N Clark
Biographic Data
| ID | 37795 |
|---|---|
| NAME | N Clark |
| GIVEN NAMES | N |
| FAMILY NAME | Clark |
| SIGNATURE | CLARK N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lancaster University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6666-1739 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 514 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
From the Anthropocene to Geoanthropology
This interview with Nigel Clark (which took place in June 2025), conducted by Giovanni Fava and Justas Patkauskas, explores the concept of geoanthropology in relation to Clark’s longstanding engagement with geophilosophy and inhuman geography. Emerging from the Anthropocene debates, geoanthropology investigates the shifting relations between the planet and its human and non-human inhabitants. The conversation considers key concepts in this framew…
Dis-ordnance
Our commentary picks up on Mikko Joronen's use of the interface between weather and the earth to frame his account of Israel's violent appropriation of Palestinian space. Taking a more general approach, we propose that modern warfare moves between the Earth system and geological strata. Our main concern is the way climate change is stirring up and redistributing the wastes of war both spatially and temporally. In conversation with Joronen's case …
For a paleogeography of childcare
What happens to the mundane practice of carrying infants if we situate it in the context of intensifying climate change and a deep past of geoclimatic instability? This article takes the resurgence of baby slings in the United Kingdom as an entry point into the deep, evolutionary history of child carrying and, in this way, as a prompt for an experiment in repurposing the field of paleogeography. This involves viewing the technics of the baby slin…
Thinking through the Earth
In this short response, we engage with four generous and stimulating commentaries on our Planetary Social Thought (2021). We endorse Cecilia Åsberg's suggestion that the boundary between the environmental humanities and social sciences is dissolving – but also call for more inventive relations between these disciplines and the natural sciences. We discuss László Cseke's account of the rise of factory-farmed ‘broiler’ chickens as a reversal of man…
An Anthropocene species of trouble? Negative synergies between earth system change and geological destratification
It is already well understood that unbinding materials and energy from their lithic reservoirs impacts upon Earth systems. But that is just the first stage of a cycle of 'Anthropocene trouble'. This paper tracks the multiple ways in which subsequent Earth system change reacts back upon the social infrastructures of subsurface exploitation and the landscapes they produce. Shifting fire regimes, intensifying hydrometeorological events and sea level…
Planetary Cities
Whereas recent framings of planetary urbanization stress the planet-scaled impacts of contemporary urban processes, we might also conceive of cities as being constitutively 'planetary' from their very outset. This article looks at two ways in which the earliest urban centres or 'civilizations' on the floodplains of the Fertile Crescent harnessed the deep, geological forces of the Earth. The first is the tapping and channelling of sedimentary proc…
A Solid Fluids Lexicon
In our discussions around the theme of solid fluids, we often resort to everyday words, many of them of ancient derivation and rich in association. We have decided to make a list of some of the words that come up most often - barring those that already figure as the principal characters of individual contributions - and to distribute among ourselves the task of writing a sort of mini-biography for each. The resulting lexicon with 19 entries, rang…
Introduction
The development of the environmental humanities as an interdisciplinary formation is a response to an ecological and planetary crisis [...]
Vertical fire
(Un)Earthing Civilization
Today, concern about population displacement triggered by climate change is prompting some sovereign states to tighten security measures, as well as inciting ethically and politically motivated calls to relax border controls. This paper explores resonances between the current climate predicament and events in the mid-Holocene. Paleoclimatic and archaeological evidence is reviewed, suggesting that an abrupt turn to cooler, drier weather in the 4th…
Anthropocene semiosis
While affirming their more-than-human concerns, Ruddick ((2017) Rethinking the subject, reimagining worlds. Dialogues in Human Geography (this issue).) proposes that there are limits to the capacity of relational ontologies to deal with the conflicting demands and extensive temporalities of the Anthropocene crisis. This commentary probes her alternative notions of a forcefulness and generativity that exceeds individuated bodies and of a semiosis …
Earthing the Anthropos? From 'socializing the Anthropocene' to geologizing the social
Responding to claims of Anthropocene geoscience that humans are now geological agents, social scientists are calling for renewed attention to the social, cultural, political and historical differentiation of the Anthropos. But does this leave critical social thought's own key concepts and categories unperturbed by the Anthropocene provocation to think through dynamic earth processes? Can we 'socialize the Anthropocene' without also opening 'the s…
An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz
This article is an interview with Elizabeth Grosz by Kathryn Yusoff and Nigel Clark. It primarily addresses Grosz's approaches to 'geopower', and the discussion encompasses an exploration of her ideas on biopolitics, inhuman forces and material experimentation. Grosz describes geopower as a force that subtends the possibility of politics. The interview is accompanied by a brief contextualizing introduction examining the themes of geophilosophy an…
Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene
For at least two centuries most social thought has taken the earth to be the stable platform upon which dynamic social processes play out. Both climate change and the Anthropocene thesis - with their enfolding of dramatic geologic change into the space-time of social life - are now provoking social thinkers into closer engagement with earth science. After revisiting the decisive influence of the late 18th-century notion of geological formations o…
Politics of Strata
Modern western political thought revolves around globality, focusing on the partitioning and the connecting up of the earth's surface. But climate change and the Anthropocene thesis raise pressing questions about human interchange with the geological and temporal depths of the earth. Drawing on contemporary earth science and the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, this article explores how geological strata are emerging as provocations for pol…
Relational ontologies and the ground of life
This commentary on Irus Braverman’s Wild Life (2015) and Jamie Lorimer’s Wildlife in the Anthropocene (2015), raises some questions about the movement between the authors’ own relational ontologies and the pragmatic or improvised ontologies that surface in their respective ethnographic accounts. It also asks whether an apparent allegiance to an undefiled `Nature’ on the part of some conservationists might be viewed not only in terms of relational…
Metamorphoses
This is a reply to:Conway, Philip. 2016. “Back down to Earth: reassembling Latour’s Anthropocenic geopolitics.” Global Discourse 6 (1–2): 43–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2015.1004247
Combustion and Society
Fire is a force that links everyday human activities to some of the most powerful energetic movements of the Earth. Drawing together the energy-centred social theory of Georges Bataille, the fire-centred environmental history of Stephen Pyne, and the work of a number of ‘pyrotechnology’ scholars, the paper proposes that the generalized study of combustion is a key to contextualizing human energetic practices within a broader ‘economy’ of terrestr…
Mobile Life
Recent decades have seen a series of high-profile public health crises involving viruses, bacteria and other biological agents, together with escalating concern over impacts of biological invasion on crops and ecosystems. In the context of intensifying globalization, such hazards are being viewed as serious ‘security’ threats. For critical social theorists, this growing concern with biosecurity at the global scale has worrying implications, in th…
Sex, politics and inhuman artistry
This commentary argues that one of the strengths of Dixon et al.'s (2012) paper is the way that it pushes a concern with inhuman entities and processes far beyond any entanglement with human lives. This takes us on a turn – strangely rare in human geography – from life or vitality into the realms of minerality. It is suggested that what makes this possible is the authors' refreshing willingness to explore aesthetic and ontological questions witho…
Everything but the earth
Rock, Life, Fire
If origins are as complex and perturbing as Derrida suggests, then we might ask of the current anthropic environmental predicament: what kind of planet is it that gives birth to a creature capable of doing such things? Biological life may be at its liveliest along the earth's sutures and fault-lines. But so too is fire. If humans are a fire species, then this is a fire planet. From the point of view of a ‘speculative geophysics’, our combustive h…
Ex-orbitant Generosity
Volatile Worlds, Vulnerable Bodies
The abrupt climate change thesis suggests that climate passes through threshold transitions, after which change is sudden, runaway and unstoppable. This concurs with recent themes in complexity studies. Data from ice cores indicates that major shifts in global climate regimes have occurred in as little as a decade, and that for most of the span of human existence the climate has oscillated much more violently than it has over the last 10,000 year…
The Epochal Event
"The Epochal Event: Transformations in the Entangled Human, Technological, and Natural Worlds." The AAG Review of Books, 11(1), pp. 36–37
Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene
For at least two centuries most social thought has taken the earth to be the stable platform upon which dynamic social processes play out. Both climate change and the Anthropocene thesis - with their enfolding of dramatic geologic change into the space-time of social life - are now provoking social thinkers into closer engagement with earth science. After revisiting the decisive influence of the late 18th-century notion of geological formations o…
Politics of Strata
Modern western political thought revolves around globality, focusing on the partitioning and the connecting up of the earth's surface. But climate change and the Anthropocene thesis raise pressing questions about human interchange with the geological and temporal depths of the earth. Drawing on contemporary earth science and the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, this article explores how geological strata are emerging as provocations for pol…
An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz
This article is an interview with Elizabeth Grosz by Kathryn Yusoff and Nigel Clark. It primarily addresses Grosz's approaches to 'geopower', and the discussion encompasses an exploration of her ideas on biopolitics, inhuman forces and material experimentation. Grosz describes geopower as a force that subtends the possibility of politics. The interview is accompanied by a brief contextualizing introduction examining the themes of geophilosophy an…
The Demon-Seed
Spearheaded by Beck and the 'world risk society' thesis, contemporary commentators in search of evidence of political renewal 'from below' have discerned a convergence of environmental and cosmopolitan sensibilities. But through its foregrounding of the destabilization of matter by new technologies, this 'environmental cosmopolitanism' tends to reenact the conventional binary of passive nature and dynamic culture. It is suggested that this expres…
Combustion and Society
Fire is a force that links everyday human activities to some of the most powerful energetic movements of the Earth. Drawing together the energy-centred social theory of Georges Bataille, the fire-centred environmental history of Stephen Pyne, and the work of a number of ‘pyrotechnology’ scholars, the paper proposes that the generalized study of combustion is a key to contextualizing human energetic practices within a broader ‘economy’ of terrestr…
Ex-orbitant Globality
Social theorists, drawing on the study of complex dynamical systems to address global processes, tend to evoke an immanent globality devoid of a constitutive otherness or outside. However, as well as dealing with the internal dynamics of systems, complexity studies point to the mutual implication of systems and their surroundings: a concern that resonates with the interest in the convolutions of the inside-outside relationship prominent in post-s…
Earthing the Anthropos? From 'socializing the Anthropocene' to geologizing the social
Responding to claims of Anthropocene geoscience that humans are now geological agents, social scientists are calling for renewed attention to the social, cultural, political and historical differentiation of the Anthropos. But does this leave critical social thought's own key concepts and categories unperturbed by the Anthropocene provocation to think through dynamic earth processes? Can we 'socialize the Anthropocene' without also opening 'the s…
Volatile Worlds, Vulnerable Bodies
The abrupt climate change thesis suggests that climate passes through threshold transitions, after which change is sudden, runaway and unstoppable. This concurs with recent themes in complexity studies. Data from ice cores indicates that major shifts in global climate regimes have occurred in as little as a decade, and that for most of the span of human existence the climate has oscillated much more violently than it has over the last 10,000 year…
Living through the tsunami
Rock, Life, Fire
If origins are as complex and perturbing as Derrida suggests, then we might ask of the current anthropic environmental predicament: what kind of planet is it that gives birth to a creature capable of doing such things? Biological life may be at its liveliest along the earth's sutures and fault-lines. But so too is fire. If humans are a fire species, then this is a fire planet. From the point of view of a ‘speculative geophysics’, our combustive h…
The Demon-Seed
Spearheaded by Beck and the `world risk society' thesis, contemporary commentators in search of evidence of political renewal `from below' have discerned a convergence of environmental and cosmopolitan sensibilities.But through its foregrounding of the destabilization of matter by new technologies, this `environmental cosmopolitanism' tends to re-enact the conventional binary of passive nature and dynamic culture.It is suggested that this express…
Mobile Life
Recent decades have seen a series of high-profile public health crises involving viruses, bacteria and other biological agents, together with escalating concern over impacts of biological invasion on crops and ecosystems. In the context of intensifying globalization, such hazards are being viewed as serious ‘security’ threats. For critical social theorists, this growing concern with biosecurity at the global scale has worrying implications, in th…
Vertical fire
Ex-orbitant Generosity
Planetary Cities
Whereas recent framings of planetary urbanization stress the planet-scaled impacts of contemporary urban processes, we might also conceive of cities as being constitutively 'planetary' from their very outset. This article looks at two ways in which the earliest urban centres or 'civilizations' on the floodplains of the Fertile Crescent harnessed the deep, geological forces of the Earth. The first is the tapping and channelling of sedimentary proc…
Panic Ecology
L'A. porte son attention sur le phenomene de panique ecologique. Il voit dans certaines analyses d'U. Beck et de J. Baudrillard l'emergence d'un «nouveau catastrophisme». Il etudie le lien entre modernite, desenchantement et preoccupation environnementale. Il montre de quelle maniere la nature, dans la periode actuelle, parait surexposee face aux risques de catastrophe. Il dresse un bilan de l'operation Biosphere II conduite dans l'Arizona aux Et…
A Solid Fluids Lexicon
In our discussions around the theme of solid fluids, we often resort to everyday words, many of them of ancient derivation and rich in association. We have decided to make a list of some of the words that come up most often - barring those that already figure as the principal characters of individual contributions - and to distribute among ourselves the task of writing a sort of mini-biography for each. The resulting lexicon with 19 entries, rang…
Care in the time of catastrophe
(2003). Care in the time of catastrophe: Citizenship, community and the ecological imagination. Journal of Human Rights: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 235-246
Everything but the earth
Nanoplanet
Nanotechnology, or molecular engineering, is a hypothetical productive system based on the precise arrangement of atoms into molecular level devices and macroscale structures. As a response to the current environmental predicament it appears to engage with both long-term, cumulative damage and non-linear runaway accidents. As a complex adaptive system with capacities for self-replication and self-transformation, nanotech has the potential to enga…
Dis-ordnance
Our commentary picks up on Mikko Joronen's use of the interface between weather and the earth to frame his account of Israel's violent appropriation of Palestinian space. Taking a more general approach, we propose that modern warfare moves between the Earth system and geological strata. Our main concern is the way climate change is stirring up and redistributing the wastes of war both spatially and temporally. In conversation with Joronen's case …
Thinking through the Earth
In this short response, we engage with four generous and stimulating commentaries on our Planetary Social Thought (2021). We endorse Cecilia Åsberg's suggestion that the boundary between the environmental humanities and social sciences is dissolving – but also call for more inventive relations between these disciplines and the natural sciences. We discuss László Cseke's account of the rise of factory-farmed ‘broiler’ chickens as a reversal of man…
An Anthropocene species of trouble? Negative synergies between earth system change and geological destratification
It is already well understood that unbinding materials and energy from their lithic reservoirs impacts upon Earth systems. But that is just the first stage of a cycle of 'Anthropocene trouble'. This paper tracks the multiple ways in which subsequent Earth system change reacts back upon the social infrastructures of subsurface exploitation and the landscapes they produce. Shifting fire regimes, intensifying hydrometeorological events and sea level…
Anthropocene semiosis
While affirming their more-than-human concerns, Ruddick ((2017) Rethinking the subject, reimagining worlds. Dialogues in Human Geography (this issue).) proposes that there are limits to the capacity of relational ontologies to deal with the conflicting demands and extensive temporalities of the Anthropocene crisis. This commentary probes her alternative notions of a forcefulness and generativity that exceeds individuated bodies and of a semiosis …
Metamorphoses
This is a reply to:Conway, Philip. 2016. “Back down to Earth: reassembling Latour’s Anthropocenic geopolitics.” Global Discourse 6 (1–2): 43–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2015.1004247
Nicotine withdrawal medications
As an active researcher in the tobacco dependency field for nearly 20 years, I have seen our knowledge of the pathogenesis and pathophysiology of tobacco dependence grow by leaps and bounds. As our knowledge into basic behavioural and physiologic mechanisms has grown, so has our ability to improve treatment tools. Nonetheless, although we have ever more effective tools available which patients can use to help them stop smoking, there is no magic …
Being consoled? Virtual nature and ecological consciousness
Infowar/Ecodefense
Panic Ecology
L'A. porte son attention sur le phenomene de panique ecologique. Il voit dans certaines analyses d'U. Beck et de J. Baudrillard l'emergence d'un «nouveau catastrophisme». Il etudie le lien entre modernite, desenchantement et preoccupation environnementale. Il montre de quelle maniere la nature, dans la periode actuelle, parait surexposee face aux risques de catastrophe. Il dresse un bilan de l'operation Biosphere II conduite dans l'Arizona aux Et…
Nanoplanet
Nanotechnology, or molecular engineering, is a hypothetical productive system based on the precise arrangement of atoms into molecular level devices and macroscale structures. As a response to the current environmental predicament it appears to engage with both long-term, cumulative damage and non-linear runaway accidents. As a complex adaptive system with capacities for self-replication and self-transformation, nanotech has the potential to enga…
The Demon-Seed
Spearheaded by Beck and the 'world risk society' thesis, contemporary commentators in search of evidence of political renewal 'from below' have discerned a convergence of environmental and cosmopolitan sensibilities. But through its foregrounding of the destabilization of matter by new technologies, this 'environmental cosmopolitanism' tends to reenact the conventional binary of passive nature and dynamic culture. It is suggested that this expres…
The Demon-Seed
Spearheaded by Beck and the `world risk society' thesis, contemporary commentators in search of evidence of political renewal `from below' have discerned a convergence of environmental and cosmopolitan sensibilities.But through its foregrounding of the destabilization of matter by new technologies, this `environmental cosmopolitanism' tends to re-enact the conventional binary of passive nature and dynamic culture.It is suggested that this express…
The uninsured and Medicaid Oregon tobacco user experience in a real world, phone based cessation programme
The quit rates are similar to those reported in efficacy trials. The observed variation in quitting tobacco for respondents by number of calls completed and by insurance merits further investigation concentrating on increasing compliance with the call schedule, particularly for the uninsured
Care in the time of catastrophe
(2003). Care in the time of catastrophe: Citizenship, community and the ecological imagination. Journal of Human Rights: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 235-246
Offering
Steering away from the more obvious concern with the breakdown of social order following Hurricane Katrina, this article draws on weblogs and bulletin boards to highlight acts of generosity and hospitality provoked by the disaster and poses some questions about what disasters might tell us about the emergence of the “social.”
Ex-orbitant Globality
Social theorists, drawing on the study of complex dynamical systems to address global processes, tend to evoke an immanent globality devoid of a constitutive otherness or outside. However, as well as dealing with the internal dynamics of systems, complexity studies point to the mutual implication of systems and their surroundings: a concern that resonates with the interest in the convolutions of the inside-outside relationship prominent in post-s…
Living through the tsunami
Ex-orbitant Generosity
Volatile Worlds, Vulnerable Bodies
The abrupt climate change thesis suggests that climate passes through threshold transitions, after which change is sudden, runaway and unstoppable. This concurs with recent themes in complexity studies. Data from ice cores indicates that major shifts in global climate regimes have occurred in as little as a decade, and that for most of the span of human existence the climate has oscillated much more violently than it has over the last 10,000 year…
Sex, politics and inhuman artistry
This commentary argues that one of the strengths of Dixon et al.'s (2012) paper is the way that it pushes a concern with inhuman entities and processes far beyond any entanglement with human lives. This takes us on a turn – strangely rare in human geography – from life or vitality into the realms of minerality. It is suggested that what makes this possible is the authors' refreshing willingness to explore aesthetic and ontological questions witho…
Everything but the earth
Rock, Life, Fire
If origins are as complex and perturbing as Derrida suggests, then we might ask of the current anthropic environmental predicament: what kind of planet is it that gives birth to a creature capable of doing such things? Biological life may be at its liveliest along the earth's sutures and fault-lines. But so too is fire. If humans are a fire species, then this is a fire planet. From the point of view of a ‘speculative geophysics’, our combustive h…
Mobile Life
Recent decades have seen a series of high-profile public health crises involving viruses, bacteria and other biological agents, together with escalating concern over impacts of biological invasion on crops and ecosystems. In the context of intensifying globalization, such hazards are being viewed as serious ‘security’ threats. For critical social theorists, this growing concern with biosecurity at the global scale has worrying implications, in th…
Combustion and Society
Fire is a force that links everyday human activities to some of the most powerful energetic movements of the Earth. Drawing together the energy-centred social theory of Georges Bataille, the fire-centred environmental history of Stephen Pyne, and the work of a number of ‘pyrotechnology’ scholars, the paper proposes that the generalized study of combustion is a key to contextualizing human energetic practices within a broader ‘economy’ of terrestr…
Metamorphoses
This is a reply to:Conway, Philip. 2016. “Back down to Earth: reassembling Latour’s Anthropocenic geopolitics.” Global Discourse 6 (1–2): 43–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2015.1004247
Relational ontologies and the ground of life
This commentary on Irus Braverman’s Wild Life (2015) and Jamie Lorimer’s Wildlife in the Anthropocene (2015), raises some questions about the movement between the authors’ own relational ontologies and the pragmatic or improvised ontologies that surface in their respective ethnographic accounts. It also asks whether an apparent allegiance to an undefiled `Nature’ on the part of some conservationists might be viewed not only in terms of relational…
Anthropocene semiosis
While affirming their more-than-human concerns, Ruddick ((2017) Rethinking the subject, reimagining worlds. Dialogues in Human Geography (this issue).) proposes that there are limits to the capacity of relational ontologies to deal with the conflicting demands and extensive temporalities of the Anthropocene crisis. This commentary probes her alternative notions of a forcefulness and generativity that exceeds individuated bodies and of a semiosis …
Earthing the Anthropos? From 'socializing the Anthropocene' to geologizing the social
Responding to claims of Anthropocene geoscience that humans are now geological agents, social scientists are calling for renewed attention to the social, cultural, political and historical differentiation of the Anthropos. But does this leave critical social thought's own key concepts and categories unperturbed by the Anthropocene provocation to think through dynamic earth processes? Can we 'socialize the Anthropocene' without also opening 'the s…
An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz
This article is an interview with Elizabeth Grosz by Kathryn Yusoff and Nigel Clark. It primarily addresses Grosz's approaches to 'geopower', and the discussion encompasses an exploration of her ideas on biopolitics, inhuman forces and material experimentation. Grosz describes geopower as a force that subtends the possibility of politics. The interview is accompanied by a brief contextualizing introduction examining the themes of geophilosophy an…
Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene
For at least two centuries most social thought has taken the earth to be the stable platform upon which dynamic social processes play out. Both climate change and the Anthropocene thesis - with their enfolding of dramatic geologic change into the space-time of social life - are now provoking social thinkers into closer engagement with earth science. After revisiting the decisive influence of the late 18th-century notion of geological formations o…
Philosophy (21 works) · Environmental ethics (19 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Political science (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Epistemology (12 works)