This book explores the emerging field of political geology, an area of study dedicated to understanding the cross-sections between geology and politics. It considers how geological forces such as earthquakes, volcanoes, and unstable ground are political forces and how political forces have an impact on the earth. Together the authors seek to understand how the geos has been known, spoken for, captured, controlled and represented while creating the active underlying strata for producing worlds.
This comprehensive collection covers a variety of interdisciplinary topics including the history of the geological sciences, non-Western theories of geology, the origin of the earth, and the relationship between humans and nature. It includes chapters that re-think the earth's 'geostory' as well as case studies on the politics of earthquakes in Mexico city, shamans on an Indonesian volcano, geologists at Oxford, and eroding islands in Japan. In each case political geology is attentive to the encounters between political projects and the generative geological materials that are enlisted and often slip, liquefy or erode away. This book will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners across the political and geographical sciences, as well as to philosophers of science, anthropologists and sociologists more broadly.
This book builds on the enthusiasm for the geological generated by the Anthropocene but expand beyond it in three ways. First, it will probe deeper into the politics, history, and contemporary practices of the geological sciences as a way of thinking, representing, and communicating the geos. This will open up the history of the earth sciences as a science that has been fundamentally imbricated with politics and that its politics has been one of making the geological sensible. Second, it will consider in detail geologies that are volatile and vulnerable and that because of this are subject to practices of governance. Finally, it will multiply the tradition of geological thought in the sciences by considering subaltern, amodern, vernacular, and counter traditions of geological practice and science and its political resonances. This volume will consider these three frameworks through essays historical, ethnographic and conceptual, mindful of the richness of empirical detail and the innovative consequences of looking at the intersections of geology and politics.
The book brings together key thinkers on geological politics and political geology as well as emerging topics in human and cultural geography. It will include ten clearly structured chapters, and will seek to solidify a field of inquiry that is of interest to geographers, philosophers of science, anthropologists and sociologists.
