Mick Smith
Biographic Data
| ID | 3603791 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mick Smith |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mick |
| FAMILY NAME | Smith |
| SIGNATURE | SMITH M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen's University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 137 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Megaliths, material engagement, and the atmospherics of neo-lithic ethics: Presage for the end(s) of tourism
Climate change spells the end of tourism, and tourism is just one, and one of the least important, things to be so very near its end. This situation has emerged because of the global dominance of forms of material engagement that completely misunderstand the distribution of agency in the world. Framing the world as just an external human ‘resource’ diminishes the many forms of agency that elude, transcend, effect, facilitate and subvert human int…
Somewhere in the North of England’: A Recollective Ecology
The past recedes into strangeness yet memories continue to play constitutive roles in our evolving self-understandings, re-surfacing and reminding us of a world we have shared in so many different ways with others, human and non-human. Memories concern us, that is to say, they concern who we were and are; they can concern (trouble) us quite profoundly; and they also inform our concerns (our interests in and our feelings for) other beings, people,…
Resilience
R esilience has rapidly become the most used and abused term in contemporary policy and decision making.Like the idiom of "sustainable development," it incorporates multiplicities of difference into a single and apparently incontrovertible consensus.Who could possibly disagree with making social, economic, and ecological "systems" more resilient in the face of our current environmental problems, especially global climate change?Surely resilience …
Emotional Geographies
Ecological Community, the Sense of the World, and Senseless Extinction
How might a posthumanist notion of ecological community attempt to address questions concerning extinction? Such irredeemable losses are explicated through four aspects of ecological/community relations-material manifestation (appearances), material involvement (effects), semiotic resonance (meanings) and phenomenological experiences-that together constitute a broader understanding of ecological community that does not exempt humans from ecologic…
Adorno on nature
Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution
Michel Serres Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011, 89 pp., US$15.95 paperback, (978-0-8047-7303-4) Malfeasance is, in many senses, a continuation of the themes Serres laid out in his earl
Dis(appearance): Earth, Ethics and Apparently (In)Significant Others
Spiders, Sartre and ‘magical geographies: The Emotional Transformation of Space
Drawing on interviews with individuals suffering from arachnophobia, we suggest ways in which phenomenologically oriented aspects of Jean‐Paul Sartre’s (geographically neglected) work, particularly the concept of ‘magical’ thinking outlined in Sartre’s early Sketch for a theory of the emotions , might help both elucidate the spatiality of phobic lifeworlds and provide wider explanatory resources for understanding emotional geographies. If emotion…
Dark ecology
Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving the Natural World
This book presents a passionate defense of radical ecology that speaks directly to current debates concerning the nature, and dangers, of sovereign power. Engaging the work of Bataille, Arendt, Levinas, Nancy, and Agamben, among others, the book reconnects the political critique of sovereign power with ecological considerations, arguing that ethical and political responsibilities for the consequences of our actions do not end with those defined a…
Epharmosis: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Political Oecology of Creation
The Working Landscape: Founding, Preservation, and the Politics of Place
Autistic Autobiographies and More-Than-Human Emotional Geographies
This paper draws on an analysis of forty-five published autobiographical accounts of individuals with an autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) to highlight the important role of their, often intense, emotional relations to 'natural' things and places. In doing so, it offers a partial corrective to clinical and popular views of people with autism as almost entirely asocial and unconcerned with the beings and doings of others. A textual hermeneutic of t…
Against ecological sovereignty: Agamben, politics and globalisation
Several recent texts have argued that, given the ecologically destructive effects of unfettered economic globalisation, there are good pragmatic arguments for environmentalists to advocate and support a form of green state sovereignty. However, the key question concerning this strategy is not necessarily the plausibility or implausibility of ‘greening’ state institutions but rather the dangers to ecology and politics that sovereignty itself repre…
Suspended Animation: Radical Ecology, Sovereign Powers, and Saving the (Natural) World
Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge
Worldly (In)Difference and Ecological Ethics: Iris Murdoch and Emmanuel Levinas
Wild-life: Anarchy, Ecology, and Ethics
Certain forms of anarchism, especially those associated with primitivism, regard nature as a fundamental source of individual liberty, self-awareness, and self-responsibility. These distinctive varieties of ‘ecological anarchism’ often combine a wild(er)ness ethos with a polemical critique of the social constraints and environmental damage they identify, to varying degrees, with ‘civilisation’. To anarchists associated with Enlightenment humanist…
‘It Makes My Skin Crawl…’: The Embodiment of Disgust in Phobias of ‘Nature’
Specific phobias of natural objects, such as moths, spiders and snakes, are both common and socially significant, but they have received relatively little sociological attention. Studies of specific phobias have noted that embodied experiences of disgust are intimately associated with phobic reactions, but generally explain this in terms of objective qualities of the object concerned and/or evolutionary models. We draw on the work of Kolnai, Doug…
Environmental Risks and Ethical Responsibilities: Arendt, Beck, and the Politics of Acting into Nature
Hermeneutics and the culture of birds: The environmental allegory of ‘easter island’
It has become commonplace to interpret ‘Easter Island’ in terms of an environmental allegory, a Malthusian morality tale of the consequences of over-exploitation of limited natural resources. There are, however, ethical dangers in treating places and peoples allegorically, as moralized means (lessons) to satisfy others’ edificatory ends. Allegory reductively appropriates the past, presenting a specific interpretation as ‘given’ (fixed) and exempl…
Goffman's legacy
Shadow and shade: The ethopoietics of en light enment
Modern Western thought and culture have envisaged their task in terms of a metaphorics, a metaphysics and a technics of ‘enlightenment’. However, the ethical and environmental implications of this determination to dispel all shadows have become increasingly pernicious as modernity both extends and alters the conceptualization and employment of (a now artificial) light as a tool of discovery and control. Drawing on the work of Foucault and Benjami…
Democracy and Global Warming
Ecological Community, the Sense of the World, and Senseless Extinction
How might a posthumanist notion of ecological community attempt to address questions concerning extinction? Such irredeemable losses are explicated through four aspects of ecological/community relations-material manifestation (appearances), material involvement (effects), semiotic resonance (meanings) and phenomenological experiences-that together constitute a broader understanding of ecological community that does not exempt humans from ecologic…
Autistic Autobiographies and More-Than-Human Emotional Geographies
This paper draws on an analysis of forty-five published autobiographical accounts of individuals with an autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) to highlight the important role of their, often intense, emotional relations to 'natural' things and places. In doing so, it offers a partial corrective to clinical and popular views of people with autism as almost entirely asocial and unconcerned with the beings and doings of others. A textual hermeneutic of t…
Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution
Michel Serres Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011, 89 pp., US$15.95 paperback, (978-0-8047-7303-4) Malfeasance is, in many senses, a continuation of the themes Serres laid out in his earl
Bio-phobias/techno-philias: Virtual Reality Exposure as Treatment for Phobias of 'Nature
In modern society natural objects like spiders or snakes have a primary role as the loci of specific phobias. Drawing on interviews with members of the UK National Phobics Society (NPS) and associated service providers, this paper explores the implications of the increasingly significant role played by new media, particularly Virtual Reality technologies, in the treatment of these 'bio-phobias'. While advanced technological approaches provide new…
Resilience
R esilience has rapidly become the most used and abused term in contemporary policy and decision making.Like the idiom of "sustainable development," it incorporates multiplicities of difference into a single and apparently incontrovertible consensus.Who could possibly disagree with making social, economic, and ecological "systems" more resilient in the face of our current environmental problems, especially global climate change?Surely resilience …
Repetition and Difference: Lefebvre, Le Corbusier and Modernity's (Im)moral Landscape
If, as Lefebvre argues, every society produces its own social space, then modernity might be characterized by that (anti-)social and instrumental space epitomized and idealized in Le Corbusier's writings. This repetitively patterned space consumes and regulates the differences between places and people; it encapsulates a normalizing morality that seeks to reduce all differences to an economic order of the Same. Lefebvre's dialectical conceptualiz…
Spiders, Sartre and ‘magical geographies: The Emotional Transformation of Space
Drawing on interviews with individuals suffering from arachnophobia, we suggest ways in which phenomenologically oriented aspects of Jean‐Paul Sartre’s (geographically neglected) work, particularly the concept of ‘magical’ thinking outlined in Sartre’s early Sketch for a theory of the emotions , might help both elucidate the spatiality of phobic lifeworlds and provide wider explanatory resources for understanding emotional geographies. If emotion…
Wild-life: Anarchy, Ecology, and Ethics
Certain forms of anarchism, especially those associated with primitivism, regard nature as a fundamental source of individual liberty, self-awareness, and self-responsibility. These distinctive varieties of ‘ecological anarchism’ often combine a wild(er)ness ethos with a polemical critique of the social constraints and environmental damage they identify, to varying degrees, with ‘civilisation’. To anarchists associated with Enlightenment humanist…
Against ecological sovereignty: Agamben, politics and globalisation
Several recent texts have argued that, given the ecologically destructive effects of unfettered economic globalisation, there are good pragmatic arguments for environmentalists to advocate and support a form of green state sovereignty. However, the key question concerning this strategy is not necessarily the plausibility or implausibility of ‘greening’ state institutions but rather the dangers to ecology and politics that sovereignty itself repre…
Wittgenstein and Irigaray: Gender and Philosophy in a Language (Game) of Difference
Drawing Wittgenstein's and Irigaray's philosophies into conversation might help resolve certain misunderstandings that have so far hampered both the reception of Irigaray's work and the development of feminist praxis in general. A Wittgensteinian reading of Irigaray can furnish an anti-essentialist conception of “woman” that retains the theoretical and political specificity feminism requires while dispelling charges that Irigaray's attempt to del…
To Speak of Trees: Social Constructivism, Environmental Values, and the Future of Deep Ecology
Hermeneutics and the culture of birds: The environmental allegory of ‘easter island’
It has become commonplace to interpret ‘Easter Island’ in terms of an environmental allegory, a Malthusian morality tale of the consequences of over-exploitation of limited natural resources. There are, however, ethical dangers in treating places and peoples allegorically, as moralized means (lessons) to satisfy others’ edificatory ends. Allegory reductively appropriates the past, presenting a specific interpretation as ‘given’ (fixed) and exempl…
Ethical Difference(s): A Response to Maycroft on Le Corbusier and Lefebvre
The reinvention of politics: Ulrich Beck and reflexive modernity
The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order by Ulrich Beck. Cambridge: Polity, 1997. Pp.vi + 206; index. £45 (hardback); £12.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 7456 1366 7 and 0 7456 1758 1 Democracy Without Enemies by Ulrich Beck. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. Pp.viii + 189; index. £45 (hardback); £12.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 7456 1822 7 and 0 7456 1823 5
Against the Enclosure of the Ethical Commons: Radical Environmentalism as an “Ethics of Place”
Inspired by recent anti-roads protests in Britain, I attempt to articulate a radical environmental ethos and, at the same time, to produce a cogent moral analysis of the dialectic between environmental destruction and protection. In this analysis, voiced in terms of a spatial metaphoric, an “ethics of place,” I seek to subvert the hegemony of modernity’s formal systematization and codification of values whilestill conserving something of modernit…
Cheney and the Myth of Postmodernism
Epharmosis: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Political Oecology of Creation
Environmental Risks and Ethical Responsibilities: Arendt, Beck, and the Politics of Acting into Nature
Shadow and shade: The ethopoietics of en light enment
Modern Western thought and culture have envisaged their task in terms of a metaphorics, a metaphysics and a technics of ‘enlightenment’. However, the ethical and environmental implications of this determination to dispel all shadows have become increasingly pernicious as modernity both extends and alters the conceptualization and employment of (a now artificial) light as a tool of discovery and control. Drawing on the work of Foucault and Benjami…
The Face of Nature: Environmental Ethics and the Boundaries of Contemporary Social Theory
Social and cultural theorists readily deconstruct what they regard (with some justification) as the naturalistic pretensions of environmental ethics. However, despite innovative attempts to incorporate environmentalism's values into theoretical frameworks as varied as those of Habermas and Foucault, contemporary social theory has often failed to reflect on the disciplinary limitations of its own critique. To the extent that it poses a fundamental…
The Ethical Architecture of the 'Open Road
The motorcar is a mobile embodiment, expression and encapsulation of modernity's economic, environmental and ethical relations. The moral ambiguities of the automobile, as a vehicle of both individual freedom and environmental destruction, distil the equivocal costs and benefits of modernity itself. Any environmental critique of 'car culture' must recognise the automobile's role in expressing and constituting our individualistic and instrumental …
Cheney and the Myth of Postmodernism
Against the Enclosure of the Ethical Commons: Radical Environmentalism as an “Ethics of Place”
Inspired by recent anti-roads protests in Britain, I attempt to articulate a radical environmental ethos and, at the same time, to produce a cogent moral analysis of the dialectic between environmental destruction and protection. In this analysis, voiced in terms of a spatial metaphoric, an “ethics of place,” I seek to subvert the hegemony of modernity’s formal systematization and codification of values whilestill conserving something of modernit…
What's Natural? The socio-political (de)construction of nature
Reconstructing Nature: Alienation, Emancipation and the Division of Labour by Peter Dickens. London: Routledge, 1996. Pp.x + 217; index. £45 (hardback); £13.99 (paperback). ISBN 0 415 08921 2 and 08922 0 The Social Construction of Nature: A Sociology of Ecological Enlightenment by Klaus Eder. London: Sage, 1996. Pp.x + 231; index. £45 (hardback); £13.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 8039 7848 0 and 7849 9
The Ethical Architecture of the 'Open Road
The motorcar is a mobile embodiment, expression and encapsulation of modernity's economic, environmental and ethical relations. The moral ambiguities of the automobile, as a vehicle of both individual freedom and environmental destruction, distil the equivocal costs and benefits of modernity itself. Any environmental critique of 'car culture' must recognise the automobile's role in expressing and constituting our individualistic and instrumental …
Terra Nova: Nature and culture
Terra Nova: Nature and Culture Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Vol.1, Nos.1–4, 1996 and Vol. 2, Nos.1–3, 1997. Subscription rates are: Individuals $34: Students/retired $24: Institutions $98 (add $16 for postage outside of the United States). ISSN 1081 0749
Wittgenstein and Irigaray: Gender and Philosophy in a Language (Game) of Difference
Drawing Wittgenstein's and Irigaray's philosophies into conversation might help resolve certain misunderstandings that have so far hampered both the reception of Irigaray's work and the development of feminist praxis in general. A Wittgensteinian reading of Irigaray can furnish an anti-essentialist conception of “woman” that retains the theoretical and political specificity feminism requires while dispelling charges that Irigaray's attempt to del…
Wittgenstein and Irigaray: Gender and Philosophy in a Language (Game) of Difference
Drawing Wittgenstein's and Irigaray's philosophies into conversation might help resolve certain misunderstandings that have so far hampered both the reception of Irigaray's work and the development of feminist praxis in general. A Wittgensteinian reading of Irigaray can furnish an anti-essentialist conception of “woman” that retains the theoretical and political specificity feminism requires while dispelling charges that Irigaray's attempt to del…
To Speak of Trees: Social Constructivism, Environmental Values, and the Future of Deep Ecology
The reinvention of politics: Ulrich Beck and reflexive modernity
The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order by Ulrich Beck. Cambridge: Polity, 1997. Pp.vi + 206; index. £45 (hardback); £12.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 7456 1366 7 and 0 7456 1758 1 Democracy Without Enemies by Ulrich Beck. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. Pp.viii + 189; index. £45 (hardback); £12.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 7456 1822 7 and 0 7456 1823 5
Snap-shots: Tourism and the environment
Ecotourism: An Introduction by David A. Fennell. London: Routledge, 1999. Pp.xx + 310; index. £50 (hardback); £15:99 (paperback). ISBN 0 415 14237 7 and 20168 3 The Geography of Tourism and Recreation. Environment, Place and Space by C.M. Hall and S.J. Page. London: Routledge, 1999. Pp.xvii + 304; index. £50 (hardback); £16.99 (paperback). ISBN 0 415 16003 0 and 16004 9
Avalanches and Snowballs A Reply to Arne Naess
Repetition and Difference: Lefebvre, Le Corbusier and Modernity's (Im)moral Landscape
If, as Lefebvre argues, every society produces its own social space, then modernity might be characterized by that (anti-)social and instrumental space epitomized and idealized in Le Corbusier's writings. This repetitively patterned space consumes and regulates the differences between places and people; it encapsulates a normalizing morality that seeks to reduce all differences to an economic order of the Same. Lefebvre's dialectical conceptualiz…
Environmental Anamnesis: Walter Benjamin and the Ethics of Extinction
The Face of Nature: Environmental Ethics and the Boundaries of Contemporary Social Theory
Social and cultural theorists readily deconstruct what they regard (with some justification) as the naturalistic pretensions of environmental ethics. However, despite innovative attempts to incorporate environmentalism's values into theoretical frameworks as varied as those of Habermas and Foucault, contemporary social theory has often failed to reflect on the disciplinary limitations of its own critique. To the extent that it poses a fundamental…
Ethical Difference(s): A Response to Maycroft on Le Corbusier and Lefebvre
Shadow and shade: The ethopoietics of en light enment
Modern Western thought and culture have envisaged their task in terms of a metaphorics, a metaphysics and a technics of ‘enlightenment’. However, the ethical and environmental implications of this determination to dispel all shadows have become increasingly pernicious as modernity both extends and alters the conceptualization and employment of (a now artificial) light as a tool of discovery and control. Drawing on the work of Foucault and Benjami…
Democracy and Global Warming
Bio-phobias/techno-philias: Virtual Reality Exposure as Treatment for Phobias of 'Nature
In modern society natural objects like spiders or snakes have a primary role as the loci of specific phobias. Drawing on interviews with members of the UK National Phobics Society (NPS) and associated service providers, this paper explores the implications of the increasingly significant role played by new media, particularly Virtual Reality technologies, in the treatment of these 'bio-phobias'. While advanced technological approaches provide new…
Hermeneutics and the culture of birds: The environmental allegory of ‘easter island’
It has become commonplace to interpret ‘Easter Island’ in terms of an environmental allegory, a Malthusian morality tale of the consequences of over-exploitation of limited natural resources. There are, however, ethical dangers in treating places and peoples allegorically, as moralized means (lessons) to satisfy others’ edificatory ends. Allegory reductively appropriates the past, presenting a specific interpretation as ‘given’ (fixed) and exempl…
Goffman's legacy
‘It Makes My Skin Crawl…’: The Embodiment of Disgust in Phobias of ‘Nature’
Specific phobias of natural objects, such as moths, spiders and snakes, are both common and socially significant, but they have received relatively little sociological attention. Studies of specific phobias have noted that embodied experiences of disgust are intimately associated with phobic reactions, but generally explain this in terms of objective qualities of the object concerned and/or evolutionary models. We draw on the work of Kolnai, Doug…
Environmental Risks and Ethical Responsibilities: Arendt, Beck, and the Politics of Acting into Nature
Worldly (In)Difference and Ecological Ethics: Iris Murdoch and Emmanuel Levinas
Wild-life: Anarchy, Ecology, and Ethics
Certain forms of anarchism, especially those associated with primitivism, regard nature as a fundamental source of individual liberty, self-awareness, and self-responsibility. These distinctive varieties of ‘ecological anarchism’ often combine a wild(er)ness ethos with a polemical critique of the social constraints and environmental damage they identify, to varying degrees, with ‘civilisation’. To anarchists associated with Enlightenment humanist…
Suspended Animation: Radical Ecology, Sovereign Powers, and Saving the (Natural) World
Philosophy (31 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Epistemology (25 works) · Political science (17 works) · Environmental ethics (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Contemporary philosophy (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Aesthetics (9 works)