybridization with nonhuman others. Such concepts as sympoiesis, or holobiont, question the notion of the biological individual and also change our understanding of what it means to be human. As Richard Grusin pointed out, "we have never been human" because "the human has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman--and that the human is characterized precisely by this indistinction from the nonhuman" (ix-x). We have never been human because we have always been dependent on other species living within or beyond our bodies. However, the question which still needs to be answered is whether all forms of coexistence are profitable and welcomed. How does one define the limit at which this co-existence is collaborative and productive ("posthuman"), and beyond which it becomes damaging and lethal (in other words, "posthumous," e.g., coming after life)? For this reason, the interrelations between different life forms should be discussed together with the concepts of contagion and immunity. The notion of immunity expresses an ambivalent character of life: on the one hand, it protects the organism against everything that is beyond its boundary; on the other hand, it helps to collaborate with other organisms and to create an ecosystem. In this sense, immunity can be thought as a field of negotiations between human and nonhuman beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Athena: Filosofijos studijos is the property of Lithuanian Culture Research Institute and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This speculative exercise in more-than-human communication geographies of human-machine encounters—what I describe as machine geographies—bypasses reductionistic and replicative responses to the question What does understanding mean in HMC, and rather shifts the focus toward the implications of the question as questioning our very assumptions regarding the machine, the human, the more-than-human, agency, aesthetics, and their respective origins, ultimately displacing actants' genesis in favor of the ways in which actants affect one another. By utilizing the geographic registers of aesthetics, agency, and ecology, I offer meditations on how a reimagined notion of agency—in ecological, relational, entangled, and networked terms—contributes to recasting what we mean when we say that "humans and machines understand each other" when communicating. I describe how a shift from poiesis to sympoiesis, a making-with and worlding-with, in company, is inherently ecological and displaces any considerations of the I and the Thou in inter-actant encounters between machines and humans by shifting to a holistic perspective focused on the situated relation. Ultimately, this theoretical proposal provides an opportunity to challenge the still anthropocentric commitments found in HMC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a tribute to the intellectual legacy of Peter Fitzpatrick, this article explores the poiesis of modern law, as a constitutive ambivalence distilled in the affinity between law and literature. Reading with Fitzpatrick, the resolution of the contradictions of this law in myth depends, paradoxically, upon its fundamental irresolution. Reflecting upon the profound significance of his revelation of the mythology of modern law and its scholarly reverberations, I consider the constitutive tensions of this law as exemplified in the relation between praxis and poiesis, the operative function of the former dependent upon the creative unfolding of the latter. The alchemy of autopoiesis, by which law boldly proclaims itself law, is made explicit in the eschatology of its archive and the formation of its sovereign subject in negation. Revealing the literary dimensions of this law, the conceit of autonomy is nonetheless subject to the subversive substitutions of the supplement. Pressing yet further, the autopoiesis of law is found to be enfolded within a generative sympoiesis, constituted by the movement between its apposite dimensions. Ultimately, extending Fitzpatrick's rendering of the irresolution of modern law as decolonial, I explore the possibilities afforded by a reading of the fundamental mutuality of myths, and the decolonial conviviality of poiesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to describe changes in the routine of people with disabilities in face of Covid19 pandemic and the ongoing coping measures underway in the state of Alagoas, in northeast Brazil. Data from in-depth interviews with subjects marked by different experiences of visual, hearing, motor and intellectual impairment are analyzed here. Participants are part of an extension project, started in 2019, under the responsibility of the first author of this article. The project changed the routine of the university in face of the presence, circulation and engagement of bodies and minds that escape the conventions of normality in the academic space. The interactions, mediated by a series of applications of digital communication, addressed the following issues: 1) the loss of individual and/or family income resulting from the pandemic, and its impact on their material conditions of existence; 2) the emergence of new demands related to physical and mental health as well as changes in previous therapeutic strategies; 3) the characterization of access to communication technologies, the new possibilities and restrictions for maintaining extra-family bonds, such as contact with friends, participation in social mobilizations and in academic activities. In the analysis, we focused on the mutual dynamics of care, especially the engagement in support and assistance practices from family and friends. The attention to changes in the environment from the different collective demands in face of the pandemic exposes some displacements in the ways of embodying disability as well as the ability to give powerful responses to complex demands for adaptation. The intersection between different social markers of difference, like race, gender and class is also central to the identification of continuities, which involve the pre-existence of physical distance as a reality of disability.

This article explores what the emerging paradigm of ‘Earth System Law’ suggests in terms of reconfigurations of the Earth, its subjects and the law. Which representations of the Earth and of its subjects does Earth System Law think with? And which human-nonhuman relations do these systemic reconceptualizations translate? While innovative in many regards when contraposed to international environmental law, Earth System Law's central novelty lies in its ‘systems-oriented ontology’. Yet, it is precisely this underpinning that deserves, I argue, more critical attention. While Earth System Law's rendering of the Earth system seems to embrace an ‘autopoietic’ understanding of how life-making and life-sustaining processes are enacted, its proposed functioning of a planetary Earth System Law and the systems approach that underlies it remain elusive. This article unpacks these tenets by suggesting that, instead of looking at the functioning of the Earth through autopoietic lenses, a ‘sympoietic’ view should be preferred to make sense of how life emerges and contingently unfolds on Earth, and leave space for collective modes of being, thinking and acting in the Anthropocene.

Formulating how biomimicry relates to nature has been crucial to 'deepening' its theory. Currently, an autopoietic model of nature dominates the literature. However, advances in the natural and human sciences have demonstrated that autopoiesis does not adequately explain complex, dynamic, responsive, and situated systems. This article draws on Beth Dempster's (1998) characterisation of ecosystems as sympoietic, that is as homeorhetic, evolutionary, distributively controlled, unpredictable, and adaptive, and on Donna Jeanne Haraway's (2016) critique that entities do not pre-exist their relationships. We argue that using sympoietic processes of becoming as our model, measure, and mentor impacts biomimicry's practice and relation to sustainability. Taking John Todd's Living Machines as a case study, we explicate how sympoiesis unfurls autopoiesis. By integrating advances in the natural and human sciences into the philosophy of biomimicry, we address the limitations of the autopoietic model and provide a more comprehensive and adequate model of 'nature.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a relational model for electroacoustic composition practice. In the model, relationality focuses on perspectives of response-ability of the composer with more-than-human agents, within an entangled sympoietic musical space. Here, the response-practices are built on acts of listening that entail, aural analysis and embodied practice with material objects. Within the scope of this paper, more-than-human agents are narrowed down to only recorded sounds (fixed media sound files] and physical material objects. In investigating such response-able compositional practices, the model follows Post-humanist and New-materialist strands focusing on various concepts proposed by Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. And in doing so, it aims to re-figure some of the conventional discourses about the concepts of poietic agency, and of multivalence within the composition practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to present the transubstantiative quality of the datification process from the description of the related interactions in a connected ecosystem. Based on the analysis of the quality of the interactions of the connected ecosystem Array of things (AoT), here called "info-ecology", we investigated the connective and interdependent dimensions of these complex networks of relationships that develop through the datification process, constituting a new type of common not only limited to humans. From the analysis of these computerized interactions, the article presents some interpretations about these new forms of connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the development of the Gaia Hypothesis as it was defined by James Lovelock in the 1970s and later elaborated in his collaboration with biologist Lynn Margulis. Margulis’s research in symbiogenesis and her interest in Maturana and Varela’s theory of autopoiesis helped to reshape the Gaia theory from a first-order systems theory to second-order systems theory. In contrast to the first-order systems theory, which is concerned with the processes of homeostasis, second-order systems incorporate emergence, complexity and contingency. In this respect Latour’s and Stengers’s takes on Gaia, even defining it as an “outlaw” or an anti-system, can be interpreted as specific kind of systems thinking. The article also discusses Haraway’s interpretation of Gaia in terms of sympoiesis and argues that it presents a major reconceptualization of systems theory.

The dark and catastrophic futures of dystopian and post-apocalyptic YA fiction are often perceived of as critiques of late capitalist society, presenting an alternative to the status quo of what Mark Fisher once termed «capitalist realism». However, as these narratives at the same time comport according to the feedback and control mechanisms of genre conventions and popular media franchises, they also reproduce, within the system of genre and franchise structures, the very conditions under which creativity and, in extension, future worlds can emerge. The participatory aesthetics of dystopian and post-apocalyptic YA fiction, in which co-creation of other worlds is integral, here becomes a matter of adhering to the regulatory feedback of a system of control. Hence, the alternative futures presented by critical dystopias are already lost to the capitalist present. Nevertheless, this paper argues that one possible solution to the lost futures of capitalist realism can be found in the ecological concept of sympoiesis and in a parasitic notion of subjectivity. Discussing Scott Westerfeld’s two novels Peeps and The Last Days, it is suggested that the future of, and for, creativity lies in the haunting of parasitic infections.

This paper presents the idea of multispecies diplomacy on the background of unstable and violent political geographies of the Anthropocene. The idea is first defined in terms of associated notions of sympoiesis and habilitation. After the preliminary arrangement of the conceptual framework of the paper, the possibilities of multispecies diplomacy are assessed in relation to current militarisation of environment, that prevents any diplomatic solution of climate change and leads to increased environmental injustices worldwide. This is illustrated with an example of conflict in the Negev desert, where changing climate is inherently integrated into the structure of conflict. Secondly, digital infrastructures are identified as an ambiguous factor influencing the outlooks of future practices of multispecies diplomacy. Thanks to their capacity to redesign existing environment, they can act as forces of deterritorialisation that can either stabilise existing hegemonies or lead to subversive appropriation. As far as digital platforms are open to ideological reframing, ecosocialist politics engaging in multispecies diplomacy is encouraged to appropriate them in terms of cognitive mapping and habilitation.

This reflection contrasts the dominant imaginary underlying 'law of the Anthropocene' with an imaginary reaching towards 'law/s for the Anthropocene'. It does so primarily by contrasting two imaginaries of human embodiment—law's existing imaginary of quasi-disembodiment and an alternative imaginary of embodiment as co-woven with the lively incipiencies and tendencies of matter. It draws on 'transcorporeality' and 'sympoiesis' as inspiration for 'sympoietic normativities' as ways of co-living and co-organizing in the face of the catastrophic implications of the Anthropocene emergency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article takes Donna Haraway's Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene as a point of departure for troubling the largely uncontested acceptance of the Anthropocene as a matter of scientific "fact." Our approach is informed by our methodological commitments to understanding writing as a mode of inquiry and our preference for diffraction (rather than reflection) in conceptualizing practices of reading and critique. The article is therefore organized around questions that Haraway's text provokes, and our responses to them. We draw on various sources, including selected science fiction (SF) texts, to trouble practices of naming geological epochs and also to trouble some of the assumptions that Haraway makes in offering "Chthulucene" as an alternative name for our present epoch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes new concepts of dramaturgical thinking for baby theatre productions. With an arts-based research approach, allowing insider perspectives of the artmaking process to come forth, the authors, who are the director and dramaturge of the performance Baby Becomings by Teater Fot, discuss different concepts of postdramatic dramaturgical aspects in relation to the work. By adapting Donna Haraway's theories of sympoiesis and science art worldings as a theoretical framework, the article explores how Haraway's philosophy serves both as artistic inspiration and provides new concepts for dramaturgical reflection. The authors ask how posthumanist and sympoietic perspectives connect to postdramatic dramaturgy and wish to propose a posthumanist dramaturgy of sympoietic worlding in theatre for babies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Departing from questioning the generational character of recent environmental movements, this contribution explores Donna Haraway's conception of a non-filial, unoedipal, non-blood-related form of kinship. It thus paves the way for questioning – from a feminist and environmental viewpoint – the notion of 'generation' understood as the continuation of something akin and 'proper' to someone. This contribution is a reworking of the lecture that followed the screening of Fabrizio Terranova's film Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival (2016) in February 2019, part of the sound exhibition ICEmeltings of the CONA institute. The central concepts of Donna Haraway's (particularly most recent) thinking are thus addressed in dialogue with the formally experimental strategies of the film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay examines different cases of bioart, which, by combining biological materials and technological processes, present new forms of biological assemblages. For example, such collectives as Tissue Culture and Art Project and Art Orienté Objet, artists Eduardo Kac, ORLAN, Maja Smrekar and Robertina Šebjanič invent new forms of hybridization and symbiotic forms of cohabitation. The essay will question what is so specific in bioart and in what respect does it differ from scientific research conducted in laboratories, or from some biological phenomena found in the natural world. My hypothesis is that bioart introduces a specific mode of bio-performativity and creates a unique moment of bio-presence: it does not represent but presents and produces new material bodies, which are living and decaying in our presence. The essay will seek to discuss the specific time in which these Semi-Living objects perform their existence: this time, which is "the time of the now", can be called (in Giorgio Agamben's terms) kairos and contrasted with our habitual chronological time. Kairos is a messianic time, a contraction of time (similar to time in specific laboratory conditions), which helps to imagine new ways of organizing living materials. In this sense, bio-presence and bio-performativity can be seen as a resistance to the habitual arrangement of space and time and its biopolitical implications [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we give a flavour of how, against the odds, Reggio-Emilia-inspired pedagogical documentation can work in reconceptualizing environmental education, reconfiguring child subjectivity and provoking an ontological shift from autopoiesis to sympoiesis in teacher education. Working posthuman(e)ly and transdisciplinarily across three foundation phase teacher education courses at a university in South Africa, we situate our teaching within current environmental precarities. We show how we stirred up trouble in and outside our university classroom and provoked our students to "make kin" with children, each other, other animals, and the more-than-human, but also to stay with the trouble, that is, to learn to be truly present in colonized spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first of two articles that aim to explore co-authorship in the light of ecological systems. The assumption behind each of them is that designers could make a creative contribution to the evolutionary sustainability of natural ecosystems, thus helping to reduce the ecocidal impact of human behaviour. Unfortunately, designers are trained as specialists who catalyse economic growth and their methods are therefore part of the old paradigm that needs changing. Part of the paradigm change needs to include the re-designing of design to be more relational and combinatorial, so that its primary focus is more associated with the co-creative relations between things, rather than on individual products or services. What we call 'metadesign' is intended to help designers, and others, to re-think the habits, assumptions and discourses that seem 'normal', or are invisible, to those in the existing paradigm. Its repertoire therefore includes methods for 're-languaging' the familiar belief system in order to encourage beneficial change. Ultimately, metadesigners would be expected to co-create 'synergies' that will work together as a 'synergies-of-synergies'. Re-languaging certain key terms will be vital to the quest for synergy. For example, in the corporate vocabulary, the term 'creative innovation' implies an egocentric 'disrupting' of the status quo. Metadesigners might wish to re-describe its purpose as a process that helps organizations to find more synergistic ways to coexist, within their habitat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can designers re-design the paradigm that threatens human survival? Probably not, if they only apply the specialist skills of their training. Design evolved to make factory-made products and services more amenable to paying customers. However, if we are to meet the environmental and economic challenges facing us, it needs to be more comprehensive, integrated, self-reflexive and transdisciplinary. Our 'metadesign' approach seeks new synergies by combining existing resources. However, many new synergies are 'unthinkable' from within the 'language' of the current paradigm. In addressing this challenge we used a number of methods to reveal hidden synergies, including non-verbal, pre-verbal and interpersonal forms of knowing. We used simple mathematics to map all of the relations among all of the participants in the team, in order to make the data more shareable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to describe changes in the routine of people with disabilities in face of Covid19 pandemic and the ongoing coping measures underway in the state of Alagoas, in northeast Brazil. Data from in-depth interviews with subjects marked by different experiences of visual, hearing, motor and intellectual impairment are analyzed here. Participants are part of an extension project, started in 2019, under the responsibility of the first author of this article. The project changed the routine of the university in face of the presence, circulation and engagement of bodies and minds that escape the conventions of normality in the academic space. The interactions, mediated by a series of applications of digital communication, addressed the following issues: 1) the loss of individual and/or family income resulting from the pandemic, and its impact on their material conditions of existence; 2) the emergence of new demands related to physical and mental health as well as changes in previous therapeutic strategies; 3) the characterization of access to communication technologies, the new possibilities and restrictions for maintaining extra-family bonds, such as contact with friends, participation in social mobilizations and in academic activities. In the analysis, we focused on the mutual dynamics of care, especially the engagement in support and assistance practices from family and friends. The attention to changes in the environment from the different collective demands in face of the pandemic exposes some displacements in the ways of embodying disability as well as the ability to give powerful responses to complex demands for adaptation. The intersection between different social markers of difference, like race, gender and class is also central to the identification of continuities, which involve the pre-existence of physical distance as a reality of disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]