Bronislaw Szerszynski
Biographic Data
| ID | 100638 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bronislaw Szerszynski |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bronislaw |
| FAMILY NAME | Szerszynski |
| SIGNATURE | SZERSZYNSKI B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lancaster University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6546-1479 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1013 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
What can a planet do
In this article we build on recent 'geo-' themed work in human geography to move beyond the Earth and consider what our own planet shares with other astronomical bodies. Mobilising ideas from the planetary sciences, we sketch a speculative philosophy of planetary evolution in three steps. First, we develop an idea of 'the planetary' that sees planets as ongoing processes and sets of relations stretched over space and time. We then consider 'the i…
Planetary Stories Before and After Geoengineering
The cultural politics of climate change has always relied on images, most notably the "hockey stick" graphs of changing global temperature over the last thousand years (Schneider and Nocke 2014). Geoengineering—the proposed, deliberate, large-scale technological intervention into climate processes to counteract global warming—has also developed its own visual aesthetic. Geoengineering is climate promise, hope, absolution; but it is also the weird…
Heterogeneous capital stocks and economic inertia in the US economy
The timescales of capital investments, and therefore the turnover dynamics of capital stock, have limited representation in macroeconomic modelling. This hinders analysis of the economic inertia produced by these timescales, which is particularly important in the context of a rapid net zero transition in which vast quantities of long-lived investments may need to be prematurely abandoned. We set out to determine the minimum model that is required…
Attractions of delay: Using deliberative engagement to investigate the political and strategic impacts of greenhouse gas removal technologies
Concerns have been raised that a focus on greenhouse gas removals (GGR) in climate models, scientific literature and other media might deter measures to mitigate climate change through reduction of emissions at source - the phenomenon of 'mitigation deterrence'. Given the urgent need for climate action, any delay in emissions reduction would be worrying. We convened nine deliberative workshops to expose stakeholders to futures scenarios involving…
Culture and the much-more-than-human: The case of colloids
In this paper I try to identify a minimal definition of culture that might be applicable in the much-more-than-human realm that extends beyond organic matter and human involvement. I speculate that culture conceived in this broad way might be a metapattern or ‘machinic solution’ available to matter of diverse kinds, organic and inorganic. I explore how this idea might apply this to colloids – hybrid forms of matter such as sols, foams and gels th…
Life in the hole: Practices and emotions in the cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence
Negative emissions techniques (NETs) promise to capture greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and sequester them. Since decarbonisation efforts have been slow, and the climate crisis is intensifying, it is increasingly likely that removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere will be necessary to meet internationally-agreed targets. Yet there are fears that pursuing NETs might undermine other mitigation efforts, primarily the reduction (rather tha…
Thinking through the Earth: Surviving and thriving at a planetary threshold
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…
Rifted subjects, fractured Earth: Progress' as learning to live on a self-transforming planet
In this article we make a case for an understanding of human difference that attends to the way that social collectives engage with the Earth's own capacity for self-differentiation. This draws us into conversation with recent interpretations of Hegel that see at the heart of his philosophy not a self-aggrandizing human agent set against a passive nature but an inherently fractured subject confronting a no-less intrinsically sundered outer realit…
Colloidal Social Theory: Thinking about Material Animacy and Sociality beyond Solids and Fluids
This paper argues that an exploration of colloids can help us situate human social life within a wider understanding of the sociality and animacy of matter. Colloids are substances such as sols, foams, powders, gels, doughs and pastes that exhibit complex and shifting macroscale physical properties that do not conform to standard conceptions of solids, liquids or gases. Colloids can behave in complex and creative ways because of their topological…
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…
On representation and speculation: A case for the use of representational practices in SciArt
In a reply to ‘Speculative Listening’ by Kaya Barry, Michele Lobo and Michelle Duffy, I defend representation as a resource for experimental and speculative practice, arguing that the loss of total immersion in the flux and becoming of the world that the representational engenders is a precondition for experimentation and speculation
Cosmic Hail
Bronislaw Szerszynski 1 "O cosmic dust!"We are planet Gaia, living world, And as you transit through our shade Our very planetary form Creates for you a ring of sun-limned air, And thus inscribes the "O" that signifies The vocativedirect address.It shows we do not name the crowd of dust That passes through our neighbourhood But call direct to you, a single mote.O small but travelled nomad, Just a hundred microns wide, Porous, gritty, asymmetric -…
How the Earth Remembers and Forgets
The Making of Power Shortage: The Sociotechnical Imaginary of Nationalist High Modernism and Its Pragmatic Rationality in Electricity Planning in Taiwan
High modernism, the dominant sociotechnical imagination in postwar Taiwan, manifested in tacit answers to the questions of what a better society would look like and the most pragmatic and viable approach to make the particular dreamed-of future become reality. This article explores the exclusion of alternative energy futures brought about by a high modernist imaginary. This imaginary underlies a strategy of emphasizing shortage at present and pro…
Geoengineering/Climate Intervention
The term “geoengineering” is used to refer to a range of techniques for deliberatively intervening in the global climate to counteract global warming. Solar radiation management techniques are a class of geoengineering methods designed to reflect some of the inbound sunlight back into space with the intended effect of arresting further warming of the planet and thus counteracting global warming. Carbon dioxide removal techniques, by contrast, aim…
Viewing the technosphere in an interplanetary light
I argue that discussion about the ‘technosphere’ as an emergent new Earth system needs to be situated within wider reflection about how technospheres might arise on other worlds. Engaging with astrobiological speculation about ‘exo-technospheres’ can help us to understand whether technospheres are likely, what their preconditions might be, and whether they endure. Engaging with science fiction can help us to avoid observer biases that encourage l…
The Anthropocene monument: On relating geological and human time
In the Parthenon frieze, the time of mortals and the time of gods seem to merge. Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that with the advent of the Anthropocene the times of human history and of the Earth are similarly coming together. Are humans entering the 'monumental time' of the Earth, to stand alongside the Olympian gods of the other geological forces? This article first looks at the cultural shifts leading to the modern idea of separate human and E…
Gods of the Anthropocene: Geo-Spiritual Formations in the Earth's New Epoch
In this article the author argues that we need not just to 'decolonize' the Anthropocene but also to 'desecularize' it - to be aware that in the new age of the Earth we may be coeval with gods and spirits. Drawing particularly on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Georges Bataille, and using concepts from both thermodynamics and fluid dynamics, the author starts to develop an interdisciplinary theory of planetary spirit and use this t…
Planetary mobilities: Movement, memory and emergence in the body of the Earth
In this paper, I present a unified framework for understanding abiotic, biotic and technological mobilities as achievements of a far-from-equilibrium planet self-organising over geological time, and generating informationally rich forms of matter and motion. I discuss how flows of energy through the Earth support the emergence of different kinds of movement in spatially distinct ‘mobility regions’ and scale-related ‘mobility situations’. I also d…
Getting Hitched and Unhitched with the Ecomodernists
The authors of An Ecomodernist Manifesto offer us a new twist on an old argument: to avert ecological collapse we need not less modernity, but more. 1 According to the ecomodernists, our global predicament is like that of a truck driver in the midst of an emerging multiplevehicle pile-up; if we lose our nerve, and jam on the brakes, the disaster will overwhelm us.We must instead keep faith in the technological, progressive project, and press the …
Praise Be to You, Earth-Beings
This essay appeared in the journal Environmental Humanities in a special commentary section on the papal encyclical Laudato Si
Living the global social experiment: An analysis of public discourse on solar radiation management and its implications for governance
Geoengineering Knowledge: Interdisciplinarity and the Shaping of Climate Engineering Research
In this paper we highlight the need to attend to the structuring power of knowledge production in geoengineering research, because of the way that problem definitions are shaped by disciplinary ways of thinking and describing the world. We also draw attention to a number of problematic assumptions about how interdisciplinary research should be approached and organised in this area. We first look at the logic of 'subordination', in which certain d…
Why Solar Radiation Management Geoengineering and Democracy Won't Mix
In this paper we argue that recent policy treatments of solar radiation management (SRM) have insufficiently addressed its potential implications for contemporary political systems. Exploring the emerging 'social constitution' of SRM, we outline four reasons why this is likely to pose immense challenges to liberal democratic politics: That the unequal distribution of and uncertainties about SRM impacts will cause conflicts within existing institu…
The End of the End of Nature: The Anthropocene and the Fate of the Human
In this paper I explore the metaphor of the strata of the earth as ‘great stone book of nature’, and the Anthropocene epoch as its latest chapter. I suggest that the task of marking the base of the Anthropocene's geological layer is entangled with questions about the human — about who would be the ‘onomatophore’ of the Anthropocene, would carry the name of ‘Anthropos’. I consider divergent ways of characterising the geological force of the Anthro…
Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology
This wide-ranging and accessible contribution to the study of risk, ecology and environment helps us to understand the politics of ecology and the place of social theory in making sense of environmental issues. The book provides insights into the complex dynamics of change in 'risk societies'
Reconceptualizing the 'Anthropos' in the Anthropocene: Integrating the social sciences and humanities in global environmental change research
Visuality, mobility and the cosmopolitan: Inhabiting the World From Afar
In earlier publications based on the research discussed in this article (e.g. Szerszynski and Urry 2002), we argued that an emergent culture of cosmopolitanism, refracted into different forms amongst different social groups, was being nurtured by a widespread 'banal globalism'- a proliferation of global symbols and narratives made available through the media and popular culture. In the current article we draw on this and other empirical research …
Cultures of Cosmopolitanism
This paper is concerned with whether a 'culture of cosmopolitanism' is currently emerging out of massively wide-ranging 'global' processes. The authors develop certain theoretical components of such a culture, they consider ongoing research concerned with belongingness to different geographical entities including the 'world as a whole', and they present their own empirical research findings. From their media research they show that there is somet…
Nature performed: Environment, Culture and Performance
vi, 226 p. : 23 cm
Reading and Writing the Weather
In this article I argue that an adequate response to climate change requires an overcoming of the metaphysics of presence that is structuring our relationship with the weather. I trace the links between this metaphysics and the dominant way that the topic of climate change is being narrated, which is structured around the transition from diagnosis to cure, from the scientific reading to the technological writing of the weather. Against this narra…
The End of the End of Nature: The Anthropocene and the Fate of the Human
In this paper I explore the metaphor of the strata of the earth as ‘great stone book of nature’, and the Anthropocene epoch as its latest chapter. I suggest that the task of marking the base of the Anthropocene's geological layer is entangled with questions about the human — about who would be the ‘onomatophore’ of the Anthropocene, would carry the name of ‘Anthropos’. I consider divergent ways of characterising the geological force of the Anthro…
Living the global social experiment: An analysis of public discourse on solar radiation management and its implications for governance
Gods of the Anthropocene: Geo-Spiritual Formations in the Earth's New Epoch
In this article the author argues that we need not just to 'decolonize' the Anthropocene but also to 'desecularize' it - to be aware that in the new age of the Earth we may be coeval with gods and spirits. Drawing particularly on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Georges Bataille, and using concepts from both thermodynamics and fluid dynamics, the author starts to develop an interdisciplinary theory of planetary spirit and use this t…
Changing Climates: Introduction
OCIAL THEORY is faced by a new spectre haunting the 'globe' - thechanging of the world's climate. Such changes are now thought to bebeyond doubt and, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange (IPCC), very likely the product of human practices (IPCC, 2007).These practices have generated raised levels of 'greenhouse gases' in theatmosphere, which seem to be leading to increased temperatures, which willin turn transform future forms …
The Anthropocene monument: On relating geological and human time
In the Parthenon frieze, the time of mortals and the time of gods seem to merge. Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that with the advent of the Anthropocene the times of human history and of the Earth are similarly coming together. Are humans entering the 'monumental time' of the Earth, to stand alongside the Olympian gods of the other geological forces? This article first looks at the cultural shifts leading to the modern idea of separate human and E…
Attractions of delay: Using deliberative engagement to investigate the political and strategic impacts of greenhouse gas removal technologies
Concerns have been raised that a focus on greenhouse gas removals (GGR) in climate models, scientific literature and other media might deter measures to mitigate climate change through reduction of emissions at source - the phenomenon of 'mitigation deterrence'. Given the urgent need for climate action, any delay in emissions reduction would be worrying. We convened nine deliberative workshops to expose stakeholders to futures scenarios involving…
Why Solar Radiation Management Geoengineering and Democracy Won't Mix
In this paper we argue that recent policy treatments of solar radiation management (SRM) have insufficiently addressed its potential implications for contemporary political systems. Exploring the emerging 'social constitution' of SRM, we outline four reasons why this is likely to pose immense challenges to liberal democratic politics: That the unequal distribution of and uncertainties about SRM impacts will cause conflicts within existing institu…
Ecological Rites: Ritual Action in Environmental Protest Events
Social scientists have noted how radical social movements operate largely in terms of symbol and meaning, both at the level of everyday life and at that of public protest. Using examples from contemporary environmental protest, I argue that this insight can be further elucidated through applying the notion of ritualization. I argue that ritual action is used in environmental protest for a number of different reasons. First, ritual is used to link…
Environmental Sociology: Theory and Practice
The Post-ecologist condition: Irony as symptom and cure
Resources for an authentic response to the ‘post-ecologist condition’ as described by Ingolfur Blühdorn can be found in a cultural modernism which emphasises the contradictory nature of the human condition and whose master trope is irony. The concept of irony can help us both diagnose and respond to the crisis in public meaning which helps sustain unsustainable behaviour. Forms of dispositional irony, in which private and public meaning are disco…
The Varieties of Ecological Piety
The idea of nature's sacrality, contrasting starkly with industrial modernity's overwhelmingly instrumental valuation of non-human nature, visibly inform philosophical positions such as deep ecology and Gaia theory. But at a more unspoken level they can also be seen as suffusing a wider societal sensibility, evident not least in popular values regarding nature. But, granted that many people would ascribe such a value to nature, how are such belie…
Planetary mobilities: Movement, memory and emergence in the body of the Earth
In this paper, I present a unified framework for understanding abiotic, biotic and technological mobilities as achievements of a far-from-equilibrium planet self-organising over geological time, and generating informationally rich forms of matter and motion. I discuss how flows of energy through the Earth support the emergence of different kinds of movement in spatially distinct ‘mobility regions’ and scale-related ‘mobility situations’. I also d…
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…
Viewing the technosphere in an interplanetary light
I argue that discussion about the ‘technosphere’ as an emergent new Earth system needs to be situated within wider reflection about how technospheres might arise on other worlds. Engaging with astrobiological speculation about ‘exo-technospheres’ can help us to understand whether technospheres are likely, what their preconditions might be, and whether they endure. Engaging with science fiction can help us to avoid observer biases that encourage l…
Getting Hitched and Unhitched with the Ecomodernists
The authors of An Ecomodernist Manifesto offer us a new twist on an old argument: to avert ecological collapse we need not less modernity, but more. 1 According to the ecomodernists, our global predicament is like that of a truck driver in the midst of an emerging multiplevehicle pile-up; if we lose our nerve, and jam on the brakes, the disaster will overwhelm us.We must instead keep faith in the technological, progressive project, and press the …
Wild times and domesticated times: The Temporalities of Environmental Lifestyles and Politics
Life in the hole: Practices and emotions in the cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence
Negative emissions techniques (NETs) promise to capture greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and sequester them. Since decarbonisation efforts have been slow, and the climate crisis is intensifying, it is increasingly likely that removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere will be necessary to meet internationally-agreed targets. Yet there are fears that pursuing NETs might undermine other mitigation efforts, primarily the reduction (rather tha…
Praise Be to You, Earth-Beings
This essay appeared in the journal Environmental Humanities in a special commentary section on the papal encyclical Laudato Si
Geoengineering Knowledge: Interdisciplinarity and the Shaping of Climate Engineering Research
In this paper we highlight the need to attend to the structuring power of knowledge production in geoengineering research, because of the way that problem definitions are shaped by disciplinary ways of thinking and describing the world. We also draw attention to a number of problematic assumptions about how interdisciplinary research should be approached and organised in this area. We first look at the logic of 'subordination', in which certain d…
The Varieties of Ecological Piety
The idea of nature's sacrality, contrasting starkly with industrial modernity's overwhelmingly instrumental valuation of non-human nature, visibly inform philosophical positions such as deep ecology and Gaia theory. But at a more unspoken level they can also be seen as suffusing a wider societal sensibility, evident not least in popular values regarding nature. But, granted that many people would ascribe such a value to nature, how are such belie…
Voluntary Associations and the Sustainable Society
Voluntary Associations and the Sustainable Society 1
Environmental Sociology: Theory and Practice
Introduction: Ecology, Realism and the Social Sciences
Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology
This wide-ranging and accessible contribution to the study of risk, ecology and environment helps us to understand the politics of ecology and the place of social theory in making sense of environmental issues. The book provides insights into the complex dynamics of change in 'risk societies'
Performing Politics: The Dramatics of Environmental Protest
Wild times and domesticated times: The Temporalities of Environmental Lifestyles and Politics
Cultures of Cosmopolitanism
This paper is concerned with whether a 'culture of cosmopolitanism' is currently emerging out of massively wide-ranging 'global' processes. The authors develop certain theoretical components of such a culture, they consider ongoing research concerned with belongingness to different geographical entities including the 'world as a whole', and they present their own empirical research findings. From their media research they show that there is somet…
Ecological Rites: Ritual Action in Environmental Protest Events
Social scientists have noted how radical social movements operate largely in terms of symbol and meaning, both at the level of everyday life and at that of public protest. Using examples from contemporary environmental protest, I argue that this insight can be further elucidated through applying the notion of ritualization. I argue that ritual action is used in environmental protest for a number of different reasons. First, ritual is used to link…
Nature performed: Environment, Culture and Performance
vi, 226 p. : 23 cm
Technology, Performance and Life Itself: Hannah Arendt and the Fate of Nature
Augustinian Ecological Democracy: Postmodern Nature and the City of God
In this article I critically explore the work of the social theorists Klaus Eder and Ulrich Beck, who in different ways use an account of the ‘postmodern’, plural character of contemporary ideas of nature to argue for the necessity and possibility of an ecological democracy. I argue that within such social theoretical understandings of the contemporary politics of nature is a tension between pagan and Christian understandings of difference—betwee…
Nature, Technology and the Sacred
The disenchantment of the world.2. Nature, secularization and the transformation of the sacred.PART 2 - NATURE AND TECHNOLOGY.3. Nature, science and the death of Pan.4. Modern technology and the sacred.PART 3 - THE BODY AND ITS ENVIRONMENT.5. The body, healing and the sacred.6. The birth of 'the environment'.PART 4 - AGAINST THE TECHNOLOGICAL CONDITION.7. The politicization of nature.8. Nature, virtue and everyday life.9. Nature and public speech…
The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality
List of Plates.Preface.Introduction.1. Distinguishing Religion and Spirituality: Findings from Kendal.2. Testing the Spiritual Revolution Claim in Kendal.3. Evidence for a Spiritual Revolution: Britain and USA.4. Bringing the Sacred to Life: Explaining Secularization and Sacralization.5. Looking to the Future.Appendices.References.Index
Critical Discourse Analysis and Citizenship
The PARADYS project is therefore concerned with empirically researching and theorising ‘citizenship ... as an ongoing communicative achievement’ (Bora et al 2001b:3). The concept of citizenship is “operated in terms of the dynamics of social positioning” (Bora & Hausendorf 2000:1). The research focus is on “the ways in which participants themselves act and are treated by others as citizens” (Bora & Hausendorf 2001a:4).
Techno-demonology: Naming, Understanding and Redeeming the A/Human Agencies with Which We Share Our World
In this paper I argue that an important strand of ecotheology should be an articulated techno-demonology—an understanding of the ways that technologies increasingly confront us as indifferent or malign agencies. Drawing particularly on the New Testament language of spiritual agencies, I consider in turn three necessary components of techno-demonology. First, techno-demonology needs a taxonomic nomenclature, one which ‘names’ techno-demonological …
Visuality, mobility and the cosmopolitan: Inhabiting the World From Afar
In earlier publications based on the research discussed in this article (e.g. Szerszynski and Urry 2002), we argued that an emergent culture of cosmopolitanism, refracted into different forms amongst different social groups, was being nurtured by a widespread 'banal globalism'- a proliferation of global symbols and narratives made available through the media and popular culture. In the current article we draw on this and other empirical research …
The Post-ecologist condition: Irony as symptom and cure
Resources for an authentic response to the ‘post-ecologist condition’ as described by Ingolfur Blühdorn can be found in a cultural modernism which emphasises the contradictory nature of the human condition and whose master trope is irony. The concept of irony can help us both diagnose and respond to the crisis in public meaning which helps sustain unsustainable behaviour. Forms of dispositional irony, in which private and public meaning are disco…
Changing Climates: Introduction
OCIAL THEORY is faced by a new spectre haunting the 'globe' - thechanging of the world's climate. Such changes are now thought to bebeyond doubt and, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange (IPCC), very likely the product of human practices (IPCC, 2007).These practices have generated raised levels of 'greenhouse gases' in theatmosphere, which seem to be leading to increased temperatures, which willin turn transform future forms …
Reading and Writing the Weather
In this article I argue that an adequate response to climate change requires an overcoming of the metaphysics of presence that is structuring our relationship with the weather. I trace the links between this metaphysics and the dominant way that the topic of climate change is being narrated, which is structured around the transition from diagnosis to cure, from the scientific reading to the technological writing of the weather. Against this narra…
The End of the End of Nature: The Anthropocene and the Fate of the Human
In this paper I explore the metaphor of the strata of the earth as ‘great stone book of nature’, and the Anthropocene epoch as its latest chapter. I suggest that the task of marking the base of the Anthropocene's geological layer is entangled with questions about the human — about who would be the ‘onomatophore’ of the Anthropocene, would carry the name of ‘Anthropos’. I consider divergent ways of characterising the geological force of the Anthro…
Reconceptualizing the 'Anthropos' in the Anthropocene: Integrating the social sciences and humanities in global environmental change research
Living the global social experiment: An analysis of public discourse on solar radiation management and its implications for governance
Geoengineering Knowledge: Interdisciplinarity and the Shaping of Climate Engineering Research
In this paper we highlight the need to attend to the structuring power of knowledge production in geoengineering research, because of the way that problem definitions are shaped by disciplinary ways of thinking and describing the world. We also draw attention to a number of problematic assumptions about how interdisciplinary research should be approached and organised in this area. We first look at the logic of 'subordination', in which certain d…
Sociology (29 works) · Political science (27 works) · Philosophy (23 works) · Epistemology (22 works) · Law (18 works) · Environmental ethics (17 works) · Politics (17 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Ecology (12 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (10 works)