The contributors to Kin draw on the work of anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose (1946-2018), a foundational voice in environmental humanities, to examine the relationships of interdependence and obligation between human and nonhuman lives. Through a close engagement over many decades with the Aboriginal communities of Yarralin and Lingara in northern Australia, Rose's work explored possibilities for entangled forms of social and environmental justice. She sought to bring the insights of her Indigenous teachers into dialogue with the humanities and the natural sciences to describe and passionately advocate for a world of kin grounded in a profound sense of the connectivities and relationships that hold us together. Kin's contributors take up Rose's conceptual frameworks, often pushing academic fields beyond their traditional objects and methods of study. Together, the essays do more than pay tribute to Rose's scholarship; they extend her ideas and underscore her ongoing critical and ethical relevance for a world still enduring and resisting ecocide and genocide.
Contributors. The Bawaka Collective, Matthew Chrulew, Colin Dayan, Linda Payi Ford, Donna Haraway, James Hatley, Owain Jones, Stephen Muecke, Kate Rigby, Catriona (Cate) Sandilands, Isabelle Stengers, Anna Tsing, Thom van Dooren, Kate Wright
Industry Reviews
"Deborah Bird Rose created an expansive scholarly field underpinned by interconnections, the affirmation of life, and love and responsibility as analytics. Invited to such a challenging field, the stories in this book carefully labor across a heterogeneity of forms of life and nonlife to reshuffle biological, political, and historical boundaries and creatively open possibility for a plethora of interconnected differences, pragmatic boundaries without a center. Caring for the Earth as Country, this artfully crafted collection meets Rose's most urgent demand: becoming a witness of death that asserts life through an ethical practice that is always already ecological." - Marisol de la Cadena, author of (Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds) "Rose's thought is timely now more than ever. This collection is a testimony to the vitality of their work for the present and challenges ahead that will involve relearning to be one among lifescapes of other beings rather than a social atom." - Christopher Blakley (Science as Culture) "I was provoked and challenged by the diversity of this collection. . . ." - David Moore (Indigenous Religious Traditions)