Browsing by Author "Cudworth, E."
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Item Open Access Analysing Change: Complex Rather than Dialectical?(Taylor & Francis, 2014-09-03) Cudworth, E.; Hobden, S.This article offers a discussion of dialectics from a complexity perspective. Dialectics is a term much utilized but infrequently defined. This article suggests that a spectrum of ideas exist concerning understandings of dialectics. We are particularly critical of Hegelian dialectics, which we see as anthropocentric and teleological. While Marxist approaches to dialectics, in the form of historical materialism, marked a break from the idealist elements of Hegelian dialectics, they retained traces of this approach. The article offers a partial discussion of essential elements of dialectics, which we consider to be the analysis of change, the centrality of contradiction, and the methodology of abstraction. Points of overlap with complexity thinking are highlighted, together with those points where complexity thinking and dialectical approaches diverge. We conclude with some suggestions as to how complexity thinking might contribute to a development of dialectical approaches.Item Open Access Anarchism's Posthuman Future(Lawrence and Wishart, 2018-12) Cudworth, E.; Hobden, S.In previous work, we have argued that there are considerable areas of overlap between anarchism and complexity thinking, in particular because both explore the possibilities for the development of order without a specific source of authority. In more recent interventions we have developed a posthuman world view as a political project based on a foundation in complexity thinking. Hierarchical and exclusive forms of social organisation are usually understood by anarchists to be forms of domination. It is unsurprising then, that the history of anarchist thought and practical political engagement demonstrates a concern with an eclectic range of dominations. In this paper, we argue that in questioning our treatment of the environment, or ‘nature’ and in problematising some of our relations with non-human beings and things, some anarchism usefully informs the politics of posthumanism. We trace the past and contemporary linkages between anarchism and posthumanist thinking, drawing on literature in the overlapping fields of political ecologism, new materialism and animal studies. However, we also argue that there is a contradiction embedded in arguments for the liberation of human and non-human beings and things and a recognition that our world was ever more-than-human. The western conception of the human as an autonomous, rational being able to make decisions and choices about actions has only developed alongside, and in contradistinction to, the ‘animal’. These conceptions of autonomy and rationality have been important to all western left political projects, including much of the politics of ecologism and anarchism, where the notion of ‘freedom’ is writ large. If anarchism is to have a posthuman future, we consider that it needs to interrogate and perhaps loosen its ties to some established conceptual building blocks of the western political tradition.Item Open Access Anarchy and Anarchism: Towards a Theory of Complex International Systems(Sage, 2010-11-08) Cudworth, E.; Hobden, S.The use of ‘anarchy’ in International Relations theory appears very different from its incarnations in political philosophy. Whilst realist scholars have used anarchy to describe an absence of centralised political authority in which states wield differential power, political philosophers in the anarchist tradition have mounted a critique of the coercive and compulsory powers of states themselves. This article argues for reconceptualising ‘anarchy’ in International Relations theory using insights from complexity theory. We would describe the international system as a complex adaptive system which has a tendency to self-organisation. Furthermore, in distinct contrast to Waltz, we argue that the international system has to be seen as embedded within a range of physical systems, and other social systems including those which reproduce a range of (gendered, racial, class-based, colonial) relations of domination. Here insights from anarchist social ecologism can be utilised to further accounts of hierarchy and dominance within International Relations.Item Metadata only Animal Entanglements: Muddied Living in Dog-Human Worlds(Rowman and Littlefield, 2024-04-05) Cudworth, E.Nonhuman 'animals' have raised interesting questions for what it means to be human and the boundaries of the social world. Work on domesticate species has illustrated the extent to which we have entangled histories, resulting in specific social formations. This book considers peoples' everyday lives with dog companions as they cohere around experiences of work, care, walking and the use of public space, food and eating, sharing the space of home, emotional bonds and relations of kinship. In looking at these aspects of the lives of dogs and human companions, the book also frames the human-dog relationship in terms of matrices of power, understanding 'species' as socially constituted and as implicated in relations of social domination. As agential beings, dogs are able to shape outcomes and change aspects of their lived experience, but the world they inhabit is profoundly geared to human inhabitants. People living with dogs find that their lives are muddied, both literally and figuratively, as boundaries are tested and the complications of interspecies cohabitation are negotiated.Item Unknown Animalizing International Relations(Sage, 2023-08-09) Cudworth, E.; Hobden, StephenThis article explores what it means to ‘animalise’ International Relations. The posthuman move in the social sciences has involved the process of de-centring the human, replacing an anthropocentric focus with a view of the human as embedded within a complex network of inter-species relations. In a previous work we drew attention to the lack of analysis within International Relations of the key role played by more-than human animals in situations of conflict. The current COVID-19 pandemic again indicates that an analysis of international relations that does not have at its core an understanding of a more than human world is always going to be an incomplete account. The paper argues for the animalising of International Relations in order to enhance inclusivity, and suggests five ways in which this might be approached. As it becomes increasingly clear that a climate-related collapse is imminent, we argue for a transformative approach to the discipline, stressing interlinked networks and a shared vulnerability as a political project which challenges capitalism (advanced/late/carboniferous/genocidal) and the failure of states to address the concatenation of crises that life on the planet confronts.Item Unknown Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Liberal Cosmopolitan IR: A Response to Burke et al.’s Planet Politics(Sage, 2017-08-22) Cudworth, E.; Chandler, D.; Hobden, S.This article is a collective response to Anthony Burke et al’s ‘Planet Politics’, published in this journal in 2016, and billed as a ‘Manifesto from the end of IR’. We dispute this claim on the basis that rather than breaking from the discipline, the Manifesto provides a problematic global governance agenda which is dangerously authoritarian and deeply depoliticising. We substantiate this analysis in the claim that Burke et al reproduce an already failed and discredited liberal cosmopolitan framework through the advocacy of managerialism rather than transformation; the top-down coercive approach of international law; and use of abstract modernist political categories. In the closing sections of the article, we discuss the possibility of different approaches, which, taking the Anthropocene as both an epistemological and ontological break with modernist assumptions, could take us beyond IR’s disciplinary confines.Item Embargo Archipelagic Nations: Situating Citizenship in Education(Common Ground, 2008) Cudworth, E.; Burnett, J.The ‘citizenship issue’ has become a major source of media and political debate as we grapple with the complexities of living in a diverse and globalising social form. This paper problematises citizenship in education at the level of lived experience, noting that specific debates around the citizenship of those in post compulsory educational systems are muted. Greater air space is consumed by engagement with the liberal, ‘safety-first’ approach in response to anxious discourses such as that of ‘integration’, institutionalised through school curricula. Drawing on findings from a collaborative project, we consider our explorations of the ‘problem’ of citizenship with some of our undergraduate students. These took students and staff into a variety of educational settings including schools, colleges and a ‘free’ school. In each, different models of citizenship prevail, and different kinds of citizens are produced and are productive of citizenship communities. This paper examines the difficulties of our students moving from commonsense understandings of citizenship to an informed and critical engagement. It elaborates on the ways in which this leads to a questioning of, and transformations in, the roles of, and the relationships between, staff, students, the university and sociology. The paper concludes that the problem of citizenship can be understood as one of praxis. In particular, it notes the power of the sociological imagination in its defamiliarisation, reflexivity, and contestation, to disrupt citizenship relations in the university and beyond. The picture painted of citizenship in this study is of uncertain, complex becomings in which ‘citizens’ fall into cross cutting, and diverse groupings. Whereas the dominant agenda in citizenship education in the UK suggests adherence to a traditional pluralism, we found that in the praxis of doing citizenship, the liberal model is unhinged by the diverse identities and concerns of situated citizens.Item Open Access Beyond Environmental Security: Complex Systems, Multiple Inequalities and Environmental Risks(Taylor and Francis, 2011-01-18) Cudworth, E.; Hobden, S.The development of environmental security as an academic project is an important contribution in theorising the politics of global environmental change and shifting security contexts, but there are significant problems with the ways in which environmental issues have been incorporated into security discussions. Approaches to theorising environmental questions in international politics in terms of environmental conflict or environmental security tend to reproduce a dualistic understanding of human relations to ‘the environment’ in which humans are either threatened by or pose a threat to ‘nature’. An approach in terms of ecological security does account for changes in the biosphere resultant from human endeavours and understands social relations as ecologically embedded, but it underplays the extent to which multiple and complex inequalities shape the environmental impact of different populations. Drawing on concepts from complexity theory, alongside different elements of political ecologism, it is argued that human relationships with environments are characterised by social intersectionality and complex inequalities. Complexity approaches can help capture the patterns of these relations and understand the co-constitution of human communities and the ‘natural environment’.Item Metadata only Bringing down the Animal Abuse Industry by Any Means Necessary: State-corporate-media alliance, the fragility of pro-meat propaganda and the possibilities of counter cultural intervention(Peter Laing, 2022-04-30) Cudworth, E.; White, Richard, J.Item Open Access Civilisation and the Domination of the Animal(Sage, 2014-08-05) Cudworth, E.; Hobden, S.Underlying claims about a ‘standard of civilisation’ are questions about what it means to be human. Those that assert membership of a higher civilisation do so on the basis of the extent to which a particular grouping has been able to separate itself and become independent of nature. Such contentions reproduce the duality between the human and non-human nature in that the civilised are considered as separate/superior to the non-civilised, and on the grounds of that superiority have a right of dominion over them in ways that parallel human relations with non-human nature. The process of othering that any claim of civilisation requires thus involves a claim about the less than human status of the other. Following a brief discussion of posthumanism, we assess the considerable literature on the ‘standard of civilisation’ and, focusing on the language of race, consider the ways in which claims about civilisation are based on notions of a separation from nature. In the third section we assess the implications of such a separation. In the final section we turn the notion of civilisation on its head, by pointing to developments that suggest that those groupings who make the claims to be most separated from nature are those posing the gravest ecological threats.Item Open Access Climate Change, Industrial Animal Agriculture and Complex Inequalities(Common Ground, 2011) Cudworth, E.This paper examines changes in agricultural practices, focusing on developments in meat production. There are a number of interlinked processes and practices that will be examined: the key changes in animal food production, and the impact of very recent developments in animal food production on local, regional and global environments. The current scale of animal farming is intense, and there has been an incredible increase in the populations of farmed animals. The production of animals and animal feed crops has had a significant impact on localised food production systems, and the intensive production of stock is set to become the model for agricultural development in poor countries. Animal based food is seen as a solution to food poverty and helping to eliminate food insecurity. Yet this paper will suggest that the establishment of Western intensive production and the promotion of Western eating habits are more likely to increase social inequalities.Item Open Access Companions, Captives, Kin: Domination and Affection in the Conceptualising of ‘Pets’(MDPI, 2024-09-05) Cudworth, E.This review article reflects on the idea of the pet, or animal companion. It is a response to the tension between the important role animal companions play in the lives of many people and the ways they are ill-treated and discarded. In examining this apparent anomaly, the paper revisits Yi-Fu Tuan’s conception of pets as produced through the nexus of domination and affection. For Tuan, there is no anomaly in demonstrating both kindness and cruelty towards pets because, while pets may be objects of affection, they are created through practices of manipulation and control. The paper endorses Tuan’s conception of pets as an exercise in domination but argues for a more nuanced conception which allows for the possibility of different kinds of relations. In so doing, it provides an alternative model of human domination which can be seen in the ‘making’ of pets, drawing on a study of people’s relationships and lives with dog companions in the UK. The paper argues for an inclusive concept of pets, involving various species, and which recognises that pet–human relations differ according to the species which are kept. Ultimately, the paper suggests that the terms, concepts and theories we use to understand pets and human relations with them needs to be open to the diversity of species of animal kept and the ways in which this impacts human relations with them. Attention also needs to be paid to the varied kinds of relationship people have with pets based on different kinds of regard for animals. The paper also considers future directions for research, making the case for a critical approach to pet studies.Item Open Access Complexity Theory and the Sociology of Natures(Common Ground, 2007) Cudworth, E.The natural environment is characterised by incredible difference, yet its complexity is often homogenised in sociological understandings. This paper will argue that social formations are ecologically embedded in inter-species networks, and that sociological work needs to reflect this more strongly. Despite this co-constitution of the 'social' and the 'natural', the paper also argues that human nature is subject to a complex system of domination which privileges the human. Despite the dynamic qualities of the contemporary formations of natured domination, intimations of a 'posthuman condition' are very much over drawn. This paper examines the burgeoning work on systems thinking in both the natural and the social sciences, and suggests how some scientific models have developed conceptualisations that might usefully be deployed in the understanding of relatively contained social formations, and in the analysis of systemic relations between non-human communities, non-human species and environmental contexts. It proposes a concept of 'anthroparchy', a complex social system of natured domination which can be understood as a network of institutions, processes and practices that can be evidenced in particular social forms. Within a complexity frame however, 'anthroparchy' cannot stand alone. Rather, specific formations of social natures are emergent as a result of the interplay of a range of systems of domination.Item Open Access Complexity, Ecologism, and Posthuman Politics(Cambridge University Press, 2012-12-11) Cudworth, E.; Hobden, S.Theorisations of the political in general, and international politics in particular, have been little concerned with the vast variety of other, non-human populations of species and ‘things’. This anthropocentrism limits the possibilities for the discipline to contribute on core issues and prescribes a very limited scope for study. As a response to this narrow focus, this article calls for the development of a posthuman approach to the study of international politics. By posthuman, we mean an analysis that is based on complexity theory, rejects Newtonian social sciences, and decentres the human as the object of study. We argue for a decentring of ‘the human’ in our scholarship as imperative to understanding the complexity of the world. However, this approach also has a political incentive, which we describe as ‘complex ecologism’.Item Metadata only Educating the outcast: Policy and practice in the education of gypsy traveller children.(Interdisciplinary Press, 2009) Cudworth, David; Cudworth, E.Item Open Access The Emancipatory Project of Posthumanism(Routledge, 2017-08-29) Cudworth, E.; Hobden, S.Item Metadata only Feminist Animal Studies: Theories, Practices, Politics(Routledge, 2023-01-01) McKie, Ruth E.; Turgoose, Di; Cudworth, E.Strands of feminist thinking have made an incisive critique of the ways in which gender and other intersecting differences and inequalities are constitutive of our destructive, exploitative and often violent relationships with non-human worlds. The essays in this collection take forward contemporary debates within feminism about our relationships with other animals and with each other. They showcase cutting edge work in the field of feminist animal studies by established scholars and newer voices in the field, working in cultural studies, criminology, geography, law, philosophy, politics, and sociology. Amongst the issues addressed in this collection are questions of animal being and animal rights, caring relations, the relationships between activism and theory and activism and trauma, interspecies sexual violence, tension in the animal defence movement around body politics, gender politics and professionalisation, different spaces of gender and animal relations from social media to sexology, safe spaces and sanctuaries, spaces of home – both in times of ‘business-as-usual’ and times of lockdown. In addition, important historical legacies in theory, empirical research and activism are acknowledged. The contributors add their collective voices to the many others arguing for profound change in the ways human being manage their relationships with the myriad other creatures with whom they share this planet; change for which revisioning relationships of gender and intersected inequalities will be imperative.Item Open Access For a Critically Posthumanist Sociology in Precarious Times (Special Issue Editorial)(Emerald, 2020) Cudworth, E.Item Open Access Foundations of Complexity, and the Complexity of Foundations: Beyond the Foundation/Anti-Foundational Debate(Wiley, 2010-11-22) Cudworth, E.; Hobden, S.A debate over the possibilities for foundations of knowledge has been a key feature of theoretical discussions in the discipline of International Relations. A number of recent contributions suggest that this debate is still active. This article offers a contribution to this debate by suggesting that the study of complexity may provide a contingent foundation for the study of international relations. We examine the grounds on which such a claim might be made, and examine the implications for taking complexity as a foundational claim.Item Open Access From godkin to oddkin: Love, friendship and kin making beyond the human family(Sage, 2024-07-10) Cudworth, E.Work within the sociology of the family and personal life has tended to proceed with little or no recognition of non-human members of the household. In the sociology of human–animal relations, however, ideas of multispecies families, multispecies households and animal companions (pets) as kin have been proposed in attempting to capture the close bonds between people and the animals they share their homes and lives with. Drawing on a UK ethnographic study, this article considers the emotional ties and affective relations people have with dog companions. The article argues that the sociological concept of the family is stretched in attempting to capture intra- species domestic relations. Haraway uses kin making to indicate that intimate relationality might be more widely drawn, beyond immediate human relatives to a range of people and beyond the human. Through a critical engagement with Haraway’s conception of ‘oddkin’, the article asks whether kin might be a more productive category in conceptualising intimate relations with animal companions.