From the human to the planetary: Speculative futures of care

Authors

Miriam Ticktin, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-24-2019

Abstract

This is largely a theoretical, speculative essay that takes on the question of what ‘care’ looks like at a moment when climate change is increasingly taking center stage in public and political discussions. Starting with two new practices, namely, humanitarian care for nonhumans and One Health collaborations, I seek to determine what forms of political care can incorporate the well-being of future generations and future iterations of the earth. After an exploration of One Health as an approach to planetary care, I ask what its parts enable us to think, despite its limitations; I focus on the new human-nonhuman assemblages connected through different biosocial models, such as neuroscience or immunology, to see how these scientific theories might enable new possibilities. I argue that a focus on biological ecologies at different scales – as opposed to ethicomoral categories like humanity – can open the way to a larger imaginary of human and nonhuman flourishing and a space for nonmoralistic politics.

Comments

This article was originally published in Medicine Anthropology Theory, available at https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.6.3.666

This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).