Elemental worlds: Specificities, exposures, alchemies

Abstract

The elements have become the focus of a significant volume of research by geographers and others. Engagements with the elements have been framed in terms of four elemental orientations: matter, molecule, milieu and media. Our aim is to consider what is at stake in efforts to think with, across and beyond these orientations. Avoiding any reduction of the elements to a single ontological or epistemological proposition, we explore possibilities for grasping their implication in the composition and decomposition of worlds. Doing this can be facilitated by thinking about these worlds in relation to three interrelated matters of concern: specificities, exposures and alchemies.

Cultural geographies II: In the critical zone? – Environments, landscapes and life

“…As a recent article in this journal by Engelmann and McCormack (2021: 1423) observed, diverse elemental scholarship negotiates tensions between the elements as something specific (earth, air, fire, water or chemical elements, for example), and something excessive, something that ‘remains withdrawn from and exceeds’ epistemic habits of technoscientific or conceptual reductionism. As Engelmann and McCormack (2021) and others (e.g. Hawkins 2020) observe, future elemental geographies might do well to look elsewhere other than the Western pre-Socratic thinkers for their understandings of matter and life.…”

Follow the thing: Air rights

“…The second framing understands ‘air rights’ as the right to urban airs (e.g., breathing) and sky (e.g., access to sunlight and landscapes) (Gibson-Graham et al, 2016). Urban airs are key depositories of chemical circulations from densification processes; sources of life support (Engelmann and McCormack, 2021; Graham, 2015); and sites where territorial tensions between urban commons and private enclosures unfold. From breathing to access to sunlight, air rights chart the geospatial trajectories that not only reveal the relationship across airs as biophysical commons; industrial effluvia, and respiratory vulnerabilities but also the relevant monitoring and documentation of such elemental ecologies serve as an actionable agenda of commoning (Zee, 2021).…”

Sensing weather and climate: Phenomenological and ethnographic approaches

“…Our approach contributes to an ongoing debate in geography and beyond concerning the phenomenal nature of weather and climate (Barry et al, 2020;Diaconu, 2022;Hitchings, 2022;Horn, 2018;Neimanis and Walker, 2014;Schnegg, 2019;Verlie, 2022) and sensing (Engelmann, 2020;Förster, 2021;Gabrys, 2019;McCormack, 2008;McCormack and Engelmann, 2021). How are weather and climate experienced (differently)?…”