Political Geology: Active Stratigraphies and the Making of Life – eBook

Political Geology, (PDF) explores the emerging field of political geology, an area of study devoted to understanding the cross-sections between politics and geology. It considers how geological forces such as volcanoes, earthquakes, and unstable ground are political forces and how political forces have an influence on the earth. Together the authors aim to understand how the geos has been known, spoken for, captured, controlled and represented while making the active underlying strata for producing worlds.

This thorough collection includes a variety of interdisciplinary topics including the history of the geological sciences, the origin of the earth, non-Western theories of geology and the relationship between nature and humans. It includes chapters that re-think the earth’s ‘geostory’ together with case studies on the politics of earthquakes in Mexico city, , geologists at Oxford, shamans on an Indonesian volcano, and eroding islands in Japan. In every case, political geology is attentive to the encounters between political projects and the generative geological materials that are enlisted and often liquefy, slip or erode away. This ebook will be of great interest to practitioners and scholars across the political and geographical sciences, as well as to anthropologists, philosophers of science and sociologists more broadly.

Reviews

“It has been widely supposed that social scientists should restrict their attention to the surface of the Earth; as a result, they have had little to say about the Earth’s geology. This wonderful collection finally ends this odd silence and, in bringing the study of politics to the Earth’s depths, opens up a whole new venue of geographical and historical enquiry.” — Andrew Barry, Department of Geography, University College London, UK

“Political Geology: Active Stratigraphies and the Making of Life is an inspiring and smart collection that includes some of the best writers on the topic. Don’t however be mistaken: it is not only about the solid ground beneath our feet; instead, the earth is moved as numbers, projects, calculations,; it haunts as colonial memories and as material dynamics. This ebook is one main collection that helps to outline the (geo)political stakes of the Anthropocene.” — Jussi Parikka, University of Southampton, author of A Geology of Media

“Whether the newest era in the history of our planet should be termed the Anthropocene has yet to be determined, but the following disputes have left no doubt that we live in an era of political geology. Controversies about climate change, resource use, and distinctions between the biological, geological and human have brought a new appreciation of the political dimensions of the Earth sciences. Stretching from Korea and India to Poland and Mexico, this extensive volume is vital reading for anyone who wishes to understand the part of the geosciences in recent debates.” — James A. Secord, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, UK

NOTE: The product only includes the ebook Political Geology: Active Stratigraphies and the Making of Life in PDF. No access codes are included.