In the video below Katherine Gibson (one half of the amazing JK Gibson-Graham feminist economic-geographer duo; unfortunately Julie Graham died in 2010) delivers a powerful and insightful plenary lecture entitled, ‘An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene‘ (2011), sponsored by the Ethics, Justice, and Human Rights Specialty Group, of the Association of American Geographers.
Abstract: Over Antipode’s 40 years our role as academics has dramatically changed. We have been pushed to adopt the stance of experimental researchers open to what can be learned from current events and to recognize our role in bringing new realities into being. Faced with the daunting prospect of global warming and the apparent stalemate in the formal political sphere, this essay explores how human beings are transformed by, and transformative of, the world in which we find ourselves. We place the hybrid research collective at the center of transformative change. Drawing on the sociology of science we frame research as a process of learning involving a collective of human and more-than-human actants—a process of co-transformation that re/constitutes the world. From this vision of how things change, the essay begins to develop an “economic ethics for the Anthropocene”, documenting ethical practices of economy that involve the being-in-common of humans and the more-than-human world. We hope to stimulate academic interest in expanding and multiplying hybrid research collectives that participate in changing worlds.
“Through new hybrid research collectives we have been attempting to produce a new econo-sociality.” – Katherine Gibson
Related articles
- What is this so-called Anthropocene? (screeningtheanthropocene.wordpress.com)
- Introduction to Anthropocene (screeningtheanthropocene.wordpress.com)
- Human Impact on Water Cycle Ushering In a New Age (earthfirstnews.wordpress.com)
- Further Thoughts on Dark Ontology and Religion (larvalsubjects.wordpress.com)
synthetic zerØ 
So enjoyed this talk Dirk! Thank you. I want to give it one more watch and then I’ll share my notes…
glad it spoke to you too and thanks as always for framing it in a more complete and useful way. Broadly speaking my own experience is that coming to terms with such realities actually takes away the fevered madness even as it strips bare the old assumptions and reveals all of the machinations below the surface so that we might retool them as we can.
The down side as it were (the Undertow as I often call it) is that such intimacy with what is being done (and what isn’t being done or can’t be done) is often quite painful and even overwhelming at times, so how to make peace with all of that? Looking forward to what you and others make of the talk.
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