STANFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
  
Cover of Feral Atlas by Edited by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou
Feral Atlas
The More-Than-Human Anthropocene
Edited by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou



START EXPLORING

2020

ISBN: 9781503615045

DescriptionDesc.
Reviews
Excerpts and More

Gold Medal in the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYs) - Best Adult Non-Fiction Informational E-Book category, sponsored by the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

Named one of the 2020 Power 100, Art Review's annual ranking of the most influential people in art.

Every event in human history has been a more-than-human event. When hunter-gatherers burn the land, they cooperate with herbs that seed quickly and grasses that sprout after fires, attracting game. Inside us, intestinal bacteria make it possible for us to digest our food. Other things, living and nonliving, make it possible to be human. Yet powerful habits of thought over the last centuries have made this statement less than obvious. With the arrival of the idea of the Anthropocene, we move away from such thinking to reconsider how human and nonhuman histories are inextricably intertwined.

Convening over one hundred researchers to trace a whole range of such intertwinements, Feral Atlas offers an original and playful approach to studying the Anthropocene. Focused on the world's feral reactions to human intervention, the editors explore the structures and qualities that lie at the heart of the feral and make the phenomenon possible. This publication features original contributions by high-profile artists, humanists and scientists such as Amitav Ghosh, Elizabeth Fenn, Simon Lewis, Mark Maslin, and many others.

About the authors

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Jennifer Deger is Associate Professor and Research Leader in the College of Arts, Society and Education at James Cook University.

Alder Keleman Saxena is Assistant Research Professor at the Department of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University.

Feifei Zhou is Researcher at Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA).

"To fix a problem we have to understand it. Feral Atlas helps us do just that. It illuminates the ways in which we are shaping the world and gives us the information we need to be able to act."

—Annie Leonard, Executive Director, Greenpeace USA

"Being part of the onrushing Anthropocene often makes me feel like a number, some machine part of eight or nine billion people. Feral Atlas throws me into a future that swirls with art, poetry, dark facts, and ironic humor. It keeps the impending future in human focus, smashing together calamity and humanity."

—Steven Palumbi, Stanford University

"Feral Atlas is the most innovative digital humanities or sciences project I have ever seen. After being immersed in this transdisciplinary, multimedia, polysensuous, and open-access experiment, you will emerge more attentive to the feral qualities and patchy infrastructures of the Anthropocene."

—Craig Stantos Perez, University of Hawaii, Mānoa

"Feral Atlas is an intricately granular reimagining of the Anthropocene which allows users to move horizontally across its multiple manifestations. It is an urgent and poetic call to action that rewards patience and curiosity. The site leads us through the dark, serpentine trails of our contemporary condition, urging us to look around rather than ahead."

—Nicolás Jaar, Composer

"Ambitious and adventurous, Feral Atlas is an innovative project designed to work with the links, filters, and navigational options that digital publication affords. Rich in intellectual content and still novel in format, the Atlas gives a sense of how much we have come to expect from online publishing—and what may unfold ahead. We need such projects, with their heavy investment in the challenges of integrating designers, artists, scholars, and editors to forge the directions that will become part of the way we think and work."

—Johanna Drucker, University of California, Los Angeles

"I have found myself continually wandering back into [Feral Atlas], unsure of what I am looking for, but nevertheless drawn to this unusual exploratory tool. Poetic, playful and political, it reveals itself to the curious reader as a singular new roadmap through what we now call the Anthropocene."

—Louise Darblay, ArtReview

"The kaleidoscopic nature of Feral Atlas, with its shifting, colourful and fact-rich fragments, makes it endlessly absorbing. Feral Atlas is so absorbing, in fact, that it is hard to stop clicking through and getting lost in its many stories. It is aimed at the digital generation. In fact, the site's editors see it as having a clear pedagogic function, explaining that while Feral Atlas 'is a scholarly effort to advance novel theory, it also responds to an age-old pedagogical question: How should teachers get students to sit up, pay attention, and care about the material being taught?'. Feral Atlas is an impressive answer to this question."

—Alastair Bonnett, Social & Cultural Geography

"Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene sets the gold standard for 21st-century digital humanities scholarship."

—Maya Kóvskaya, Asian Anthropology

"[Feral Atlas] is a gorgeous feat of interdisciplinary collaboration and compilation, and a gift to those of us teaching in the environmental humanities and sciences."

—Alenda Y. Chang, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment