Two proposals

I thought it would be a good idea to create a blog in order to commit some of my ideas to writing. For my first posting, I'll share two proposals I've recently written for academic projects. The first is for the 33rd International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. The second is for a book on "learning for sustainability in times of accelerating change." Both proposals originate from my interest in asking critical questions about how we conceive of and represent "Nature," especially in light of emerging sustainability movements and the urgency of developing viable cultural alternatives to globalized consumerism.

"The Eden that Beckons Us" is an examination of Paolo Bacigalupi's "biopunk" novel The Windup Girl (2009). In the proposal below, I try to develop a sympathetic reading of the text, but I'm not sure if it'll hold up after I reread it. In other words, there are a few images in The Windup Girl that might be somewhat difficult to make sense of, especially the character Gibbons, a genetic-engineer who is depicted as a gay, syphilitic pedophile. I'm not sure whether the novel perpetuates or unravels the "queer against Nature" myth...




Paper proposal for The 33rd International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts: “The Monstrous Fantastic”

“The Eden that Beckons Us”: Unraveling Organic Wholeness in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl

The globalized production, distribution, and consumption of food constellate a series of interrelated ethical and political concerns such as cultural autonomy, social and economic justice, animal rights, biodiversity, and ecological integrity. The negative consequences of the current agribusiness food system include the intense confinement and unnecessary suffering of animals, massive expenditure of energy and material resources, exploitation of labor, genetic monoculture, and erosion of community. In response, consumers increasingly demand organic, locally grown, fairly traded, and humanely produced foods.


Like many strands of environmentalism, however, the emerging food counterculture often employs a lapsarian narrative of humanity’s fall from an imagined state of organic wholeness. (Consider for example the simulacral images of pastoral scenes and edenic farmlands that adorn organic products on supermarket shelves.) While a powerful imaginative device, this mode of thought reveals its limitations when confronted with the difficult choices involved in responsibly marshaling technological and scientific resources to feed a burgeoning global population that has already diminished Earth’s life support systems. This dilemma is dramatized in Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Windup Girl (2009), which depicts a biosphere irrevocably altered by “calorie companies” using genetic engineering to gain a stranglehold on the world’s food markets. The novel’s protagonists inhabit an environment ravaged by bioengineered plagues against which the only defense is to genetically-engineer foodstuffs resistant to mutating diseases – there is no turning back the clock to a prelapsarian food system.


Bacigalupi’s text is at least part cautionary tale against the marriage of corporate agribusiness and genetic engineering, but with its emphasis on human relationships with artificial and engineered life forms, The Windup Girl asks its reader to take up what Donna Haraway calls the “skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life.” The proposed paper will investigate how the novel critiques the current global industrial food system while simultaneously challenging binary categories of thought such as organic/inorganic and natural/artificial. Moving beyond the rhetoric and politics of “Frankenfood,” The Windup Girl presents artificial life forms outside of antagonistic dualisms, and, if “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion,” the novel demands we reconsider our stance toward the artificial in a finite and fragmented world.




Chapter proposal for Learning for Sustainability in Times of Accelerating Change

"Welcome to the Anthropocene": Ecological Ontology in Times of Accelerating Change

The proliferation of digital media and information technologies, coupled with the expansion of our built physical and virtual environments, creates a crisis for traditional understandings and representations of "Nature," even as nature itself exists in a state of ecological crisis. Humans, especially in the world's most technologically-developed countries, inhabit ambiguously natural and crafted environments in which intact or unappropriated ecosystems are either non-existent or have been pushed far outside the possibilities of immediate lived experience. As Timothy Morton observes, "We're losing the ground under our feet. In philosophical language, we're losing not only 'ontological' levels of meaningfulness. We're losing the 'ontic,' the actual physical level we trusted for so long. Imagine all the air we breathe becoming unbreathable" (31).


I do not contest what Katherine Hayles calls the "fragility of a material world that cannot be replaced" (49), a finite biophysical world within which we and other organisms are enmeshed and upon which we ultimately depend for our flourishing. However, informed by a growing chorus of scholarship that questions the ontological utility of our predominant conception of Nature, I contend that the traditional lapsarian narrative of humanity's fall from an imagined state of organic wholeness, as well as the anti-technological politics associated with this cultural myth, reveals its inadequacy when confronted with the complexity of our current social reality.


The fiction of a return to organic wholeness fails to provide the imaginative and analytical tools to make sense of the ecological crisis, which is ultimately a crisis of failed relationships between humans, between humans and other organisms, and between humans and machines. Our work then is not to restore the Garden, but to understand and care for the asymmetric relationships with near and far-flung people, places, organisms, and things in which we are instantiated. As Morton writes, "Ecology is about relating not to Nature, but to aliens and ghosts."


The proposed chapter will argue that our present moment necessitates new ecological ontologies that "must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness," but about the "power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world" (Haraway 175). The proposed chapter will explore a heterogeneous array of efforts to develop new ecological ontologies appropriate to our current moment of accelerating change, including Deleuze and Guattari's "rhizome," Donna Haraway's "cyborg," Bernard Stiegler's "epiphylogenesis," and Timothy Morton's "dark ecology."

Works Cited

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.


Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1999.


Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009. Print.


Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2010. Print.