Monthly Archives: June 2024

Michaela Büsse (bio) Abstract This essay discusses the author’s experience doing field work in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, and suggests that the messy entanglements between sand mining, real estate development, and local life afford an analysis that is both situated in and attentive to the global economies of sand. Thinking along the ecological, social, […]

Mareike Winchell (bio) Abstract The boundaries of fieldwork not only define the scope of research but also circumscribe and delimit the bounds of responsibility. This essay proposes a return to the whereness of the field as an antidote to treating the powers of description and historical dispersal as absolute and uncontested. Linking classic critiques of […]

Jeff Diamanti, Guest Editor (bio) This special issue of Postmodern Culture gathers scholars in the environmental and critical humanities developing advanced, practice-based methodologies and critical theories of field research. Traditionally, “the field” of research has been treated as the raw material from which objects and cases are drawn in order to advance knowledge in a […]

Fred Carter (bio) Abstract Grounded in the material and historical specificity of the Durham Coalfield, this essay engages two unlikely modes of field theory: the vein of radical poetry associated with the “open field” in the 1970s, and the parallel resurgence of a vernacular Marxism committed to reorienting the critique of capital “from below.” Tracing […]

Maria Sledmere (bio) Abstract Building on Daniel Eltringham’s notion of the “kinetic commons,” this essay offers “meadowing” as an experiment in putting to creative-critical work the multi-sensory dreamscape of abundance, desire, exposure, and biodiversity signified by meadow. Through close readings of contemporary texts by Verity Spott, Tom Raworth, and Myung Mi Kim, and drawing on Sedgwick’s […]

Michaela Büsse is a postdoctoral researcher at the Technische Universität Dresden working with the Chair of Digital Cultures, and Associated Investigator in the cluster of excellence “Matters of Activity. Image Space Material” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research focuses on sociomaterial transformations in the context of speculative urbanism, climate change mitigation, and energy transition. Drawing on […]