Kin: Thinking with Deborah Bird Rose

by Thom van Dooren (Editor), Matthew Chrulew (Editor)

The contributors to Kin draw on the work of anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose (1946–2018), a foundational voice in environmental humanities, to examine the relationships of interdependence and obligation between human and nonhuman lives. Through a close engagement over many decades with the Aboriginal communities of Yarralin and Lingara in northern Australia, Rose’s work explored possibilities for entangled forms of social and environmental justice. She sought to bring the insights of her Indigenous teachers into dialogue with the humanities and the natural sciences to describe and passionately advocate for a world of kin grounded in a profound sense of the connectivities and relationships that hold us together. Kin ’s contributors take up Rose’s conceptual frameworks, often pushing academic fields beyond their traditional objects and methods of study. Together, the essays do more than pay tribute to Rose’s scholarship; they extend her ideas and underscore her ongoing critical and ethical relevance for a world still enduring and resisting ecocide and genocide.

Contributors. The Bawaka Collective, Matthew Chrulew, Colin Dayan, Linda Payi Ford, Donna Haraway, James Hatley, Owain Jones, Stephen Muecke, Kate Rigby, Catriona (Cate) Sandilands, Isabelle Stengers, Anna Tsing, Thom van Dooren, Kate Wright

248 pages, Hardcover

Published April 1, 2022

Reviews

[Molsa Roja(s) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved it. A piece that is an homage to Deborah Bird Rose thought, that within its matrix gets to expand it, to make it bigger and deeper, all in the language of love and grief. I've found some texts more interesting or compelling than others, and of course Haraway's was amazing -as always-, but I'd like to point here at the writing by the Bawaka Country, which was absolutely mind-blowing. I think that indigenous philosophy is going to be a game changer within the following decades, and it's already starting to show. Don't miss this!