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Call for papers: RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, Cardiff University,
2831 August 2018

Excavating multispecies landscapes: temporalities, materialities and the
more-than-human Anthropocene

Session organisers: Aurora Fredriksen (University of Manchester) and Charlotte
Wrigley (Queen Mary, University of London)

Along with eroding coastlines (Matless 2017) and the blasted ruins of
capitalist development (Tsing 2017), nonhuman beings are key signals of the
Anthropocene in landscapes. Changing migration patterns, novel colonisations,
extinctions, adaptive mutations and hybridisations make legible the material
transformation of landscapes through melting ice, warming seas,
desertification, toxification. The current or threatened absence of once
present species fold in remembered, forgotten and imagined pasts and
alternately apocalyptic and redemptive futures into a present of haunted,
spectral landscapes (e.g., Whale and Ginn 2017; Gan et al 2017: G1). This is
evident in popular imaginaries of the Anthropocene as human induced
environmental catastrophe in visions of a silent spring (Carson 1962),
insectageddon (Monbiot 2017), and coral reef graveyards and ghost towns
that foreground the absence of once present nonhuman beings in beloved
landscapes. It is also evident in projections for a so-called good
Anthropocene that envision a near future in which technoscientific progress
and human ingenuity are able to turn back time and/or alter the future by
returning long absent nonhuman species to landscapes through restoration,
rewilding or de-extinction initiatives. As the Anthropocene invites a
reassessment of humanitys place in the geologic timescale, nonhumans become
intricately entangled in these shifting temporalities: cryobanks stash
endangered species DNA as a future safeguard against extinctions (Chrulew
2017) whilst melting ice reveals prehistoric carcasses and thousands of years
of fossilised climate data.

Beyond total absence or abundant presence, there are smaller, sometimes
stranger ways that nonhuman beings make the Anthropocene legible in
landscapes: old trees calling out in flower for symbiont animal pollinators
that are now absent, signalling a loss of synchronous time and cascading
transformations of place (Rose 2012); hybrid polar-grizzly bears wandering the
edge of exposed shores once covered in ice extending out to sea; a type of
bacteria found only in the rectums of geese digesting toxic waste from mines
(Hird and Yusoff 2018); and long dormant microbiotic pathogens from the deep
past re-emerging as permafrost melts in arctic landscapes. In these and many
other possible examples, carefully attending to the signs writ into landscapes
by nonhuman beings can unsettle anthropocentric narratives of the Anthropocene
centred on the history of Modern (western) humanity and its future dissolution
or redemption, calling forth more ambivalent, multivocal narratives of
multispecies worldings in flux (DeLoughrey 2015).

This session invites contributions that engage with the ways in which nonhuman
beings signal the Anthropocene in landscapes. Potential themes include (but
are not limited to):

Changing and novel nonhuman agencies in response to the material
transformation of landscapes
Absence/presence of nonhumans and folded temporalities in haunted/spectral
landscapes
Landscapes as multispecies worldings
More-than-human affects in landscape encounters
Speculative futures for more-than-human landscapes
Transmogrification and monstrous landscapes

We especially encourage contributions that unsettle anthropocentric and/or
occidental readings of the Anthropocene in landscapes.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to
aurora.fredriksen@manchester.ac.uk and c.a.wrigley@qmul.ac.uk by 5 February
2018.

References:
Carson, R. (1962) Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Chrulew, M. (2017) Freezing the Ark: The Cryopolitics of Endangered Species
Preservation in J. Radin and E. Kowal (eds.) Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a
Melting World, 283305. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

DeLoughrey, E. (2015) Ordinary futures: interspecies worldings in the
Anthropocene in Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities:
Postcolonial Approaches, edited by E. DeLoughrey, J. Didur, A. Carrigan.
London: Routledge.

Hird, M. and Yusoff, K. (2018) [forthcoming] Traversing Plateaus in
Microbial-Mineral Relation. The American Association of Geographers: Annual
Meeting, April 10-14, New Orleans.

Gan, E., Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Bubandt, N. (2017) Haunted landscapes of the
Anthropocene in A. Tsing, H, Swanson, E Gan and N. Bubandt (eds) Arts of
Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: Minnesota.

Whale, H. and Ginn, F. (2017) In the Absence of Sparrows. In A. Cunsolo and
K. Landman (eds) Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and
Grief, 92116. London: Routledge.

Matless, D. (2017) The Anthroposcenic. Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers 42(3): 36376.

Monbiot, G. (2017) Insectageddon: Farming Is More Catastrophic than Climate
Breakdown. The Guardian, October 20. URL:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/20/insectageddon-farming-ca
tastrophe-climate-breakdown-insect-populations.

Rose, D. B. (2012) Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time. Environmental
Philosophy, Special Issue Temporal Environments: Rethinking Time and
Ecology9 (1):12740.

Tsing, A. (2017) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of
Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.



Dr Aurora Fredriksen
Lecturer in Human Geography
The University of Manchester
Email: aurora.fredriksen@manchester.ac.uk
https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/aurora.fredriksen.html

Fredriksen, A. (2017, in press) Valuing species: the continuities between
non-market and market valuations in biodiversity conservation Valuation
Studies 5(1).

Fredriksen, A. (2016) Of wildcats and wild cats: troubling species-based
conservation in the Anthropocene Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space, 34(4): 689-705
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