Landscape Entrusted

Depositing Nuclear Waste in Geologic Time

Constructed about 53 kilometers southeast and 655 meters below Carlsbad in New Mexico in the United States, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is a permanent deep geological repository for a special kind of radioactive waste. There are several categories of radioactive waste, depending on many factors including types of radionuclides, levels of toxicity, and purposes of a project (whether the activities from which the waste derives are civil or defense-related). These classifications are specific to each regulatory body and thus often differ from nation to nation. The WIPP houses nuclear waste categorized as defense-generated transuranic (TRU) waste…

Affective Bodies

Nonhuman and Human Agencies in Djuna Barnes's Fiction

Reading fiction makes us face all kinds of situations, characters and phenomena that we might consider strange and uncanny, yet enchanting and immersive. This way, it also puts us face to face with the nonhuman in its various forms. Some fictional encounters with the nonhuman may become accentuated and even disturbing, especially ones in which the nonhuman presents itself as profoundly entangled with what we consider as human, which entails elements such as agency based on individual subjectivity, psychologically motivated actions, […]

The Trouble With Emergence

I have grown suspicious of the word emergence and the concepts it designates. More often than not, the term seems to serve as a deus ex machina whenever other models or theories cannot account for a certain new aspect or object. Emergence is then used as though it were based on a concept or a theory, when all the term does is label something as complex, unpredictable, and only comprehensible after the fact. It is my contention that, particularly in the study of culture, we need to carefully scrutinize the ways in which we use […]