Learning to feel at home in the Anthropocene:

Abstract

In the deserts of Southern California, a series of climate crises has disturbed the form and content of the ordinary. In this context of unfolding change, Californians are experimenting with the spaces, surfaces, objects, and infrastructures of their homes, harnessing the material elements of the house as a site not only of repetition and reproduction but also of reinvention. At times, these experiments in the ecologies of everyday life unleash a range of transformative effects on both self and world, accreting into instances of cosmological reconfiguration. Rather than analyze such experiments as practices of adaptation or recovery, we can better understand them as attempts to cultivate alternative ways of feeling at home in the Anthropocene. Such experiments take up the relations among aesthetics, ethics, and affect as their primary site of improvisation and innovation.

Vegetal Agency in Street Tree Stewardship Practices: People-Plant Involutions Within Urban Green Infrastructure in New York City

“…Myers’ (2017) emphasis on affect, however, and the notion that humans and plants might conspire together, also invites us to consider the limits of available concepts such as stewardship or labor (Besky and Blanchette 2019). Taking everyday practice as a site of affective and ethical experimentation (Anjaria 2020; Lewis 2015; Vine 2018), I wish to consider what else might be emerging from the entanglement of humans and trees amidst New York City's “ruderal ecology” (Stoetzer 2018) of diverse people and plants, climate change and adaptation, neoliberal governance, and environmental stewardship. In so doing I seek to advance ethnobiological inquiry regarding the role of cities in human-plant relations (Emery and Hurley 2016).…”

Awakening from the sleep-walking society: Crisis, detachment and the real in prepper awakening narratives

“…The bringing in of the food bank and the vulnerability it is compiled to abate, the materialized future-present traces of food shortages, power outages, or medical supply interruptions, seemed to sediment objects symbolising risk and anxiety within the home. As preppers come to practice and experiment with forms of infrastructural autonomy, configuring the home as a site for survival experiments (Vine, 2018), it becomes somewhere between a present-day home and a space adaptive to an anticipated future landscape of scarcity. Preppers furnish this meeting point, the line between the homely and unhomely, the comfortable and estranged, not to challenge but to rebuild a sense of home as a place of security and comfort.…”

Experimenting with fog: Environmental infrastructures, infrastructuring environments, and the infrastructure of infrastructure

“…Ethnographers have increasingly adopted the term experiment to get at the sometimes unanticipated effects occasioned when multiple elements become differently assembled (Fortun, 2003;Jensen and Morita, 2015;Vine, 2018). The term is useful for elucidating how, rather than imposed from elsewhere, concepts are sometimes issued forth practically through situated encounters between disparate more-than-human processes.…”

“…Ethnographers have given myriad examples of how infrastructures enfold entities and processes that are rarely associated with the infrastructural. To describe these socio-material configurations, scholars have drawn upon notions such as “multispecies infrastructure” (Morita, 2017), “environmental infrastructure” (Jensen, 2015), “landscape as infrastructure” (Bélanger, 2009), “nonhuman life as infrastructure” (Barua, 2020), and “nature as infrastructure” (Carse, 2012; Wakefield, 2020).…”