Traces “We” Leave Behind: Toward the Feminist Practice of Stig(e)merging

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37536/ECOZONA.2020.11.2.3487

Keywords:

environmental humanities, waste, feminism, multispecies communities, Anthropocene

Abstract

      As Serpil Oppermann has stated “the Anthropocene has come to signify a discourse embedded in the global scale vision of the sedimentary traces of the anthropos” (“The Scale of the Anthropocene” 2). In the following article we wish to revisit the practice of leaving traces through thinking with wastes as traces human beings leave behind and lands of waste that co-compose today’s naturecultures (Haraway, Companion Species). Situating our research in the context of Polish ecocriticism, we would like to think-with an art project by Diana Lelonek entitled Center for the Living Things, in which the artist gathers and exhibits waste that “have become the natural environment for many living organisms” (Lelonek). Following the ambivalent and chaotic traces of wastes, we offer a concept of stig(e)merging to rethink the “unruly edges” (Tsing 141-54) of capitalist wastelands. We fathom stig(e)merging as a feminist methodology that relies on reacting to changes and alterations in the milieu, as well as the actions and needs of others, and on participating in the common work of reshaping the un/wasted world together with them.

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Author Biographies

Monika Rogowska-Stangret, University of Bialystok

Assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy, University of Białystok. Her research is situated at the intersection of feminist philosophy, environmental humanities, and posthumanism. Monika was a member of the Management Committee in the European project “New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’”, European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST), Action IS 1307 (2013-2018). She published in Feminist Theory (forthcoming), Philosophy Today (2019), The Minnesota Review: A Journal of Creative and Critical Writing (2017). She co-edited journal special issue of Social Sciences on “Feminist new materialisms: Activating ethico-politics through genealogies in social sciences” (2019). With her long-time collaborator, Olga Cielemęcka, they are editors of a section “Praxiography*: Practices and Institutions” in a new journal Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research.  They have also received grants from ERSTE Stiftung and WUS Austria (in the frames of PATTERNS Lectures programme) and from the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. 

Olga Cielemęcka, Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Turku

She is a Turku Institute for Advanced Studies postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Gender Studies, University of Turku in Finland. Her work brings together contemporary philosophy, feminist, and queer approaches into a reflection on environmental change. She published in Journal of Gender Studies, Somatechnics, and Theory, Culture, & Society. She is the co-editor of the special issue on “Toxic Embodiment” of Environmental Humanities (2019) and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience, “Plantarium: Human-Vegetal Ecologies” (2019). Olga’s current research project focuses on the intersection of nature, nation, and gender in the Białowieża Forest in Poland. With her long-time collaborator, Monika Rogowska-Stangret, they have co-authored several articles and a volume on new materialisms (2018), and have been committed to creating spaces for cultivating feminist theory in Poland.

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Published

2020-09-30

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 2 (2020): 2020 Ecocriticism: In Europe and Beyond

Section

Articles: New Ecocritical Practices

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