A new collection from one of Latin America's most dynamic radical thinkers—in the tradition of Frantz Fanon and Eduardo Galeano. Constructing Worlds Otherwise sets itself against the recolonization of Latin America by one-dimensional, ethnocentric perspectives that permeate the North American left and block fundamental social change in the Global South. In a provocative mix of polemic and on-the-ground analysis, Raúl Zibechi argues that it is time for radicals in the Global North to learn from the people their governments have colonized and oppressed for centuries. Through a survey of the most marginalized voices across Latin America—feminists, the Indigenous, people of African descent, and inhabitants of urban favelas and shantytowns—he introduces the Anglo world to a range of critical perspectives and new forms of struggle. For Zibechi, real change comes from “societies in movement,” the people already fighting for their survival using egalitarian and traditional models of world-building, without the state, without official representatives, and without vanguards of political experts. His book contributes to global geographies of autonomous and anti-state thinking, with Zibechi placing his work in conversation with the ideological theorist of Kurdish resistance, Abdullah Öcalan, for a rich and dynamic survey of global movements of decolonization. Now more urgent than ever, this translation by George Ygarza Quispe comes at a time when the global left—struggling to expand its vision in a time of climate chaos and rising authoritarianism—finds itself at an impasse, desperate to animate and renew its critical imaginary.

Honorable Mention, Best Book in Latin American Visual Culture Studies, Latin American Studies Association–Visual Culture Studies Section, 2023 Extractivism has increasingly become the ground on which activists and scholars in Latin America frame the dynamics of ecological devastation, accumulation of wealth, and erosion of rights. These maladies are the direct consequences of long-standing extraction-oriented economies, and more recently from the expansion of the extractive frontier and the implementation of new technologies in the extraction of fossil fuels, mining, and agriculture. But the fields of sociology, political ecology, anthropology, and geography have largely ignored the role of art and cultural practices in studies of extractivism and post-extractivism. The field of art theory, on the other hand, has offered a number of texts that put forward insightful analyses of artwork addressing extraction, environmental devastation, and the climate crisis. However, an art theory perspective that does not engage firsthand and in depth with collective action remains limited and fails to provide an account of the role, processes, and politics of art in anti- and post-extractivist movements. Creating Worlds Otherwise examines the narratives that subaltern groups generate around extractivism, and how they develop, communicate, and mobilize these narratives through art and cultural practices. It reports on a six-year project on creative resistance to extractivism in Argentina and builds on long-term engagement working on environmental justice projects and campaigns in Argentina and the UK. It is an innovative contribution to the fields of Latin American studies, political ecology, cultural studies, and art theory, and addresses pressing questions regarding what post-extractivist worlds might look like as well as how such visions are put into practice.

In her book A World Otherwise: Environmental Praxis in Minamata, Yuki Miyamoto examines the struggles of those suffering from Minamata disease, eponymous with the Japanese city in which a Chisso factory released methylmercury into the Shiranui Sea, leading to widespread poisonings. Miyamoto explores Minamata sufferers’ struggles, examining their physical pains as well as the emotional plight of having lost their loved ones, their livelihood, and fellowship in communities, to the illness. Miyamoto’s analysis focuses on the philosophies and actions of a group, Hongan no kai, comprised of Minamata disease sufferers and their supporters in 1994. Relying on the group’s newsletter, “Tamashii utsure” (Transferring the spirit), this monograph explores the ways in which Hongan no kai members have come to terms with their experiences as well as their visions of “a world otherwise” (janaka shaba), where ontology, epistemology, and worldviews are construed differently from those of this modern world.

Ecological crisis is being widely discussed in society today and therefore, the subject of religious naturalism has emerged as a major topic in religion. The Routledge Handbook of Religious Naturalism is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems, and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising thirty-four chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into seven parts: • Varieties of religious naturalism and its relations to other outlooks • Some earlier religious naturalists • Pantheism, materialism, and the value-ladenness of nature • Ecology, humans, and politics in naturalistic perspective • Religious naturalism and traditional religions • Putting religious naturalism into practice • Critical discussions of religious naturalism. Within these sections central issues, debates, and problems are examined, including: defining religious naturalism; religious underpinnings of ecology; natural piety; the religious-aesthetic; ecstatic naturalism as deep pantheism; spiritual ecology; African-American religious naturalism; Christian religious naturalism; Dao and water; Confucianism; environmental action; and practices in religious naturalism. The Routledge Handbook of Religious Naturalism is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies, theology, and philosophy. The Handbook will also be useful for those in related fields, such as environmental ethics and ecology.

Following World War II the American government and philanthropic foundations fundamentally remade American universities into sites for producing knowledge about the world as a collection of distinct nation-states. As neoliberal reforms took hold in the 1980s, visions of the world made popular within area studies and international studies found themselves challenged by ideas and educational policies that originated in business schools and international financial institutions. Academics within these institutions reimagined the world instead as a single global market and higher education as a commodity to be bought and sold. By the 1990s, American universities embraced this language of globalization, and globalization eventually became the organizing logic of higher education. In Making the World Global Isaac A. Kamola examines how the relationships among universities, the American state, philanthropic organizations, and international financial institutions created the conditions that made it possible to imagine the world as global. Examining the Center for International Studies, Harvard Business School, the World Bank, the Social Science Research Council, and NYU, Kamola demonstrates that how we imagine the world is always symptomatic of the material relations within which knowledge is produced.

How digital networks are positioned within the enduring structures of coloniality The revolutionary aspirations that fueled decolonization circulated on paper—as pamphlets, leaflets, handbills, and brochures. Now—as evidenced by movements from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter—revolutions, protests, and political dissidence are profoundly shaped by information circulating through digital networks. Digital Unsettling is a critical exploration of digitalization that puts contemporary “decolonizing” movements into conversation with theorizations of digital communication. Sahana Udupa and Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan interrogate the forms, forces, and processes that have reinforced neocolonial relations within contemporary digital environments, at a time when digital networks—and the agendas and actions they proffer—have unsettled entrenched hierarchies in unforeseen ways. Digital Unsettling examines events—the toppling of statues in the UK, the proliferation of #BLM activism globally, the rise of Hindu nationalists in North America, the trolling of academics, among others—and how they circulated online and across national boundaries. In doing so, Udupa and Dattatreyan demonstrate how the internet has become the key site for an invigorated anticolonial internationalism, but has simultaneously augmented conditions of racial hierarchy within nations, in the international order, and in the liminal spaces that shape human migration and the lives of those that are on the move. Digital Unsettling establishes a critical framework for placing digitalization within the longue durée of coloniality, while also revealing the complex ways in which the internet is entwined with persistent global calls for decolonization.

"How do people live in a time after promises of progress have revealed themselves to be empty? In Futures after Progress, anthropologist Chloe Ahmann examines the grave, lethal threat posed by long-term air pollution in Baltimore, MD. Focusing on the industrialized community of Curtis Bay-ranked first in the country for air pollutants released from stationary sources-she examines competing visions of the future and the severe human toll they can take. Examining the rifts between white and Black communities, advocates of big industry and environmental activists, and older and younger generations, Ahmann shows how this community has become a battleground in which lives lost to pollution are seen by some as a regrettable side effect on the road to economic renewal. A rigorous, moving study of environmental risk and disaster, this book offers deep insights for our current condition and the possibility of a postindustrial world"--

What might it mean to “unsettle” our disciplinary understanding of race, nature, and the environment? This book assembles diverse voices and approaches in geographic thinking on race and racialization during an era of climate crisis, toxic legacies, state violence, mass extinctions, carceral logics, and racial injustices that shape—and are shaped by—the (re)production of nature. The volume advances new critical scholarship on race and racialization in Anglo-American geography; reflects on its uneven diffusion and unmet challenges; and notes the unstoppable force of insurgent thinking, abolition geography, critical race theory, Black and Indigenous geographies, scholar activism, and environmental justice praxis in taking hold and transforming the discipline. Together, the authors work across the vibrant fields of political ecology and human–environment geography; grapple with timely questions of land, water, territory, and place-making; render visible the spatial and socioecological reproduction of power and violence by capital and the state; and make space for the enduring politics of struggle on multiple registers—body, home, classroom, park, city, community, region, and world. Race, Nature, and the Environment will interest students, academics, and researchers in Geography who are keen to learn about disciplinary approaches and debates in relation to race, racialization, environmental justice, and the politics of nature in a world marked by white supremacy. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

If we see that our contemporary condition is one of war and widely diffused complexity, how do we understand our most basic ethical motivations? What might be the aims of our political activity? A War on People takes up these questions and offers a glimpse of a possible alternative future in this ethnographically and theoretically rich examination of the activity of some unlikely political actors: users of heroin and crack cocaine, both active and former. The result is a groundbreaking book on how anti–drug war political activity offers transformative processes that are termed worldbuilding and enacts nonnormative, open, and relationally inclusive alternatives to such key concepts as community, freedom, and care.

Long-sighted, radical and provocative, this book offers a foundational framework of concepts, principles and methods (exemplified with selected tools) to enable metadesigners to manage and reinvent their practices. The book reminds readers that designers are, albeit unwittingly, helping to shape the Anthropocene. Despite their willingness to deliver greener products and services, designers find themselves part of an industry that has become the go-to catalyst for dividends and profit. If our species is to achieve the rehabilitation and metamorphosis, we may need to design at the level of paradigms, genres, lifestyles and currencies. This would mean making design more integrated, comprehensive, adaptive, transdisciplinary, self-reflexive and relational. The book, therefore, advocates a shift of emphasis from designing ‘sustainable’ products, services and systems towards cultivating synergies that will induce regenerative lifestyles. The book will be of interest to managers, designers, scholars and educators from a wide range of backgrounds, including design research, design history, design studies and environmental studies.