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The ecological crisis is also an ontological crisis. It raises questions about our ethical response-ability to this world, calling for a rethinking of the human–nature divide. Vitalist approaches and scholarship on the affective turn have shifted our understanding of our relations to nonhuman others, but they remain constrained: limited to proximate attachments; ambivalent or agnostic in the face of conflict; unable to move beyond the celebration of a lively earth. At issue I feel is a methodological individualism that haunts these offerings when confronted with questions of the ethical composition of a larger whole. Building upon Sharp’s invitation to explore ‘our continuity with nonhuman agencies’, I investigate the ethical basis for a reimagined subject in a series of becomings: the becoming nature of God, becoming animal of man, and becoming sign of earth. Drawing on the writings of Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, and Peirce, I rework this familiar terrain on two counts. First, I examine how the content of each becoming invokes distinct relational dynamics and complicates the ‘problem of composition’. Second, I draw on Spinoza’s differentiated concept of power (as potentia and potestas) and the concept of the composite individual to suggest an alternative way of framing our collaborations with the nonhuman world.

A boy was taken from his elementary school in handcuffs after his classmates turned him in for drawing pictures of weapons. The 11-year-old fifth grader was not charged with a crime in the Wednesday incident. His name is not being released to protect him, school officials said. "There were some drawings that were confiscated by the teacher," Oldsmar Elementary School Principal David Schmitt said. "The children were in no danger at all. It involved no real weapons." Still, Schmitt refused to discuss details of the boy's case. "All I can tell you is it was a threat. .. against students," he said. "Nobody in particular, but students in general.. .. We just need to get it through kids' heads that there are certain things you don't say and there are certain things you don't draw," he said. The boy was handcuffed by school police for his safety, according to Pinellas County School District spokesman Ron Stone. "That's normal procedure in a situation like this," Stone said. "The primary concern was to make sure we get appropriate services for the child."-Sun-Sentinel, May 11, 2001 There is a profound shift underway in the public institutions that are responsible for the training and socialization of children in Anglo-American nations, a shift that marks the final demise of a modern ideal of child

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How do we fashion a new political imaginary from fragmentary, diffuse and often antagonistic subjects, who may be united in principle against the exigencies of capitalism but diverge in practice, in terms of the sites, strategies and specific natures of their own oppression? To address this question I trace the dissonance between the approaches of Antonio Negri and Gilles Deleuze back to their divergent mobilizations of Spinoza’s affect and the role it plays in the ungrounding and reconstitution of the social body. This dissonance reveals a divergence in their projects, the way these political projects emerge as counter-actualizations, the means by which they are expressed, and the necessity (or not) of a particular kind of historical subject to their realization. Most significantly, it speaks to how we might engage difference and alterity within our own political projects, our collective creations. I conclude with a focus on the productive possibilities provided by Deleuze’s writings on the scream, as a vehicle to uncover new terrains of struggle and new possibilities for collectivity.

Building on Deleuze's theories of the becoming of bodies, and notions of the geographic maturity of the disabled body we formulate an emplaced model of disability wherein bodies, social expectations and built form intersect in embodied experiences in specific environments to increase or decrease the capacity of disabled children to act in those environments. We join a growing effort to generate a more comprehensive model of disability, which moves beyond a binary between the individual and the social. Drawing on in-depth case studies conducted with 13 physically disabled children, we consider the intersections between their primary environments (homes, schools and neighbourhoods) and the multiple subjectivities they embody. Ultimately we make a case about the importance of responsive, situated models of subjectivity for the development of adaptations, and that physical and social adaptations must respond to these children's complex and varied needs and desires.

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As Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park note in Wonders and the Order of Nature (1998), their book was very nearly the only historical treatment of monsters to appear in 50 years, a testament to the manner in which progressive accounts of science had consigned such creatures to the periphery as mere fiction or superstition. In counterpoint, and in fascinating detail, they scour diverse archives to recover sudden irruptions of the marvelous. Daston and Park present a pre-Enlightenment Europe wherein the monster enacted a kind of closure, sealing the ruptures of social discontent. Demanding interpretation, it was an extrinsic sign that served to confirm and preserve the existing social order, its precise meaning always tailored to prevailing, local circumstances. As such, these were inherently political as well as scholarly creatures. Beyond this invitation to legibility, however, their singular character evoked a powerful, visceral response: 'As portents signifying divine wrath and imminent catastrophe, monsters evoked horror: they were contra naturam, violations of both the natural and moral orders. As marvels they elicited wondering pleasure: they were praeter naturam, rare, but not menacing, reflecting an aesthetic of variety and ingenuity.' 1 The famous monster of medieval Ravenna, for instance, served to seal off the points of rupture and discontinuity posed to the doctrine of the divine right of Kings when Louis XII and Pope Julius both lay claim to rule over the Italian principality of Ravenna. 2 The victory of Louis over Julius, after a series of protracted skirmishes between1494 and 1559, was sealed by a portent from God, the birth of a severely deformed child. It would seem surprising today that a child (who likely survived only a few hours after birth) would become so notorious. But the child's deformed body became text, a potent symbol warning of the threat that the nascent Italian city-states posed to the rest of Europe. Her/his lack of arms came to signify a lack of generosity of the Italians, her/his wings a sign of fickleness, her/his hermaphrodite sexuality indications of lust and bestiality; the deformed claw like foot a grasping greedy nature; the misplaced eye a love of material things; and the horn an overwhelming hubris. At a time and place when the divine right of kings was the hegemonic explanation for the organization of rule over states and principalities, this child's body