Sasha Engelmann
Biographic Data
| ID | 116377 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sasha Engelmann |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sasha |
| FAMILY NAME | Engelmann |
| SIGNATURE | ENGELMANN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Royal Holloway University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1827-2525 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 166 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Cultural geography of heat: Artistic experiments with heat’s animacies
How do we practise cultural geography in an increasingly hot, thermally inequitable, and flammable world? How do we make sense of record‐level heat stress, devastating wildfires, and many other registers of heat that daily affect bodies, cultures, and lifeways? A sustained, cultural geographical engagement with heat is long overdue. In this article, I further cultural geographies of heat through the lens of contemporary art and art activism. In m…
Geohumanities I: Elements, animacy, and memory
Geographers, humanities scholars, artists, and practitioners of many kinds are thinking, feeling, and practicing with the elements. In this first of three progress reports on the geohumanities, I explore a growing body of geographical, humanistic, and artistic work that has foregrounded elemental materials, forces, media, and particles as they are implicated in an increasingly urgent set of questions and contestations about anticolonial geographi…
Breathing Aesthetics, Jean-Thomas Tremblay (2022)
Review of: Breathing Aesthetics , Jean-Thomas Tremblay (2022) Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 232 pp., photos, illus., notes, bibliog ISBN 978-1-47801-886-5, p/bk, $25.95 ISBN 978-1-47801-622-9, h/bk, $118.16
Floating in space: Teaching atmosphere in human geography
This article explores the teaching of atmosphere for undergraduate geography students. Though many scholars have observed an “atmospheric turn” in the discipline, teaching atmosphere in human geography has received less attention. To this end, the article examines the design and delivery of a “floating workshop” that engaged students in thinking and feeling the meteorological and affective qualities of atmosphere. Practically, the floating worksh…
Weathering Three Storms: Experiments in an Elemental Geohumanities
For cultural geographers, weather is primarily known through the body. Cultural geographers employ sensual ethnographies, diaries, interviews and visual methods to understand how weather is differentially felt. Somewhat lacking are cultural geographical accounts of weather as data: how weather is mapped, indexed and modelled with consequences not only for science but also for vernacular weather-worlds. In contrast, a growing set of artistic proje…
Open-weather: Speculative-feminist propositions for planetary images in an era of climate crisis
This article explores how speculative feminist practices can contribute to the collection and production of images of a planet in climate crisis. Inspired by feminist geographers and the speculative pragmatism of Didier Debaise and Isabelle Stengers, we suggest how speculative and feminist thinking unsettles the mediated optics of contemporary satellite earth observation. In a speculative feminist framework, earth images may transcend their domin…
Elemental Memory: The Solid Fluidity of the Elements in the Nuclear Era
The epistemological challenges of the Anthropocene trouble distinctions of solid and fluid. In this contribution, the author proposes, after Gabrielle Hecht, that the nuclearity of the Anthropocene contributes significantly to destabilising these categories. Nuclear materials and ideas of nuclearity force (re)consideration of deep timescales and imperceptible processes, problematising fixed material ontologies. The article engages with nuclear ma…
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…
Performing Shared Atmospheres: Museo Aero Solar
Geopoetics: On organising, mourning, and the incalculable
In this commentary, I trace some of the earthy, mineral, and more-than-human properties of Magrane’s climate poems in order to emphasise the urgency of the geopoetics project. In particular, I consider Magrane’s use of constraint, de/composition, and juxtaposition as geopoetic techniques. In addition to challenging abstractions of climate change and enlivening critical and creative approaches for geography and the geohumanities, I propose that ge…
Elemental worlds: Specificities, exposures, alchemies
The elements have become the focus of a significant volume of research by geographers and others. Engagements with the elements have been framed in terms of four elemental orientations: matter, molecule, milieu and media. Our aim is to consider what is at stake in efforts to think with, across and beyond these orientations. Avoiding any reduction of the elements to a single ontological or epistemological proposition, we explore possibilities for …
Floating feelings: Emotion in the affective-meteorological atmosphere
The forensics of form
In this commentary, I suggest Ash’s contributions can be productively illuminated if we consider his illustration of the forms of bump stocks through the lens of critical forensics. Examining the logic, perspective and spatialization of Ash’s flat ontological analysis, and considering resonances in open forensic investigations, I outline further consequences and stakes of this project
Adrift in the etheric ocean
In this commentary, I explore Peters and Steinberg’s use of extension, entanglement and excess as operative terms for their ‘more-than-wet’ ontology. I ask whether the elemental ocean so vividly expressed in their article is commensurable with these terms. In doing so, I suggest that elemental geographies may require further experimentation beyond analytical and grammatical description, and towards poetic, aesthetic and creative gestures that con…
Of spiders and simulations: Artmachines at Studio Tomás Saraceno
This article employs Anne Sauvagnargues’ writing on ‘artmachines’ to explore a series of experiments with spiders and simulations at Studio Tomás Saraceno. These experiments were the first to ‘capture’ or ‘image’ the black widow spider’s highly complex, three-dimensional web and to investigate its similarity to astrophysical simulations of the universe. To develop the artmachine for cultural geographies of art, and as a grammar for techno-aesthet…
Elemental Aesthetics: On Artistic Experiments with Solar Energy
In recent years, geographers and others have begun to tease out the ontological, epistemological, and ethico-political implications of thinking about and with the elemental. In this article, we contribute to this work by considering the relation between the elemental and the aesthetic. More precisely, we argue for the importance to geographical thinking of the development of an elemental aesthetics attuned to the diverse ways in which the element…
Earth in Circuit
In Don Dellilo's 1985 novel White Noise, an accident involving a tank car releases, "a feathery plume" and then "a black billowing cloud" that finally becomes "an Airborne Toxic Event".On August 28 th 2017, a mist drifted toward the Sussex coastline at Birling Gap Beach, causing acute respiratory illnesses in over 150 people before dissipating without being identified.A symptom of the Airborne Toxic Event in Delillo's novel is an acute sense of d…
Intra-acting with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory; or, how the technosphere may come to matter
This paper contends that a robust concept of the technosphere – indeed one that is truly adequate to the Anthropocene – must be approached using a plurality of methods that do not categorize agencies or rely on hierarchical scalar analysis. In this commentary, we draw from feminist science studies scholar Karen Barad’s philosophy of agential realism, and in particular her concept of ‘intra-action’, to identify the technosphere as emergent from en…
Social spiders and hybrid webs at Studio Tomás Saraceno
A spider's web is the species-specific production of spacetime; it is an aesthetic as well as an evolutionary, metabolic and climatic achievement. As part of a long-term engagement with spiders and their webs, the artist Tomás Saraceno has collaborated with populations of spiders and other creatures to produce hybrid webs. The processual and patterned production of hybrid webs at Studio Tomás Saraceno inspires thought on the axes of more-than-hum…
More-than-human affinitive listening
It is a definition of elemental air as more than human, wholly ungraspable, and even monstrous, which enlivens Adey’s method of ‘affinitive listening’ to the elemental. The difference between air, as it has been lately addressed, and the element of air is that the latter precedes and exceeds the specific alchemical compositions of air masses, and is not reducible to the descriptions and metaphors with which we attempt to ‘grasp’ air and atmospher…
Toward a poetics of air: Sequencing and Surfacing Breath
This paper develops the concept of a poetics of air: a notion borrowed from cultural anthropology that denotes an awareness of the simultaneous material, affective and aesthetic impressions of air and atmosphere. While there is a rich and growing body of work on atmospheric geopolitics and aeromobility, much less attention has been given to the affective and aesthetic dimensions of being in and witnessing air and atmosphere. This paper uses the s…
Toward a poetics of air: Sequencing and Surfacing Breath
This paper develops the concept of a poetics of air: a notion borrowed from cultural anthropology that denotes an awareness of the simultaneous material, affective and aesthetic impressions of air and atmosphere. While there is a rich and growing body of work on atmospheric geopolitics and aeromobility, much less attention has been given to the affective and aesthetic dimensions of being in and witnessing air and atmosphere. This paper uses the s…
Elemental worlds: Specificities, exposures, alchemies
The elements have become the focus of a significant volume of research by geographers and others. Engagements with the elements have been framed in terms of four elemental orientations: matter, molecule, milieu and media. Our aim is to consider what is at stake in efforts to think with, across and beyond these orientations. Avoiding any reduction of the elements to a single ontological or epistemological proposition, we explore possibilities for …
Elemental Aesthetics: On Artistic Experiments with Solar Energy
In recent years, geographers and others have begun to tease out the ontological, epistemological, and ethico-political implications of thinking about and with the elemental. In this article, we contribute to this work by considering the relation between the elemental and the aesthetic. More precisely, we argue for the importance to geographical thinking of the development of an elemental aesthetics attuned to the diverse ways in which the element…
Open-weather: Speculative-feminist propositions for planetary images in an era of climate crisis
This article explores how speculative feminist practices can contribute to the collection and production of images of a planet in climate crisis. Inspired by feminist geographers and the speculative pragmatism of Didier Debaise and Isabelle Stengers, we suggest how speculative and feminist thinking unsettles the mediated optics of contemporary satellite earth observation. In a speculative feminist framework, earth images may transcend their domin…
Weathering Three Storms: Experiments in an Elemental Geohumanities
For cultural geographers, weather is primarily known through the body. Cultural geographers employ sensual ethnographies, diaries, interviews and visual methods to understand how weather is differentially felt. Somewhat lacking are cultural geographical accounts of weather as data: how weather is mapped, indexed and modelled with consequences not only for science but also for vernacular weather-worlds. In contrast, a growing set of artistic proje…
More-than-human affinitive listening
It is a definition of elemental air as more than human, wholly ungraspable, and even monstrous, which enlivens Adey’s method of ‘affinitive listening’ to the elemental. The difference between air, as it has been lately addressed, and the element of air is that the latter precedes and exceeds the specific alchemical compositions of air masses, and is not reducible to the descriptions and metaphors with which we attempt to ‘grasp’ air and atmospher…
Floating feelings: Emotion in the affective-meteorological atmosphere
Elemental Memory: The Solid Fluidity of the Elements in the Nuclear Era
The epistemological challenges of the Anthropocene trouble distinctions of solid and fluid. In this contribution, the author proposes, after Gabrielle Hecht, that the nuclearity of the Anthropocene contributes significantly to destabilising these categories. Nuclear materials and ideas of nuclearity force (re)consideration of deep timescales and imperceptible processes, problematising fixed material ontologies. The article engages with nuclear ma…
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…
Floating in space: Teaching atmosphere in human geography
This article explores the teaching of atmosphere for undergraduate geography students. Though many scholars have observed an “atmospheric turn” in the discipline, teaching atmosphere in human geography has received less attention. To this end, the article examines the design and delivery of a “floating workshop” that engaged students in thinking and feeling the meteorological and affective qualities of atmosphere. Practically, the floating worksh…
Of spiders and simulations: Artmachines at Studio Tomás Saraceno
This article employs Anne Sauvagnargues’ writing on ‘artmachines’ to explore a series of experiments with spiders and simulations at Studio Tomás Saraceno. These experiments were the first to ‘capture’ or ‘image’ the black widow spider’s highly complex, three-dimensional web and to investigate its similarity to astrophysical simulations of the universe. To develop the artmachine for cultural geographies of art, and as a grammar for techno-aesthet…
Social spiders and hybrid webs at Studio Tomás Saraceno
A spider's web is the species-specific production of spacetime; it is an aesthetic as well as an evolutionary, metabolic and climatic achievement. As part of a long-term engagement with spiders and their webs, the artist Tomás Saraceno has collaborated with populations of spiders and other creatures to produce hybrid webs. The processual and patterned production of hybrid webs at Studio Tomás Saraceno inspires thought on the axes of more-than-hum…
Adrift in the etheric ocean
In this commentary, I explore Peters and Steinberg’s use of extension, entanglement and excess as operative terms for their ‘more-than-wet’ ontology. I ask whether the elemental ocean so vividly expressed in their article is commensurable with these terms. In doing so, I suggest that elemental geographies may require further experimentation beyond analytical and grammatical description, and towards poetic, aesthetic and creative gestures that con…
The forensics of form
In this commentary, I suggest Ash’s contributions can be productively illuminated if we consider his illustration of the forms of bump stocks through the lens of critical forensics. Examining the logic, perspective and spatialization of Ash’s flat ontological analysis, and considering resonances in open forensic investigations, I outline further consequences and stakes of this project
Geohumanities I: Elements, animacy, and memory
Geographers, humanities scholars, artists, and practitioners of many kinds are thinking, feeling, and practicing with the elements. In this first of three progress reports on the geohumanities, I explore a growing body of geographical, humanistic, and artistic work that has foregrounded elemental materials, forces, media, and particles as they are implicated in an increasingly urgent set of questions and contestations about anticolonial geographi…
Geopoetics: On organising, mourning, and the incalculable
In this commentary, I trace some of the earthy, mineral, and more-than-human properties of Magrane’s climate poems in order to emphasise the urgency of the geopoetics project. In particular, I consider Magrane’s use of constraint, de/composition, and juxtaposition as geopoetic techniques. In addition to challenging abstractions of climate change and enlivening critical and creative approaches for geography and the geohumanities, I propose that ge…
More-than-human affinitive listening
It is a definition of elemental air as more than human, wholly ungraspable, and even monstrous, which enlivens Adey’s method of ‘affinitive listening’ to the elemental. The difference between air, as it has been lately addressed, and the element of air is that the latter precedes and exceeds the specific alchemical compositions of air masses, and is not reducible to the descriptions and metaphors with which we attempt to ‘grasp’ air and atmospher…
Toward a poetics of air: Sequencing and Surfacing Breath
This paper develops the concept of a poetics of air: a notion borrowed from cultural anthropology that denotes an awareness of the simultaneous material, affective and aesthetic impressions of air and atmosphere. While there is a rich and growing body of work on atmospheric geopolitics and aeromobility, much less attention has been given to the affective and aesthetic dimensions of being in and witnessing air and atmosphere. This paper uses the s…
Intra-acting with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory; or, how the technosphere may come to matter
This paper contends that a robust concept of the technosphere – indeed one that is truly adequate to the Anthropocene – must be approached using a plurality of methods that do not categorize agencies or rely on hierarchical scalar analysis. In this commentary, we draw from feminist science studies scholar Karen Barad’s philosophy of agential realism, and in particular her concept of ‘intra-action’, to identify the technosphere as emergent from en…
Social spiders and hybrid webs at Studio Tomás Saraceno
A spider's web is the species-specific production of spacetime; it is an aesthetic as well as an evolutionary, metabolic and climatic achievement. As part of a long-term engagement with spiders and their webs, the artist Tomás Saraceno has collaborated with populations of spiders and other creatures to produce hybrid webs. The processual and patterned production of hybrid webs at Studio Tomás Saraceno inspires thought on the axes of more-than-hum…
Elemental Aesthetics: On Artistic Experiments with Solar Energy
In recent years, geographers and others have begun to tease out the ontological, epistemological, and ethico-political implications of thinking about and with the elemental. In this article, we contribute to this work by considering the relation between the elemental and the aesthetic. More precisely, we argue for the importance to geographical thinking of the development of an elemental aesthetics attuned to the diverse ways in which the element…
Earth in Circuit
In Don Dellilo's 1985 novel White Noise, an accident involving a tank car releases, "a feathery plume" and then "a black billowing cloud" that finally becomes "an Airborne Toxic Event".On August 28 th 2017, a mist drifted toward the Sussex coastline at Birling Gap Beach, causing acute respiratory illnesses in over 150 people before dissipating without being identified.A symptom of the Airborne Toxic Event in Delillo's novel is an acute sense of d…
Adrift in the etheric ocean
In this commentary, I explore Peters and Steinberg’s use of extension, entanglement and excess as operative terms for their ‘more-than-wet’ ontology. I ask whether the elemental ocean so vividly expressed in their article is commensurable with these terms. In doing so, I suggest that elemental geographies may require further experimentation beyond analytical and grammatical description, and towards poetic, aesthetic and creative gestures that con…
Of spiders and simulations: Artmachines at Studio Tomás Saraceno
This article employs Anne Sauvagnargues’ writing on ‘artmachines’ to explore a series of experiments with spiders and simulations at Studio Tomás Saraceno. These experiments were the first to ‘capture’ or ‘image’ the black widow spider’s highly complex, three-dimensional web and to investigate its similarity to astrophysical simulations of the universe. To develop the artmachine for cultural geographies of art, and as a grammar for techno-aesthet…
The forensics of form
In this commentary, I suggest Ash’s contributions can be productively illuminated if we consider his illustration of the forms of bump stocks through the lens of critical forensics. Examining the logic, perspective and spatialization of Ash’s flat ontological analysis, and considering resonances in open forensic investigations, I outline further consequences and stakes of this project
Performing Shared Atmospheres: Museo Aero Solar
Geopoetics: On organising, mourning, and the incalculable
In this commentary, I trace some of the earthy, mineral, and more-than-human properties of Magrane’s climate poems in order to emphasise the urgency of the geopoetics project. In particular, I consider Magrane’s use of constraint, de/composition, and juxtaposition as geopoetic techniques. In addition to challenging abstractions of climate change and enlivening critical and creative approaches for geography and the geohumanities, I propose that ge…
Elemental worlds: Specificities, exposures, alchemies
The elements have become the focus of a significant volume of research by geographers and others. Engagements with the elements have been framed in terms of four elemental orientations: matter, molecule, milieu and media. Our aim is to consider what is at stake in efforts to think with, across and beyond these orientations. Avoiding any reduction of the elements to a single ontological or epistemological proposition, we explore possibilities for …
Floating feelings: Emotion in the affective-meteorological atmosphere
Open-weather: Speculative-feminist propositions for planetary images in an era of climate crisis
This article explores how speculative feminist practices can contribute to the collection and production of images of a planet in climate crisis. Inspired by feminist geographers and the speculative pragmatism of Didier Debaise and Isabelle Stengers, we suggest how speculative and feminist thinking unsettles the mediated optics of contemporary satellite earth observation. In a speculative feminist framework, earth images may transcend their domin…
Elemental Memory: The Solid Fluidity of the Elements in the Nuclear Era
The epistemological challenges of the Anthropocene trouble distinctions of solid and fluid. In this contribution, the author proposes, after Gabrielle Hecht, that the nuclearity of the Anthropocene contributes significantly to destabilising these categories. Nuclear materials and ideas of nuclearity force (re)consideration of deep timescales and imperceptible processes, problematising fixed material ontologies. The article engages with nuclear ma…
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…
Breathing Aesthetics, Jean-Thomas Tremblay (2022)
Review of: Breathing Aesthetics , Jean-Thomas Tremblay (2022) Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 232 pp., photos, illus., notes, bibliog ISBN 978-1-47801-886-5, p/bk, $25.95 ISBN 978-1-47801-622-9, h/bk, $118.16
Floating in space: Teaching atmosphere in human geography
This article explores the teaching of atmosphere for undergraduate geography students. Though many scholars have observed an “atmospheric turn” in the discipline, teaching atmosphere in human geography has received less attention. To this end, the article examines the design and delivery of a “floating workshop” that engaged students in thinking and feeling the meteorological and affective qualities of atmosphere. Practically, the floating worksh…
Weathering Three Storms: Experiments in an Elemental Geohumanities
For cultural geographers, weather is primarily known through the body. Cultural geographers employ sensual ethnographies, diaries, interviews and visual methods to understand how weather is differentially felt. Somewhat lacking are cultural geographical accounts of weather as data: how weather is mapped, indexed and modelled with consequences not only for science but also for vernacular weather-worlds. In contrast, a growing set of artistic proje…
Geohumanities I: Elements, animacy, and memory
Geographers, humanities scholars, artists, and practitioners of many kinds are thinking, feeling, and practicing with the elements. In this first of three progress reports on the geohumanities, I explore a growing body of geographical, humanistic, and artistic work that has foregrounded elemental materials, forces, media, and particles as they are implicated in an increasingly urgent set of questions and contestations about anticolonial geographi…
Cultural geography of heat: Artistic experiments with heat’s animacies
How do we practise cultural geography in an increasingly hot, thermally inequitable, and flammable world? How do we make sense of record‐level heat stress, devastating wildfires, and many other registers of heat that daily affect bodies, cultures, and lifeways? A sustained, cultural geographical engagement with heat is long overdue. In this article, I further cultural geographies of heat through the lens of contemporary art and art activism. In m…
Geographies of human-animal interactions (15 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Art (7 works) · Meteorology (6 works) · Physics (6 works)