Anna Tsing is a professor of Anthropology at the University of California: Santa Cruz and the author of books that show us how a multitude of different forms of life are bound together in a web of complex and fragile interdependence. Her books include Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, The Mushroom at the End of the World and Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene.
In this episode, we discuss her most recent project--Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene--an online platform that is available at feralatlas.org. The site is intended as an interactive showcase for research into what Tsing and her co-editors Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou call “feral species and feral dynamics,” but it also uses multimedia techniques to tell “stories of environmental injustice, radical diversity and scientific surprise.”
Released through the Digital Repository at Stanford University Press, Feral Atlas contains a dizzying array of multidisciplinary engagements with the disturbing realities of the Anthropocene. And despite including more than one hundred essays, analyses, and artworks by leading scientists and artists, it has not yet received the level of attention that it deserves, as a text that maps the enduring social and ecological effects of Invasion, Empire, Capital, and Acceleration.
We discuss the risks and pleasures that come with using a digital medium to experiment with modes of storytelling that are capable of inspiring both the hope and the fear necessary to convince people how urgently we need to protect and nurture the last remaining spaces of interspecies flourishing, as we attempt to dismantle, in Tsing’s words, “the most harmful anthropogenic kinds of infrastructural effects.”
