Worlds and Stories
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3914307 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Muecke (0000-0003-1634-8637, The University of Notre Dame Australia), Stephen Muecke, Andrea Gaynor (0000-0002-5633-9797, The University of Western Australia), Tony Hughes-D’aeth (0000-0002-5745-042X, The University of Western Australia), Matthew Chrulew (0000-0002-6044-2383, Curtin University) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 506-524 |
| Publication date | 2025-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environmental Humanities (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2201-1919 • E-ISSN: 2201-1919 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/22011919-11713494 |
| OpenAlex | W4412706441 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 34 |
This provocation reviews the growing interest in practices of description in literary, cultural, and environmental studies. It argues that in the environmental humanities the craft of description is essential but somewhat neglected. The multispecies worlds encountered by environmental humanities researchers necessarily have to be well described, not only objectively but also rhetorically, to engage readers. Different kinds of expertise (literary, scientific, philosophical, historical) are needed to indicate possible solutions for the problems at hand. We thus offer the slogan: describe first, theorize later, building on the pragmatism of Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers in the analysis of passages from the recent writings of Thom van Dooren, Anna Tsing, Vinciane Despret, Lesley Green, and Deborah Bird Rose. Our analysis highlights the important functions that descriptions play in the practice of environmental humanities as they take time to carefully narrate encounters with living worlds. Drawing on these exemplars, the article concludes that these worlds are multirealist and call for interdisciplinary descriptive craft and eventually theoretical frameworks. Environmental humanists themselves are partially defined through their descriptive expertise, which is that of the interdisciplinary "general practitioner" whose practice overturns the traditional distinctions between theory, description, and explanation
Anthropological Studies and Insights · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History
Essays in radical empiricism
The invention of modern science
What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?
Foucault's Strange Eros
Regeneration time
The Challenge of Ontological Politics
Critical zones
Our Grateful Dead
Anthropology and Nature
Reassembling the Social
What a Mushroom Lives For
Slowly ~ writing into the Anthropocene
An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence
Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
Divisible Governance
Aesthetic Concerns, Philosophical Fabulations
The Animal Outside the Text
Description and the Nonhuman View of Nature
The Point of Precision
Portrait de l'animal comme sujet
Latour-Stengers
A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds
Images of animals
Building a Better Description
The Mushroom at the End of the World
Lively Ethography
One world anthropology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |