“Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where the shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere” (Rachel Carson, “Undersea” The Atlantic, September 1937) 

The ocean is the planet’s largest ecosystem. The stakes inherent in climate change have turned out to be entangled in the hazards affecting coastal and marine ecosystems. Scientists around the world have provided evidence that global warming is interlinked with rising sea levels, with the warming and acidification of oceans, with the dwindling of fish populations, the bleaching of coral reefs, and with an increasing number of endangered marine species. Scientific facts have made us realise that the future of our blue planet, a marine habitat per default, hinges on the blueing of our cultural imaginary. Situated in northern climes myself, I learn that global warming unfolds four times faster in Arctic waters than anywhere else on the planet. Slow but violent changes to marine environs and blue biodiversity --- (in for instance my own militarized “backyard” betwixt the Baltic Sea and the North Atlantic Sea) --- have in Sweden been understood as nested problems in need of increased scientific and technological solutions. In contrast, I will in this talk begin from the position that these interlinked problems of human environmental impact on oceans, sea beds and coastal areas require connected, affective and cultural approaches of environmental literacy to complement scientific data on how to consume better with the sea. Helpful in this regard is the rise in feminist oceanic science fiction novels over the last few years. Titles include Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014), Mira Grant’s Into the Drowning Deep (2017), Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019) and Julia Armfield’s Our Wifes under the Sea (2022). Territorial claims and struggles over resources, power and knowledge meet here multispecies fantasies with loose, but promising, ties to marine biology. I will by exploring some examples try to provide counter-narratives on how to reinvent our consumerist imaginary and nourish a new sense of relationality infused by insights from vulnerability studies and the general framework of SDG 14 Life Below Water.

Since 2022, Visual Generative AI (vGenAI) tools have experienced rapid adoption and garnered widespread acclaim for their ability to produce high-quality images with convincing photorealistic representations. These technologies mirror society's prevailing visual politics in a mediated form, and actively contribute to the perpetuation of deeply ingrained assumptions, categories, values, and aesthetic representations. In this paper, we critically analyze Stable Diffusion (SD), a widely used open-source vGenAI tool, through visual and intersectional analysis. Our analysis covers; (1) the aesthetics of the AI-generated visual material, (2) the institutional contexts in which these images are situated and produced, and (3) the intersections between power systems such as racism, colonialism, and capitalism-which are both reflected and perpetuated through the visual aesthetics. Our visual analysis of 180 SD-generated images deliberately sought to produce representations along different lines of privilege and disadvantage-such as wealth/poverty or citizen/immigrant-drawing from feminist science and technology studies, visual media studies, and intersectional critical theory. We demonstrate how imagery produced through SD perpetuates pre-existing power systems such as sexism, racism, heteronormativity, and ableism, and assumes a default individual as white, able-bodied, and masculine-presenting. Furthermore, we problematize the hegemonic cultural values in the imagery that can be traced to the institutional context of these tools, particularly in the tendency towards Euro- and North America-centric cultural representations. Finally, we find that the power systems around SD result in the continual reproduction of harmful and violent imagery through technology, challenging the oft-underlying notion that vGenAI is culturally and aesthetically neutral. Based on the harms identified through our qualitative, interpretative analysis, we bring forth a reparative and social justice-oriented approach to vGenAI-including the need for acknowledging and rendering visible the cultural-aesthetic politics of this technology and engaging in reparative approaches that aim to symbolically and materially mend injustices enacted against social groups.

With the backdrop of climate change and biodiversity loss, environmental movements, such as the Rights of Nature movement, are turning to new legal concepts to end the destruction of more-than-human ecologies. A parallel trend to this can be identified in the repurposing of digital infrastructures for species reporting and records to affect how nature is accounted for by administrative legal bodies as well as the courts. In this manner, activists seek to bypass slow democratic governance structures without altering the legal concepts of environmental legal protection for certain ecologies. (Turner & Wiber 2023). Such transformative politics of species reports in courts and in media and the environmental imaginary they produce in public society currently remain under-researched. Drawing upon the example of Swedish forests, this paper seeks to contribute with empirical data on how species observations are transformed in the interface between the species reporting person, the digital infrastructure, the administrative bodies as well as the courts, into what is considered a protection-worthy ecology. Furthermore, it show-cases how this transformation activates a conflict between property rights holders (of forests) and species reporting persons and how the latter are being framed as activists hindering the effective use of property rights. As such, Swedish forests constitute today a conflict zone of many rivalling legal, scientific, cultural and ecological interests. In the performative realms of courts, the open data-infrastructures of science, and the discursive spaces of public environmental culture – new forest futures are taking shape at the intersection of the Swedish Information System, Artportalen as the new data-driven “theater of proof” of forest biodiversity (Latour 1988; 2004). This paper examines how the legal system carries out the balancing of interests between species and forest property right holder’s land use through the valuation of Artportalen data. As such, it contributes with an understanding of how the production of rare species through the species database produces legal effects that capture and analyse the creation and contestation of species data as a means to hinder certain forms of forest management and facilitate others. Furthermore, it suggests that the environmentalisms explored here also distributes epistemic authority, reimagines citizenship and legal rights, and re-invents notions of power and agency among humans, other species and whole ecologies.

“Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where the shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere”

(Rachel Carson, “Undersea” The Atlantic, September 1937)  

The ocean is the planet’s largest ecosystem. The stakes inherent in climate change have turned out to be entangled in the hazards affecting coastal and marine ecosystems. Scientists around the world have provided evidence that global warming is interlinked with rising sea levels, with the warming and acidification of oceans, with the dwindling of fish populations, the bleaching of coral reefs, and with an increasing number of endangered marine species. Scientific facts have made us realise that the future of our blue planet, a marine habitat per default, hinges on the blueing of our cultural imaginary. Situated in northern climes myself, I learn that global warming unfolds four times faster in Arctic waters than anywhere else on the planet. Slow but violent changes to marine environs and blue biodiversity (in for instance my own “backyard” betwixt the Baltic Sea and the North Atlantic Sea) have in Sweden been understood as nested problems in need of increased scientific and technological solutions. In contrast, I will in this talk begin from the position that these interlinked problems of human environmental impact on oceans and coastal areas require connected, affective and cultural approaches of environmental literacy to complement scientific data on how to consume better with the sea. Helpful in this regard is the rise in feminist oceanic science fiction novels over the last few years. Titles include Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014), Mira Grant’s Into the Drowning Deep (2017), Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019) and Julia Armfield’s Our Wifes under the Sea (2022). 

Myself, I will explore a couple of “alien species” in these waters, ranging cannisters of mustard gas to Pacific oysters and other storied bodies out of order, so to try to provide counter-narratives on how to reinvent our consumerist imaginary and nourish a new sense of relationality. 

In the concluding chapter (chapter 17 of EUP's book The Edinburgh Companion to the New Humanities, written by Cecilia Åsberg and Rosi Braidotti, the emergence and need for versatile forms of feminist posthumanities is mapped out. Åsberg and Braidotti, building on their respective previous works on feminist posthumanities and the posthuman in feminist philosophy, describe and introduce a multi-valent new field of research fields within and beyond the new humanities. 

UNESCO TALK 1. Posthumanities as Multispecies Tales: STORYING EXPOSURE

Cecilia Åsberg

In an all too humanized world, environmental storytelling finds itself in desperate times but also in times of opportunity. It matters what stories tell stories, stated Marilyn Strathern (1992:10), a feminist anthropologist of science already in the 1990s. Building on that embrace of storytelling, Donna J Haraway (2016 a:12), famously continued: “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters /…/, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions […]. It matters what stories make worlds; what worlds make stories.” Put simply, wording is a conduit of worlding. In this very interdisciplinary scenario, all kinds of story-telling matters. From various perspectives to responsive posthumanities that I bring together in this talk, I wish here to give some theoretical and empirical examples of the practices I have come to term storying exposure. 

Threats and fears of looming environmental crisis instils a conservative emergency response in people (Mbembe & Roitman 1995), to look out only for themselves and not for others, to stay in line. This means we need today to work harder than ever before to produce stories and expositions that instil a sense of wordly belonging and local community. Literature, reading and vulnerability studies have a special role in this. Recent works in environmental humanities, ecocriticism and place-based storytelling (Haraway 2014; Alaimo 2016; van Dooren 2014; DeSilvey 2017) have explored many types of exposure stories. From The Word for World is Forest by Ursula LeGuin to Animal’s People by Indra Sinha. There is even a growing tendency in Environmental Humanities to seek accounts for giving polarized debates and heating climates, stressed environments and communities storied form in ways that might eschew the trap of focusing only on “damage stories.” Vary of the performative power of storytelling, a stance of proud pessimism and cynicism (disguised as criticism) is rejected because it may hinder unexpected possibilities social change. There is always more afoot, and reasons for surprise. Many seek expressions instead of ways of living well with and caring for, in the words of queer eco-critic Cate Sandilands, the “wounds of the world.” Indeed, experimenting with the triangular relation between self, word and world is itself a form of exposure. In academic and extra-academic settings, I have come to call such affirmative practices posthumanities – for how they bridge arts and sciences, natures and cultures, words and worlds. Storying exposure is here understood as methodological umbrella term for such “arts of living on a damaged planet” (Tsing et al) that we can jointly explore and develop for very interdisciplinary research, in-field philosophies, eco-critique and place-storied forms of situated knowledges.

             References:             

Mbembe, Achille, and Janet Roitman. 1995. "Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis."  Public Culture 7 (323-352). 

Alaimo, S. (2016) Exposed: environmental politics and pleasures in posthuman times (University of Minnesota Press)

DeSilvey, C. (2017) Curating Decay (University of Minnesota Press)

Haraway, D. (2014) Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press)

van Dooren, T. (2014) Flight Ways: life and loss at the edge of extinction (Colombia University Press)

The book is aimed at providing an assertion of Gender Studies as a vital community in our time, united in a commitment to inquiry. It brings forward an interdisciplinary set of early career researchers’ accounts of their motives for engaging in Gender Studies and, of the encounters with limitations as well as possibilities they experience on the paths they have chosen.

Each chapter is accompanied by a brief response paper where a more senior researcher involves in conversation with respective chapter’s content and shares reflections regarding Gender Studies, its integration, and developments. The first level corresponds with the significance of research in the field and its transformative power in and, crucially, outside the academia. The second relates to the value of networking and community building for doing research.

The book presents Gender Studies in a communicative, open manner that invites the reader to engage in and continue the displayed discussions. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of gender studies, sociology, queer studies, women’s studies, trans studies, anthropology, and literary studies.