This book explores how speculative thinking is shaping how we relate to our entangled social, mental, and environmental ecologies. It examines how speculative philosophies and concepts are changing geographical research methods and techniques, whilst also developing how speculative thinking transforms the way human, non-human, and more-than-human things are conceptualised in research practices across the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Offering the first dedicated compendium of geographical engagements with speculation and speculative thinking, the chapters in this edited collection advance debates about how affective, imperceptible, and infra-sensible qualities of environments might be written about through alternative registers and ontologies of experience. Organised around the themes of Ethics, Technologies, and Aesthetics, the book will appeal to those engaging with architecture, Black political theory, fiction, cinema, children’s geographies, biotechnologies, philosophy, rural studies, arts practice, and nuclear waste studies as speculative research practices appropriate for addressing contemporary ecological problems.
Chapters 1, 3 and 4 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Author(s): Nina Williams, Thomas Keating
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 308
City: Singapore
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
1: From Abstract Thinking to Thinking Abstractions: Introducing Speculative Geographies
Why Speculation?
Who Speculates?
How To Think Abstractions?
The Collection
Ethics
Technologies
Aesthetics
References
Part I: Ethics
2: Redreaming the Human and the Ethics of Terraformation
Pumzi
The 6th World
Wangechi Mutu
References
3: Contemporary Urban Heterotopias: From Fiction to Reality
On the Spectrum of Topias and the Need for the Alternative
On Place and the Otherness of Heterotopian Cities
Towards Building Contemporary Urban Heterotopias
From Fiction to Reality
References
4: Speculations on Time and Space: Or Zeno’s Last Stand
Speculation, Geography & Co.
Stirring Still
The Unreality of Unreality
References
5: Passionate Speculations | Speculative Passions
Introduction
Passionate Reason
Speculative Passions
Conclusion
References
6: Three Speculative Dispositions After William James: Towards a Concept of Pre-cursive Faith
Introduction: Taking a ‘Terrible’ Leap
An Aesthetic Sensibility Towards Sensation
A Testable Attitude Towards Genuine Problems
A Pre-cursive Feeling of Faith in the In-Between
Conclusion: Faith as a Veritable Aesthetic
References
Part II: Technologies
7: Towards Speculative Praxis: Finding the Politics in Speculation with Deleuze and Design
Introduction
Locating Speculation in Deleuze and Design
Build the Future: A Prefigurative Speculative Intervention
How Does Speculative Praxis Operate?
References
8: Speculative Reproduction
Fertility and the Time of Developmental Life
Speculative Time and the Reproductive Economy
Refusing Speculative Reproduction
References
9: NeoRural Futures: Learning Through Embodied Speculation
A Pluriverse of Rural Futures
The NeoRural Futures Summer School
Speculations About the Future(s) of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
Reflections on Learning Through Embodied Speculations
References
10: Foley and Fabulation: The Production of Screams, Sound, and Subjectivity in Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio
“Gilderoy, This Is Going to Be a Fantastic Film”
A Deleuzian Speculation?
Cinema: Fabulous Metamorphosis Is Yet ‘to Come’…
“A New World of Sound Awaits You” (Strickland, 2021, 0:04:45)
A Meditation on Screams, Sound, and Subjectivity
References
11: Nuclear Remains: For a Speculative Empirical Approach
What Remains?
Thinking Remains
Speculative Empiricism
Speculating with Nuclear Remains
References
12: Speculating with Childhoods, Plastics and Other Stuff
Introduction
Researching Childhoods, Plastics and Other Stuff
Speculating with Sculptures
Speculating with Biosamples (and Interdisciplinarity)
Conclusions
References
Part III: Aesthetics
13: Against the Cynicism of Common Sense: Guattari and the Micropolitics of Expression
Introduction
The Production of Common Sense
Incorporeal Universes
Conclusion: Speculating with Guattari
References
14: The Ecosophic Act of Feeling: Poetry, Animism and Speculative Thought
An Encounter
Aesthetic Feeling
A Pragmatic Intensity
The Lure of the Aesthetic
References
15: Flights of Fancy: Speculative Taxidermy as Pedagogical Practice
Introduction
The Thing Itself
Speculative Taxidermy
Mythologizing Nomenclature
Mutual Histories
Speculative Fabulation?
Conclusion
References
16: Becoming Listening Bodies: Sensing the Affective Atmospheres of the City with Young Children
Introduction
Demolition and Renewal in Hulme
Affective Atmospheres and Urban Ecology
Becoming Listening Bodies
An Atmospheric Turn: When Play Becomes (Micro)political
Concluding Thoughts: Towards an Atmospheric Pedagogy
References
17: Dust and Soil: Speculative Approaches to Microecological Sensing
Introduction
Ways of Knowing Dust and Soil
Opening the Black Boxes: Sensing Dust and Soil
Exposomic Thinking
Senstances
References
18: Afterword: Speculative Earth
Strangers in Flight
It Rains, It Blows, It Thinks
Writing Earth
References
Index
