Jennifer Loureide Biddle √

Live wire and speculative ethnography

This is a new work of creative non-fiction as an experiment in speculative writing, attention and attestation. My interest is in the heritage and circulation of affect as techno-electric current and currency in writing a certain history of the present, tracking a somatic legacy of ECT (Electroconvulsive therapy) as embodied female inheritance. Following Donna Haraway, Suzanne Kite and others, my concern is the inextricable entanglement of bodies with technology and with Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, the making and binding of gendered and racialized bodies to public health hierarchies of inequity, care and modes of endurance. My interest here, as elsewhere, is in how ethnographic writing can serve as radical empiricism; how to document an amnesia and violence of histories built upon affective regulatory regimes, machines and an unarchivable of the existential; to stage set and bring to life a circuitry of live wire in what Anand Pandian calls a ‘dark anthropology of uneasy times’ in the ongoing pressing control of women’s lives, health and reproduction today.
Key Words: Radical empiricism; experimental ethnography; gender, technology, aesthetics.

Laura McLaughlin √

The felt sense of enemy others: interoceptive approaches to polarised relations in the Western USA

Working with people engaged in a number of body-oriented mindfulness practices, this paper will explore people’s felt sense of ‘enemy’ others, as well as people’s bodily labours to (at times) overcome—or even metabolise—resistance to such others. Working with practitioners largely based in the Western USA operating within broader cultural formations centred on the development of interoceptive awareness to connect across difference, this paper looks at the possibilities and limits of sensory awareness for addressing polarisation and instances of relational stalemates. With a particular attention to participants’ feelings of disgust, outrage, and resistance, I discuss practitioners’ felt sense of the ‘enemy’, including the practices, concepts and intentions, and broader community values that play a part in being interested (or not) in attending to one’s sense of ‘enemy’ others, rather than—or in addition to—contact with the person themselves. Finally, I offer some initial considerations of what such practices have meant for practitioners’ relations in the world, including not only instances of radical inequity of bodily labour, sorrows, and at times misplaced hopes, but also moments of just-possible connections and of softening within relations of ongoing disagreement.

Tess Lea√

Policy ecology, infrastructure and endurance

Buried within many descriptions of anthropogenic apocalypse, in accounts of what an unchecked desire for extractive existence has imperilled beyond return, lie two key concepts: 1. Indigenous lifeworlds represent an alternative, an otherwise, that teaches us how to live more attuned to, more in harmony with, in good relations with, the non-human universe; and 2. The state needs to determine the policies and funding inducements and fines to reroute our technocapital regimes into eco-friendly, ‘sustainable’, modes and provide a decent blueprint for action. If written as a genuflection, the first concept positions Indigenous people as mnemonics for a possible otherwise, remaining in imaginations, living in margins, without infrastructural needs. In the second framing, Indigenous people disappear within metropolitan imaginaries, while densely populated settlements continue to be nourished from margins albeit through acts of kindness and repair. In both cases, a form of ‘make it good for everyone without sacrifice’ becomes a ‘making, not taking’ unworldliness. To better craft a hyper-real representation of science-art co-dependencies, this essay takes poetics into the innards of global extractivism. Using a framing of policy ecology, I revisit the ugliness of concrete and infrastructure, the messiness of policy and politics, to tether hope with a pragmatics of existence.

Key Words: Policy ecology, infrastructure, climate change, cultural politics