Methods to Study Gaps: The Ethics of the Invisible

• In Event: Something from Nothing: Exploring Non-discovery and Negative Claims

Abstract

Haraway (2015, p. 160) mourns “irreversible losses” in the Chthulucene – constituted in time and space. Over time, extinct species leave gaps in the ecological system of living beings that biological sciences are still trying to disentangle. Yet, the infinity of small and large scales may render this work forever incomplete.

In the quest to decentre the human towards a post-anthropocentric worldview (Forlano, 2016, 2017; Light, Powell, & Shklovski, 2017), we critique some of the emerging repercussions. Legal personhood was bestowed on the Whanganui river in New Zealand, and the Ganga and Yamuna rivers in India. While introducing legal rights for nature is a welcome move, the very notion of personhood is problematic. Not only does it give a natural entity, a “river,” legal rights akin to a citizen or corporation to “enter and enforce contracts, and the ability to hold property” (O’Donnell & Talbot-Jones, 2017), the river’s delineation as “person” risks overlooking the very entanglement of and with nature.

We explore an alternative perspective: Other parts of academia have come to peace with the ontological impossibility of accounting for the complex fidelity of reality’s entanglements. In historiography, losses and gaps are studied as a way to approximate a distributed (and contentious) world narrative over time (Hewitson, 2014). Learning from historiographic methods for studying historic gaps, we seek to approach an appreciation of how gaps and absence can draw attention to the fallacy of human exceptionalism. This pathway may offer new epistemological understandings that focus on the aesthetics and ethics of the invisible.


References

Forlano, L. (2016). Decentering the Human in the Design of Collaborative Cities. Design Issues, 32(3), 42–54.

Forlano, L. (2017). Posthumanism and Design. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 3(1), 16–29.

Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: Making kin. Environmental Humanities, 6(1), 159–165.

Hewitson, M. (2014). History and Causality. Springer.

Light, A., Powell, A., & Shklovski, I. (2017). Design for Existential Crisis in the Anthropocene Age. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Communities and Technologies (pp. 270–279). ACM.

O’Donnell, E., & Talbot-Jones, J. (2017, March 24). Three rivers are now legally people--but that’s just the start of looking after them. The Conversation.

Authors

• Marcus Foth, Queensland University of Technology

• Ann Light, University of Sussex

• Sara Heitlinger, Newcastle University

• Aleesha Joy Rodriguez, Queensland University Of Technology