Nigel Clark
Biographic Data
| ID | 3653709 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nigel Clark |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nigel |
| FAMILY NAME | Clark |
| SIGNATURE | CLARK N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lancaster University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3738-1583 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 431 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
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 Rifting and the Paleogeography of Care
With their specter of intergenerational betrayal, global environmental crises increasingly entangle politics with matters of care, attachment, and love-especially the unconditional bonds we are so often assumed to share with our offspring. As a contribution to the nascent field of paleoenvironmental humanities, this article's approach to questions of care and responsibility turns from future horizon-scanning to the realm of human origins. It focu…
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…
Animal Interface: The Generosity of Domestication
Market-driven pressures to minimize inputs and maximize outputs of animal bodies have led to increasingly industrialized agricultural practices in which technologies of control and modification are applied to ever-more-intimate aspects of biological being. The study of animal and plant domestication is amongst many fields in which questions of utility and need have been prominent. A social life that encompasses domesticated animals, in this light…
Political Geologies of Magma
The (in)visible health risks of climate change
This paper scrutinizes the assertion that knowledge gaps concerning health risks from climate change are unjust, and must be addressed, because they hinder evidence-led interventions to protect vulnerable populations. First, we construct a taxonomy of six inter-related forms of invisibility (social marginalization, forced invisibility by migrants, spatial marginalization, neglected diseases, mental health, uneven climatic monitoring and forecasti…
Microontologies and the politics of emergent life
What kind of a political problem are microorganisms that climate change is `waking up' after a million-odd years frozen in ice sheets? Or bacteria that feed off waste we bury in landfills – then go on to proliferate and evolve in ways that we may never know? The unpredictable behavior of microorganisms in increasingly interconnected worlds has sparked much innovative spatial-political thinking that highlights human–nonhuman entanglement. We sugge…
Speculative Volcanology
In 2009, exploratory drilling of geothermal wells in Iceland's Krafla volcanic caldera unexpectedly struck magma. The fact that the encounter did not have catastrophic consequences has excited considerable interest-and an international research facility is now being set up to explore energy generation and other possibilities of closer engagement with magma. We take this event as an incitement to explore how the Earth-changing "violence" of volcan…
Bare Life on Molten Rock
Queer Fire: Ecology, Combustion and Pyrosexual Desire
We set out by noting the preference for circular flows in ecological thought, and the related abhorrence of inefficiency and waste that Western ecology shares with mainstream economic thinking. This has often been manifest in a shared disdain both for uncontained, free-burning fire and for 'unmanaged' sexual desire. The paper constructs a 'pyrosexual' counter-narrative that explores the mutually constitutive and generative implication of sex and …
Feminist Geopolitics: Material States
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in he AAG Review of Books on 16 Oct 2017, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2017.1366848
Anthropocene Bodies, Geological Time and the Crisis of Natality
In its explicit engagement with the possibility of human extinction, the Anthropocene thesis might be seen as signalling a 'crisis of natality'. Engaging with two works of fiction - Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces - the article explores the embodied, affective and intimate dimensions of the struggle to sustain life under catastrophic conditions. Though centred on male protagonists, both novels offer insights into a '…
Floods' of migrants, flows of care: Between climate displacement and global care chains
This article explores the growing interface between climate-induced mobilities and participation in 'global care chains' under conditions in which climate change is already impacting on lives and livelihoods - especially in the Global South. The authors reconsider discourses on 'climate migration' in the light of everyday caring practices and adaptive responses to climate stress, evaluating how climate policy interferes with 'grassroots' flows of…
Fiery Arts: Pyrotechnology and the Political Aesthetics of the Anthropocene
The effects of combustion feature prominently in the planetary predicament signaled by the Anthropocene thesis. Historical studies of pyrotechnology—the application of heat to transform earth materials—suggest a wide-ranging inquiry into human fire use might bring new insights to the practical and political challenges of the Anthropocene. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, I use the term pyrotechnic phylum to refer to the multimillennial developmen…
Geo-Politics and the Disaster of the Anthropocene
Recently, earth scientists have been discussing the idea of the 'Anthropocene' - a new geologic epoch defined by human geological agency. In its concern with the crossing of thresholds in Earth systems and the shift into whole new systemic states, the Anthropocene thesis might be viewed as the positing of a disaster to end all disasters. As well as looking at some of the motivations behind the Anthropocene concept, this article explores possible …
Geopolitics at the threshold
Global justice and disasters
Critical inquiry into the relationship between natural hazards and disasters has raised pressing questions about the uneven exposure and resilience of different social groups. This paper argues that human-induced climate change and its implication in a range of extreme events extends and complicates the pursuit of justice in the context of differentiated vulnerability to hazards. But the challenge of living with natural hazards can provoke and in…
Geoengineering and Geologic Politics
Early engagement with geoengineering by social scientists indicates a certain suspicion over the motives and modes of operation of scientific research in the field. In part, this reflects the prominence of the critique of the politics of emergency in recent social and political thought: A thematisation that links securitisation measures with foreclosures of the political. This paper turns the attention back on the social sciences, arguing that re…
Geopower: A Panel on Elizabeth Grosz's Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth
Rather than understand art as cultural accomplishment, Elizabeth Grosz argues that it is born from the intensities of chaos and disruptive forms of sexual selection-a corporeality that vibrates to the hum of the universe. Grosz contends that it is precisely this excessive, nonproductive expenditure of sexual attraction that is the condition for art's work. This intimate corporeality, composed of nonhuman forces, is what draws and transforms the c…
Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet
Extending Hospitality: Giving Space, Taking Time
The recent revival of the theme of hospitality in the humanities and social sciences reflects a shared concern with issues of belonging, identity and placement that arises out of the experience of globalized social life. In this context, migration - or spatial dislocation and relocation - is often equated with demands for hospitality. There is a need to engage more carefully with the 'proximities' that prompt acts of hospitality and inhospitality…
Aboriginal Cosmopolitanism
The current drought in Australia raises questions about the extent to which urban life depends on physical forces that come with their own dynamics and eccentric rhythms. I suggest that currently deepening understandings of the inherent volatility of earth processes might help us appreciate the accomplishments of those who have stayed in place for hundreds or thousands of years: peoples whose 'nomadic' journeys through deep time have taken them t…
Thing Theory: Graham Harman, Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing, Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, pp x, 193
Interdependence
How should we respond to the increasingly dense bundle of economic, cultural and ecological interconnections that span the globe and stretch into the future? What kinds of ethical and public engagements are demanded of researchers who work on global environmental, economic and social issues? The term interdependence may provide a powerful framework for advancing thinking and debate both within academia and among wider publics in relation to these…
Reply When response becomes responsibility
Geo-Politics and the Disaster of the Anthropocene
Recently, earth scientists have been discussing the idea of the 'Anthropocene' - a new geologic epoch defined by human geological agency. In its concern with the crossing of thresholds in Earth systems and the shift into whole new systemic states, the Anthropocene thesis might be viewed as the positing of a disaster to end all disasters. As well as looking at some of the motivations behind the Anthropocene concept, this article explores possible …
Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet
Geopower: A Panel on Elizabeth Grosz's Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth
Rather than understand art as cultural accomplishment, Elizabeth Grosz argues that it is born from the intensities of chaos and disruptive forms of sexual selection-a corporeality that vibrates to the hum of the universe. Grosz contends that it is precisely this excessive, nonproductive expenditure of sexual attraction that is the condition for art's work. This intimate corporeality, composed of nonhuman forces, is what draws and transforms the c…
Extending Hospitality: Giving Space, Taking Time
The recent revival of the theme of hospitality in the humanities and social sciences reflects a shared concern with issues of belonging, identity and placement that arises out of the experience of globalized social life. In this context, migration - or spatial dislocation and relocation - is often equated with demands for hospitality. There is a need to engage more carefully with the 'proximities' that prompt acts of hospitality and inhospitality…
Botanizing on the Asphalt'? The Complex Life of Cosmopolitan Bodies
Notions of complexity, non-linear dynamics and self-organization in the natural sciences seem to resonate with certain literary and social scientific traditions of thinking about cosmopolitan life in a sense that may be more than merely metaphorical. Just as science speaks of forms and patterns which come into being spontaneously, unpredictably and `from below', so too is there a resurgent interest in a `baroque' vision of modernity which foregro…
Geoengineering and Geologic Politics
Early engagement with geoengineering by social scientists indicates a certain suspicion over the motives and modes of operation of scientific research in the field. In part, this reflects the prominence of the critique of the politics of emergency in recent social and political thought: A thematisation that links securitisation measures with foreclosures of the political. This paper turns the attention back on the social sciences, arguing that re…
Feral Ecologies: Performing Life on the Colonial Periphery
About the book: This book brings together contributions from scholars across the Humanities. A wide-ranging exploration of the interface between performance and nature. Examines the use and usefulness of ideas of 'performance' for understanding human-nature relationships. Draws on different disciplines and intellectual traditions and on different conceptions of 'performance' and 'nature'. Contributions are rooted in real-world contexts and proble…
Fiery Arts: Pyrotechnology and the Political Aesthetics of the Anthropocene
The effects of combustion feature prominently in the planetary predicament signaled by the Anthropocene thesis. Historical studies of pyrotechnology—the application of heat to transform earth materials—suggest a wide-ranging inquiry into human fire use might bring new insights to the practical and political challenges of the Anthropocene. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, I use the term pyrotechnic phylum to refer to the multimillennial developmen…
Geopolitics at the threshold
The (in)visible health risks of climate change
This paper scrutinizes the assertion that knowledge gaps concerning health risks from climate change are unjust, and must be addressed, because they hinder evidence-led interventions to protect vulnerable populations. First, we construct a taxonomy of six inter-related forms of invisibility (social marginalization, forced invisibility by migrants, spatial marginalization, neglected diseases, mental health, uneven climatic monitoring and forecasti…
Disaster and generosity
Queer Fire: Ecology, Combustion and Pyrosexual Desire
We set out by noting the preference for circular flows in ecological thought, and the related abhorrence of inefficiency and waste that Western ecology shares with mainstream economic thinking. This has often been manifest in a shared disdain both for uncontained, free-burning fire and for 'unmanaged' sexual desire. The paper constructs a 'pyrosexual' counter-narrative that explores the mutually constitutive and generative implication of sex and …
Anthropocene Bodies, Geological Time and the Crisis of Natality
In its explicit engagement with the possibility of human extinction, the Anthropocene thesis might be seen as signalling a 'crisis of natality'. Engaging with two works of fiction - Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces - the article explores the embodied, affective and intimate dimensions of the struggle to sustain life under catastrophic conditions. Though centred on male protagonists, both novels offer insights into a '…
Global justice and disasters
Critical inquiry into the relationship between natural hazards and disasters has raised pressing questions about the uneven exposure and resilience of different social groups. This paper argues that human-induced climate change and its implication in a range of extreme events extends and complicates the pursuit of justice in the context of differentiated vulnerability to hazards. But the challenge of living with natural hazards can provoke and in…
Aboriginal Cosmopolitanism
The current drought in Australia raises questions about the extent to which urban life depends on physical forces that come with their own dynamics and eccentric rhythms. I suggest that currently deepening understandings of the inherent volatility of earth processes might help us appreciate the accomplishments of those who have stayed in place for hundreds or thousands of years: peoples whose 'nomadic' journeys through deep time have taken them t…
Interdependence
How should we respond to the increasingly dense bundle of economic, cultural and ecological interconnections that span the globe and stretch into the future? What kinds of ethical and public engagements are demanded of researchers who work on global environmental, economic and social issues? The term interdependence may provide a powerful framework for advancing thinking and debate both within academia and among wider publics in relation to these…
Feminist Geopolitics: Material States
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in he AAG Review of Books on 16 Oct 2017, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2017.1366848
Reply When response becomes responsibility
Floods' of migrants, flows of care: Between climate displacement and global care chains
This article explores the growing interface between climate-induced mobilities and participation in 'global care chains' under conditions in which climate change is already impacting on lives and livelihoods - especially in the Global South. The authors reconsider discourses on 'climate migration' in the light of everyday caring practices and adaptive responses to climate stress, evaluating how climate policy interferes with 'grassroots' flows of…
Bare Life on Molten Rock
Postcolonial Natures
Being consoled
Rear-View Mirrorshades: The Recursive Generation of the Cyberbody
Materializing informatics: From data processing to molecular engineering
Nanotechnology or molecular engineering is a hypothetical regime of technics based on the precision manipulation of atoms to form workable devices or useful structures. Its proponents suggest that ‘nano’ could extend the manipu‐lability of digital information‐processing to the material realm, raising the possibility that the ‘information revolution’ is only part of a far more encompassing set of techno‐cultural transformations. Historical evidenc…
Botanizing on the Asphalt'? The Complex Life of Cosmopolitan Bodies
Notions of complexity, non-linear dynamics and self-organization in the natural sciences seem to resonate with certain literary and social scientific traditions of thinking about cosmopolitan life in a sense that may be more than merely metaphorical. Just as science speaks of forms and patterns which come into being spontaneously, unpredictably and `from below', so too is there a resurgent interest in a `baroque' vision of modernity which foregro…
Feral Ecologies: Performing Life on the Colonial Periphery
About the book: This book brings together contributions from scholars across the Humanities. A wide-ranging exploration of the interface between performance and nature. Examines the use and usefulness of ideas of 'performance' for understanding human-nature relationships. Draws on different disciplines and intellectual traditions and on different conceptions of 'performance' and 'nature'. Contributions are rooted in real-world contexts and proble…
Postcolonial Natures
Disaster and generosity
Reply When response becomes responsibility
Five billion years of global change: A History of the Land
Thing Theory: Graham Harman, Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing, Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, pp x, 193
Interdependence
How should we respond to the increasingly dense bundle of economic, cultural and ecological interconnections that span the globe and stretch into the future? What kinds of ethical and public engagements are demanded of researchers who work on global environmental, economic and social issues? The term interdependence may provide a powerful framework for advancing thinking and debate both within academia and among wider publics in relation to these…
Aboriginal Cosmopolitanism
The current drought in Australia raises questions about the extent to which urban life depends on physical forces that come with their own dynamics and eccentric rhythms. I suggest that currently deepening understandings of the inherent volatility of earth processes might help us appreciate the accomplishments of those who have stayed in place for hundreds or thousands of years: peoples whose 'nomadic' journeys through deep time have taken them t…
Extending Hospitality: Giving Space, Taking Time
The recent revival of the theme of hospitality in the humanities and social sciences reflects a shared concern with issues of belonging, identity and placement that arises out of the experience of globalized social life. In this context, migration - or spatial dislocation and relocation - is often equated with demands for hospitality. There is a need to engage more carefully with the 'proximities' that prompt acts of hospitality and inhospitality…
Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet
Geopower: A Panel on Elizabeth Grosz's Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth
Rather than understand art as cultural accomplishment, Elizabeth Grosz argues that it is born from the intensities of chaos and disruptive forms of sexual selection-a corporeality that vibrates to the hum of the universe. Grosz contends that it is precisely this excessive, nonproductive expenditure of sexual attraction that is the condition for art's work. This intimate corporeality, composed of nonhuman forces, is what draws and transforms the c…
Geopolitics at the threshold
Global justice and disasters
Critical inquiry into the relationship between natural hazards and disasters has raised pressing questions about the uneven exposure and resilience of different social groups. This paper argues that human-induced climate change and its implication in a range of extreme events extends and complicates the pursuit of justice in the context of differentiated vulnerability to hazards. But the challenge of living with natural hazards can provoke and in…
Geoengineering and Geologic Politics
Early engagement with geoengineering by social scientists indicates a certain suspicion over the motives and modes of operation of scientific research in the field. In part, this reflects the prominence of the critique of the politics of emergency in recent social and political thought: A thematisation that links securitisation measures with foreclosures of the political. This paper turns the attention back on the social sciences, arguing that re…
Geo-Politics and the Disaster of the Anthropocene
Recently, earth scientists have been discussing the idea of the 'Anthropocene' - a new geologic epoch defined by human geological agency. In its concern with the crossing of thresholds in Earth systems and the shift into whole new systemic states, the Anthropocene thesis might be viewed as the positing of a disaster to end all disasters. As well as looking at some of the motivations behind the Anthropocene concept, this article explores possible …
Fiery Arts: Pyrotechnology and the Political Aesthetics of the Anthropocene
The effects of combustion feature prominently in the planetary predicament signaled by the Anthropocene thesis. Historical studies of pyrotechnology—the application of heat to transform earth materials—suggest a wide-ranging inquiry into human fire use might bring new insights to the practical and political challenges of the Anthropocene. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, I use the term pyrotechnic phylum to refer to the multimillennial developmen…
Feminist Geopolitics: Material States
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in he AAG Review of Books on 16 Oct 2017, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2017.1366848
Anthropocene Bodies, Geological Time and the Crisis of Natality
In its explicit engagement with the possibility of human extinction, the Anthropocene thesis might be seen as signalling a 'crisis of natality'. Engaging with two works of fiction - Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces - the article explores the embodied, affective and intimate dimensions of the struggle to sustain life under catastrophic conditions. Though centred on male protagonists, both novels offer insights into a '…
Floods' of migrants, flows of care: Between climate displacement and global care chains
This article explores the growing interface between climate-induced mobilities and participation in 'global care chains' under conditions in which climate change is already impacting on lives and livelihoods - especially in the Global South. The authors reconsider discourses on 'climate migration' in the light of everyday caring practices and adaptive responses to climate stress, evaluating how climate policy interferes with 'grassroots' flows of…
Microontologies and the politics of emergent life
What kind of a political problem are microorganisms that climate change is `waking up' after a million-odd years frozen in ice sheets? Or bacteria that feed off waste we bury in landfills – then go on to proliferate and evolve in ways that we may never know? The unpredictable behavior of microorganisms in increasingly interconnected worlds has sparked much innovative spatial-political thinking that highlights human–nonhuman entanglement. We sugge…
Speculative Volcanology
In 2009, exploratory drilling of geothermal wells in Iceland's Krafla volcanic caldera unexpectedly struck magma. The fact that the encounter did not have catastrophic consequences has excited considerable interest-and an international research facility is now being set up to explore energy generation and other possibilities of closer engagement with magma. We take this event as an incitement to explore how the Earth-changing "violence" of volcan…
Sociology (24 works) · Political science (20 works) · Law (15 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Environmental ethics (11 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Law (10 works) · History (9 works)