Editors’ note

KEYWORDS:

• Time and temporality
• the colonial
• race
• radical existence
• the planetary

Dominant conceptions of ecology and history are losing their power. Despite many critiques of scholars’ writing on slavery, anti-blackness, and colonization, authors still often draw from the same wells, those of scientific knowledge (i.e. use of technology to control by efficiency and sacrifice) and metaphysics based on certain ethical, aesthetic, and social values (e.g. capital valuation processes, innovation, technical production). In so doing, they end up co-framing, co-producing, co-organizing, and co-ordering our ecologies and knowledge production, drawing on governance and security devices to order the world. But as these framings and orderings are founded on the division and obliteration of biodiversity and differences, their problematic course is now faltering.

Pushing against these forms of ‘scientific’ knowledge (and these ‘technologies’ and ‘devices’), writers challenge our familiar systems of thought and embodied practices by pointing to the limiting science, ethical norms, and justice frameworks that guide them. In work ranging from environmental politics to governmentality and governance, globalization, and ecological disasters, theorists are calling for conversations and theorizations of environmental crises and ecological shifts, especially as these crises and shifts are making clear the limits and ‘end’ of some of our dominant critiques (Burke et al., 2015). Others say we are moving towards extinction and must consider how to redress our destruction of ourselves, other species, and above all, Earth. They call for urgent interventions in geo-engineering, conservation, CO emissions, and many more, highlighting that structures and their in/attention economies (Agathangelou, 2016c) are speeding up our extinction. These conversations, of course, are compounded and complicated by global institutions’ involvement and their desires for dominant global power and profits. Very recently, in meetings led by the UN – post-Paris (2015) and post-Marrakesh (November 2016) – major actors challenged us to think the political (i.e. ecological worlds) in its global iterations without anthropomorphizing our inventions.

As climate change conversations intensify and ‘demonic neoliberalism’ ratchets up its profit extraction, this special issue centres on an overarching question: What must be given up in our reading, writing, politics, and ethics for us to unleash the ecological imagination’s radical creative in ways that disrupt and rupture necessary temporal preconditions, assumptions, and stories (i.e., progress as a primary value in the organization of societies; the notion of ‘primitive’ existence open perpetually for appropriation and conquest, etc.)? The special issue is organized by three aspects of this larger question.

First, we grapple with the relationship of the structure of time and ecology. Many of the dominant models and devices of ecology, security, and governance of our scientific knowledge production systems are informed by a certain history/historicism of ideas and metaphysical systems of thought, with clear points of departure and destination, each subordinated to the other. What kind of a dialogue do we need when confronted with the limits of our linear, metaphysical, and retrojective systems of thought? Theorists from IR, environmental studies, earth sciences, science and technology studies, and humanities point to the ‘end’ of our disciplines (Burke et al., 2015), to the end of social sciences and humanism, as a way of thinking and redressing ecological and climate concerns. For example, climate science challenges existing notions of ecology, our social institutions, and ethical commitments at the level of the communal, spatial, and temporal (Jasanoff, 2010).

Indigenous theorists note the conflicts generated by abstract, impersonal, apolitical, and universal climate science (Mitchell, 2016; Whyte, 2018; Weber, 2021). They say our meanings have reached their limit, so we fall back on the idea that ‘there is not much we can do’. Others say our institutions are failing us. We have lost the art of democracy and we no longer write or create in order to support ecologies and the ‘web of life’ (Moore, 2015). This condition is new and problematic in its engendering of a profound solitude and loss of dignity. Still others see these debates, approaches, and reforms as instrumental in this to the entrenchment of a corporate transnational global economy (Hope, 2018). Is it possible for us to recognize that different analogies or socio-technical imaginaries make possible and available only certain approaches of redressing questions to different corners of the world? Linear reductive scientific knowledges continue to inform how we embody and live our lives, and technological monoliths strain upwards toward the future, while toxic political genealogies persist in the now. Since metaphysics and its notion of history (i.e. historicism) dominate, we envision a dialogue in which we ask how we may think more centrally about this question/this issue around: a) first principles (i.e. how do we organize economies and environments), b) logics and grammars of parallelism (i.e. survival is at stake on the whole), and c) analyses of the possibility of viable projects of transformation. What will it take to break and sunder the suture between ‘time’ and ‘ecology’? Without doing so, it is impossible to clarify the theoretical role and epistemological problems of the ‘ecological question.’ That is, if the ecological question is simply understood as something whose substantiality in the form of its temporality/lived experiences is already a given, then there will be no reason for its examination as this ecological question will be self-referentially be affirming itself again and again. We see this in teleological models of decisionism, self-determination, intimate histories of racialized/sexualized violence, and gothic fears of the notion of social contracts and change and a new beginning beyond notions of temporality and historical devices and models. In this conversation, we insist on a conception of the ecological, one that is not naturally linked to a certain forcefield of time. More so, all authors in this special issue, read and grapple with environmental debates as theory. Instead, of turning this nuanced field of climate change, ecological, environmental or planetary questions into something that merely confirms or historically completes the story or confirms other fictions of possibility, the authors push for ways to disassemble and recompose these temporal aspects into inquiries (Walker, 2012: 6–8). The dialogue brings together scholars from different disciplines to theorize and engage with the possibility of a ‘new beginning’ for the invention of the planetary without moribund investments in the racial capitalist machine and its dominant fictions of efficiency and teleological progress. What are the aspects of this new beginning? How can we envision a beginning whose structure doesn’t just weave traces and memories in the abstract, outside of time, but includes moments that materialize from their ostensibly irremediable disappearance (Fanon, 1967; Marriott, 2011)? Such a dialogue will push us beyond the pretense that we can know the ‘origin’ and its coordinates and its contingent end, including our claims to know the beyond of our ‘exhaustion’ or ‘our destruction of the earth’.

Ecological phenomena (fracking, energy systems, climate change adaptation strategies) are fragmenting and changing dominant notions of the body and the planetary politic, undermining a sense of shared vulnerability and purpose. Climate change demands states and societies reconsider their global power, energy systems, socio-technical imaginaries, epistemological temporal narrations (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015), and critical infrastructures that make settlements possible, from transit networks to food supply chains and climate security systems. Of course, this raises questions about the unstable and contingent nature of modern practices and their equally unstable and indeterminate relations to time: the co-production of ‘emerging’ and ‘adaptive publics’, that is, ‘the emerging constituency clamoring for policies to cope with climate change’ (Cohen, 2016; Zeiderman, 2016), tethered to a neocolonial, enslaving, racial capitalist system and its epochs aiming to become a planetary order.

This special issue probes structures of time and time ecologies. The linkages among scales of global racial capitalist structures and the temporal aspects of political environments including notions of agency, hierarchization in the form of empty lands, underdeveloped frontiers, backward and primitive peoples, environmental crisis, emergency, new biotechnologies, info tech and futures raise important questions about the ways in which forms of linear, eschatological and recursive notions of time are related. These structures of time or timing relationships within and between entities and their environments include more than just clock and calendar or Newtonian time. Such structures become organized and ordered based on social notions of time as well as biotemporal ideas such as biological cycles and activities, on info tech and their speed of collecting, collating and analysing data as well as structures of epistemologies (i.e. temporal ways of understanding and thinking about the world). How do we engage with a melting ice sheet in West, and East, Antarctica? How do we read it in terms of the political and beyond the familiar temporal categories of global and local and beyond the dominant principles of globally positioning and ordering people such as separability and determinacy (da Silva, 2016)? How do we grapple with newer emerging forms of politics and time ecology, without taking for granted the notions and structures of time that organize and order epistemologies, systems of thought, and understandings in IR, STS, the humanities, social and natural sciences? What could this engagement with the disappearance of certain politics tell us about environmental politics and future-making, what some authors call the ‘new ecriture’ (Marriott, 2011) of the planetary otherwise and thriving?

Second, in this special issue, we grapple with how climate change is manifested in shifts in the earth landscape. We note the daily disasters and crises of confidence in the environmental, financial, research, political, and ethical sectors, with the concomitant globalization of ‘the environment’, new ‘convergent’ technologies, and shifts in our modalities of management, for example, moving from securitizing risk to securitizing ignorance and uncertainty. Of course, all these social processes are embedded in complicated sets of relationships that time out how certain subjects, states, ecologies, species move in relationship to each other. An engineer, for example, working on the Arctic and the melting of the ice controls his timing – intellectual and biological – to work with the physics of preventing the acceleration of the braking of the ice. The result may be to devise ways to stop the ice from melting suddenly by ‘scattering millions of tiny glass beads to reflect sunlight awa’ (Woodward 2019). This intensification of chrono complexities or the changes in any components end up affecting rates of flow, melting, and feeding forward and back, creating dramatic changes in the temporal patterns of entire ecological systems. These rhythms complicate the political and social imagination on several registers and pushes for paradigm shifts, including the relationship of the structure of time and its suspension. A close focus on ‘how visions of scientific and technological progress carry with them implicit ideas about public purposes, collective futures, and the common good’ (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015) points to the possibility of a shift in our paradigms in the relationship between the nation-state and its instrumental visions, including the nature-culture boundary, the decentring of the human, and the dialogue of ethics and science.

Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim (2015) theorize this idea within STS to highlight how important ‘normative’ models and devices are in the co-production of science and the planetary order. It is time to problematize familiar but rushed monologues that come from different angles: global capital, the social sciences, the humanities, the saving of the world through biotech and info tech, and multiple ethical regimes. It is important to theorize the new scale-making on the register of nature, space, time, and the major actors/objects of analysis. This issue does so by pointing to the materiality of technology in both a Foucauldian and a governance sense, to metaphysical devices and their effect on re/ordering the political, to certain discourses informing and shaping notions like progress and improvement, risk and domination, to institutions of governance activated in the global politics of climate change, and to images of ‘heaven and earth’ in environmental politics (Jasanoff, 2004, 2006). It grapples with the ways climate change demands profound reconsideration and transformation both intellectually and materially. Authors engage with climate change and climate science, for example, notions of ‘ecology’, demonic and toxic neoliberalism, social institutions, and ethical commitments. They also engage with the activation of different technologies and scientific ideas and note their effect on the social imagination and sociotechnical imaginaries within a racial asymmetrical Capitalocene.

What do these shifts mean for our conceptions of society, and how do we study them? How do we take seriously the worlds, their unfolding, and categories of technoscience and infoscience about ecology and political concerns and questions when attending to the structure of time and existing and emerging institutions? How do different and existing notions of science and technology, as well as devices and modelling practices of ‘security’ and ‘governance’ inscribed with certain ideas of the temporal (Jasanoff & Martello, 2004), inform and shape these worlds and conceptions? What existing and emerging frames allow us to take seriously the way we make the worlds we study?

Third, we call for a reorientation of our dominant fictions by addressing the relationship of time with understanding and practicing multiple epistemologies and ontologies. This special issue asks whether we can imagine ‘each existant (humans, species etc.) as a singular expression of each and every other existant’, as well ‘as a part of the entangled whole in/as which it exists’ (da Silva, 2016). How do we reorient ourselves, especially when our attempts violate the dominant and naturalized framings and their principles of separability and sequentiality, away from the dominant readings of science and data (i.e. particle physics, climate science) and collations of models? How do we turn from the most disturbing findings of these sciences to indeterminacy and nonlinear worlds and universes? What do principles like nonlocality, virtuality, and the ‘releasing of the World to the imagination’ mean to our thinking about epistemologies and ontologies (da Silva, 2016)?

Several of our authors engage with the current debates of the ecology, the limits of ‘critique’ of multiple compositions (i.e. science, data and other kinds of knowledges of our times) and the limits of the assumptions and practices of national and existing state authorities and international institutions that affirm a hegemony in their way of inventing the object of their study and practice and how it ought to respond. These authors point to how sets of literacies (i.e. universal notions of the political with notions of ‘destroying and killing all’) based on ideas of periodization such as backward or primitive and eschatological imaginaries depend on each other and yet are not put into conversation with each other. As feminists, postcolonialis, and critical writers of political economy and STS argue, these debates on the ecology and climate change have high stakes, as they have direct bearing on the ways we order and organize our lives and the ways tend to the ‘web of life’ and its invention (Agathangelou, 2016a, 2016b; Bennett, 2010; Fanon, 1967; Latour, 2004, 2016; Moore, 2015; Stengers, 2015) and science is an inventive practice (Stengers, 1997). It is not enough to say the ecology needs to be protected or science proves/does not prove we are confronted with a catastrophe. Instead, it is important to look at how creative and inventive approaches in the forms of art, poetry, academic writing, and activism constitute complex negotiations among multiple actors, temporalities or lived experiences and their visions of the planetary.

Thus, in this issue, we engage a few questions. How are state and international institutions’ multiple ecological reforms instrumental to the entrenchment of a corporate transnational global economy? How do these institutions draw on dominant understandings of temporality (i.e. progress as the primary value of social life; the capitalist economic story as the only efficient way of being) to order structures of time and the time ecologies? How are questions of science and non-science settled? How are questions of ecological resilience and proof of it settled and at what registers? What is a good reasoning and what is a bad reasoning within these debates? What role do notions of time and temporality play in them? How does different living bodies’ recalcitrance to conform to the modern values of the theoretico-experimental sciences and technologies challenge our notion of ethical institutions and protections? To sum up, the aim of this special issue is to grapple with these critiques and to look beyond ecology as a form of consensus and settlement. Ecology is an indeterminate existence, and yet, time is used as a colonial and enslaving governance technology of the entire set of relationships and life conditions.

In the introduction, ‘About Time: Climate Change and Inventions of the Decolonial, Planetarity and Radical Existence’ Agathangelou and Killian further engage with the relationship of the structure of time and its suspension and the planetary. They argue that the current multiple ecological questions are entangled with certain understandings of time which need to be clearly spelled out and better understood. Instead of rushing to the familiar and popularized notions of time (i.e. a quantitative linear measurement, cyclical approaches etc.). Time continues to be a powerful tool for producing, managing, undermining, and ordering various understandings of who is part of time (Agathangelou, 2020; Agathangelou & Killian, 2016), and what is time in relation with other beings. Not taking time for granted in ecological debates, deliberations, and practices, Agathangelou and Killian bring together several authors who do not frame time as an implicit act of ecological relations but as an active invention and beyond the experimental first principles of the organization of the materiality of life, epistemological genres, grammars and tool of colonial, enslaving (Fanon, 1967) and neoliberal governance.

In the first section of this special issue, entitled ‘The Question of Radical Existence’, Sheila Jasanoff opens the discussion with her piece ‘Humility in the Anthropocene’. She speaks to a shift in scale of humanity’s ecological imagination toward the global, spurred by developments in earth and planetary sciences that have demoted humankind from ‘a position of claimed supremacy to a status on a par with other systemic forces shaping the planet’. Nevertheless, refutation of human exceptionalism has not resulted in greater self-awareness, humility, or the use of expert knowledge to combat global problems of the Anthropocene. From the perspectives of ethics, politics, and law, Jasanoff interrogates ‘sites of struggle between a persistent human imperialism’, expressed through a commodification of nature, and ‘more humble ways of knowing and guiding humanity’s planetary future’.

In ‘On the Question of Time, Racial Capitalism and the Planetary', Agathangelou asserts that if one is to engage the complexities of the ecological concerns (instead of ‘climate change'), colonial and racial capitalism’s profit machinations as thought and practice must be grasped. To do so, she argues, requires that we engage with three dominant orientations of time, the linear, the teleological or what Delf Rothe (2019: 143) calls the ‘threat of the end of time,’ and retrojection, that is, the transformation and displacement of the endeavors of life which exceed the logics, grammars and empirico-archives of imperial capital through projection by ‘retrospectively testif[ying] to “what comes before,” of what has come before’ (Walker 2012: 268). This piece argues that such dominant stories about time and temporality inflect our understanding of ecological violence and the environment making dynamics of climate change unstable, commodity frontiers, and finance capital the most viable stories in the world. Such stories are viable as a result of politics or the ‘temporalization of desire for [their] translation into a narrative’ (Edelman 1998, 2004) in its multiple iterations for its linear, teleological or retrojective determinations. A focus on the question of the structure of the relationship between time and the re/productions of such knowledges in world politics opens up the planetary and the future to question and their invention to more collective and decolonial poetics.

In ‘Submerged Perspectives: The Arts of Land and Water Defense’, Macarena Gómez-Barris asks what the critical social sciences and humanities can bring to bear on these questions. She says such engagement is necessary and can be organized, in part, through the art of land and water defense. Drawing on her scholarship in Latinx American studies, Gómez-Barris shows how Indigenous social movements, ecologies, and representations eliminate the bifurcation of land and embodiment and present the possibility of delinking from the colonial project through direct, performative, visual, and sonic actions that challenge land and water dispossession in the Americas. Her piece examines the arts of land and water defense as modes of artistic-political inquiry, ways of thinking and doing otherwise that, when tethered to Indigenous territories and ontologies, deepen how our understanding of social life.

Next, Zahir Kolia’s piece ‘Beyond the Secular Anthropocene: Locke’s Self-Owning Body, Protestant Translations of Indigenous World-Making, and the Settler-Colonial Plantation Economy’ introduces a post-secular genealogy to the Anthropocene debates. Focusing on processes of secularization that mistranslate sacred Indigenous forms of world-making, Kolia explores the reorganization of Christian theological discourses via the progressive temporality of Eurocentric rationality and notions of embodiment. Starting with the epoch shaping the early modernist thought of John Locke, whose labour theory of property, in turn, shaped settler-colonial and capitalist forms of human-nature relations, Kolia analyses how the current ecological crisis is underpinned by a racialized, secularized, and externalized conception of the environment punctuated by ‘progressive’ settler colonial processes of appropriation and capitalist commodification.

In ‘On the Question of Time, Racial Capitalism and the Planetary', Agathangelou asserts that if one is to engage the complexities of the ecological concerns (instead of ‘climate change'), colonial and racial capitalism’s profit machinations as thought and practice must be grasped. This piece argues that time and temporality inflect our understanding of ecological violence and the environment making dynamics of climate change, commodity frontiers, and finance capital. A focus on the relationship between time and the re/productions of such knowledges in world politics makes possible a discourse of a planetary otherwise and invention of a thriving, decolonial world.

In ‘Beyond the Premise of Conquest: Indigenous and Black Earth-Worlds in the Anthropocene Debates’, Bikrum Gill probes how two competing frameworks, the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, reproduce the Eurocentric assumption of the historical priority of Euro-Western geological agency. The corollary is that non-European peoples lack such capacity until they are mobilized by Euro-Western forces. Gill’s piece interrogates the Eurocentrism of these debates by arguing that the present geological epoch became possible ‘within a contact zone constituted through the distinctive earth-world making capacity of Indigenous and Black peoples’, ‘forged in deep time and place’, and upon which the ‘late arriving European settler-master depends’. Gill examines the emergence of race as a qualitative structuring relationship that conceals non-European earth-world making capacity by collapsing Indigenous and Black peoples into the space of non-agential nature.

Kicking off Section II, ‘Profound Challenges of Climate Change and Climate Science’, Martin Weber provides a critical account of the politics of sustainable development in the highly indebted and poverty-stricken country of Madagascar, a ‘biodiversity hotspot’. In his piece ‘A Puzzle: the Environment/Development Constellation in Madagascar’, Weber investigates the efforts of international (USAID, the World Bank, international investors) and local actors to enable land-titling reform as a measure to encourage the influx of foreign direct investment. He analyses plans ‘advanced in the spirit of “sustainable development”’ and demonstrates that the 2009 coup d’etat was an expression of the failure to integrate both. The piece concludes with lessons learned from the Madagasy experiences with ‘sustainable development’, including the scope, premises, and the ecological and socio-political implications of dominant approaches to ‘governance’ of the ‘development-environment constellation’.

Engaging the Dubai government’s plan to establish the first human Martian settlement, in ‘“Welcome to Mars”: Space Colonization, Anticipatory Authoritarianism, and the Labor of Hope’, Nicole Grove discusses how authoritarian legitimacy in the UAE is grounded in the present by the speculative Mars 2117 project. She demonstrates how a government moves to ‘skip over political contradictions, environmental limits, and the precarity of a … potential catastrophic future caused by the feedback between peak oil and irreversible climate change’. While anticipatory authoritarianism may not be a solution, it is the go-to answer for those wishing to provide a distraction from problematic global labour practices and carbon economy-ecology.

In ‘Financialization and Suburbanization: The Predatory Hegemony of Suburban-Financial Nexus in Istanbul’, Murat Üçoğlu explores the financialization of the housing market and explains how suburbanization across the globe poses significant problems and contributes to the Anthropocene. Üçoğlu argues that the financialization of the suburban real estate market operates as a predatory formation by presenting suburban land colonization as the panacea for all problems of urbanization. The theories of Urban Political Ecology (UPE) pave a path toward understanding how suburbanization processes work in the twenty-first century, along with the actors, networks, and strategies that shape, produce, and reproduce the configuration of urban, nature and time. Üçoğlu explores how the financialization of the suburban housing market precipitates a new ecological reality, showcasing the case of Istanbul to reveal detrimental facets of finance capital vis-à-vis its relational link to time.

Scrutinizing the interplay among Indigenous resurgence, settler colonialism, and the politics of environmental justice, in ‘Indigenous Resistance, Planetary Dystopia, and the Politics of Environmental Justice’, Jaskiran Dhillon interrogates the tidal wave of interest in Indigenous knowledge(s) about the land, water, and sky in a desperate effort to ‘save our home’. She critically examines how conquest and persistent settler colonial violence factor into debates of the climate crisis. She asks how Indigenous political demands for decolonization are taken up within the broader scope of impending planetary dystopia and how ‘environmental justice’ might work to (re)inscribe hegemonies of settler colonial power by foregrounding settler interests. Dhillon takes up these questions in the context of Standing Rock, attending to the way the politics around water became reconfigured through notions of kinship, justice, Indigenous temporalities, and multiple frontlines. She suggests an anti-colonial indictment of environmental justice compels us to imagine a decolonial research/ praxis around environmental politics.

In ‘Time to Change? Technologies of Futuring and Transformative Change in Nepal’s Climate Change Policy’, Tim Forsyth critiques the implicit social values in future projections of transformative change in climate change policy in developing countries. Arguing that transformative change is a form of socio-technical imaginary, he applies the framework of ‘technologies of futuring’ to analyse these imaginaries in the case of Nepal. Forsyth demonstrates that ‘projections of future change are linked to assumptions about physical risks and social agency that reflect different, and contestable, worldviews’. He posits that discussions about transformative change must make more transparent assumptions about risk and society so that dialogues about new futures can become more socially inclusive.

In ‘Producing Nationalized Futures of Climate Change and Science in India’, Anthony Szczurek critically examines and compares three climate reports produced by the Indian Network for Climate Change Assessment (2010) and the Ministry of Earth Sciences (2017). He discusses how India's regionalization of climate science led to its shift ‘from constructing the past of climate change (i.e. the attribution of historical responsibility) and instead towards constructing India-specific climate futures’. Reflecting on the political temporalities, Szczurek queries ‘Which boundaries between epistemic (scientific) knowledge and normative (economic, political) concerns are affirmed, re-made, or dismissed?’

In Section III, ‘Radical Existence and Ecological Imaginaries’, authors use sites like interviews, pedagogical conversation, television series, poetry, and the palimpsest to grapple with radical entanglements and ecological imaginaries. The racial capitalocene and its co-production cannot exist without the form of value or a material basis. All the authors indicate the importance of asking how the ‘absent cause’ – the fulcrum of the structure of the ecological and time question – is formed. In this sense, what is at stake now is a question of writing and its entanglements, and poetics of creation and invention.

Togara’s work, ‘Mistral’ and ‘Göbekli Tepe’, shows poetically how land, earth and the sun exceed the frames of the Capitalocene and its dominant linear and eschatological approaches to time. Both poems regenerate a matrix of statements and flows around the axes of the empire, the metropolis, and land, as well as the haunting, invisible yet immanent energy which issues from the point of the sun and the earth. Togara also grapples with the possibility of intervention into the circuit of the double bind empire and republics. This multidirectional zone of inquiry is at the core of the articulation not only of new political projects, but also of the structure of engagement of the self, the conditions of possibility for the intervention of the self on an actual-historical basis, which stems from the poetic act of writing.

In ‘Conversations on Education, Time and the Planetary’, Erin Katherine and Heather Turcotte stage a conversation that emerged while they were working with students on a collaborative project on land and liberatory education in an educational permaculture farm in the western mountains of Puerto Rico. Nonviolent and abolitionary forms of education, such as those practiced at Plenitud, are an invention of the ‘planetary otherwise’ by calling for these nonlinear modes of existence and for a daily practice of spiritual consciousness, collective care, and physical health that works to deconstruct all the forms of structural and interpersonal violence that seek to limit our time together.

In ‘Multiple Anthropocenes: Pluralizing Space-Time as a Response to “The Anthropocene”’, Jack Amoureux and Varun Reddy examine how the Anthropocene is treated in discourses on security, politics, and ethics and critique how its ‘space-time framing assumes a universal experience and common knowledge’ not actually shared. Pointing out that even critical engagements commonly invoke cosmopolitan space-time, Amoureux and Reddy turn to the metaphor of the palimpsest and its discussion by Jacques Derrida alongside the ‘worldism’ and ‘multiple worlds’ of Anna M. Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling and put forward the heterogeneity of space-time. They conclude with thoughts about Indigenous and queer space-time perspectives relating various climate change experiences frequently ignored or written-over.

In ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene: Gregory Bateson, Disaster Porn, Swamp Thing, and “The Green”’, Kyle Killian examines a recurring narrative in popular entertainment culture – imminent global catastrophe. Contextualizing the phenomenon of disaster porn within the Anthropocene, Killian discusses Gregory Bateson’s ecosystemic theoretical lens and shows how errors in epistemology precipitate and perpetuate global climate problems. He discusses the intended and unintended consequences of disaster porn’s propagation in its three forms and applies themes and concepts of ecosystemic theory and disaster porn to an analysis of the 2019 TV series Swamp Thing. Killian concludes with reflections about cultural consciousness around climate change, noting how the urgency and gravity of this global crisis are subverted, commodified, and neutralized, as audiences sit back and watch it all happen, consuming apocalyptic ‘entertainment’.

Tsitsi Jaji draws on the struggles in Zimbabwe, where thousands of people have lost their homes due to dam building. Jaji experiments with distilling the ironies of how contemporary anti-blackness echoes with the past: ‘coal/black, rubber/Congo, everything from Heart of Darkness on out/Congo, severed hands/Congo’ and shapes the temporalities or lived experiences of Africans creating more problems such as infrastructural collapse rather than redressing them. Her poetry offers a window through which the reader can leap into the planetary otherwise.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna M. Agathangelou

Anna M. Agathangelou is Professor of Politics at York University. She is the co-editor of (with Kyle D. Killian) Time, temporality and violence in international relations: (De)fatalizing the present, forging radical alternatives, co-editor (with Nevzat Soguk) of Arab revolutions and world transformations, co-author with L.H.M. Ling of Transforming world politics: From empire to multiple worlds, and author of the Global political economy of sex: Desire, violence and insecurity in mediterranean nation-states.

Kyle D. Killian

Kyle D. Killian, PhD is a licensed couple and family therapist, professor, and Clinical Fellow and Approved Supervisor of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy and a member of the American Family Therapy Academy. Dr Killian’s books include Interracial couples, intimacy and therapy from Columbia University Press, and, with Dr Anna Agathangelou, Time, temporality and violence in international relations. Dr Killian writes on resilience, self-care, and social justice on his blog at Psychology Today called Intersections. He can be reached at kkillian.org.