Dissonant Glossary

“The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signalling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling” (Haraway 1991, 152).

“As humans in the early twenty-first century are beginning, in some meaningful sense, to see other animals, indeed other beings, as kin to us, it becomes more and more plausible to understand that nonhuman animals would feel emotions similar to those of humans when their home environments are disturbed” (Albrecht 2019, 47).

“Humans have humanized themselves by rejecting their own animality. Dismantling the human/animal opposition is thus a crucial measure for re-imagining the concept of the human” (Haapoja, n.d.).

“Considering [the] major and still growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales, it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term ‘anthropocene’ for the current geological epoch” (Crutzen and Stoermer [2000] 2013, 484).

“Anthropocene rhetoric . . . frequently acts as a mechanism of universalization . . . which enables the military-state-corporate apparatus to disavow responsibility for the differentiated impacts of climate change, effectively obscuring the accountability behind the mounting eco-catastrophe and inadvertently making us all complicit in its destructive project” (Demos 2017, 19).

“Of course, there are recognizable global Anthropocene signs—floods, fires, and storms—but variation is everywhere. Given the vast and growing catalogue of planetary problems, pluralization of the singular Anthropocene is crucial” (Jensen 2025, 1).

“If . . . we take an environmental justice approach to Anthropocene storytelling, we can better acknowledge the way human actors’ geo- and biomorphic powers have involved vast disparities in exposure to risk and access to resources” (Nixon 2017, 45).

“Let’s get back to the point: why bring art into the fight for climate justice? The reasons, despite any lingering scepticism, are overwhelming. . . . Art shakes people awake. It cuts through the cold, clinical data . . . It tells stories that make the crisis personal, immediate, and impossible to ignore” (Demos 2025, 37).

“Climate justice ensures fairness in avoiding, addressing, and repairing the causes and consequences of climate change, such as biodiversity loss and ecological breakdown. This must occur through an inclusive process that considers the interests, needs, risks, capabilities, power relations, opportunities, and limitations of all—both human and non-human—across time: past, present, and future” (Browne et al. 2026, 25).

“Like a new invention, a new philosophical idea is always both liberating and dangerous in an unprecedented way. Like a new flag, it rallies previously unknown comrades to action. Like a giant mythological bird, it protects numerous territories even while abandoning others to the flames” (Harman 2002, 79).

“Facing the catastrophic present and futureless future resulting from the extinction wars waged against everything living, demands that we—earth workers—unite. It demands that we recognise each other as Comrades in a collective struggle for living worlds against the racial-ecocidal-neocolonial capitalist death-form” (D’Souza and Staal 2024, 14)

“I choose the term ‘conviviality’ to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment . . . I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society’s members” (Illich 1973, 24).

“Human beings can no longer view themselves as proprietors and masters of nature. On the assumption that, far from being its adversary, they are actually a part of it, [the principles of conviviality] must be applied to animals—which must no longer be thought of as fodder for industry—and to the earth in general” (Convivialist Manifesto 2014, 33–34).

“To reconceive the green city as a site of more-than-human conviviality and hospitality, we would need to effect a cultural shift to resituate humankind ecologically, while resituating otherkind (plants, animals, and fungi, but potentially also rivers, wetlands, and woods, for example) ethically” (Rigby 2018, 73).

“If coexistence implies living with troublesome nonhuman natures despite the associated conflicts and costs . . . we might then conceptualize conviviality as co-flourishing, in which sustainable rural livelihoods and wildlife conservation each provides the preconditions for the other” (Martin 2024, 17).

“Objects and collections are . . . the pathways through which stories can flow. In the twenty-first-century museum, curation is not simply about working with repositories of inert curiosities, accumulations of the flotsam and jetsam of history and culture, but rather enabling the objects to live again” (Newell, Robin, and Wehner 2017, 2–3).

“The use of curator dropped after the 1990s, especially when capitalized as a professional role. Meanwhile, curated as a verb has boomed” (Grindon 2023, 29).

“Hyperobjects loom into human time like the lengthening shadow of a tree across the garden lawn in the bright sunshine of an ending afternoon. The end of the world is not a sudden punctuation point, but rather it is a matter of deep time” (Morton 2013, 122).

“Alienation is perhaps the most logical reaction to sublime, inhuman timescales. Confronted by stretched-out temporal horizons, the human figure is marginalized, decentered as measure of all things” (Ginn, Bastian, Farrier, and Kidwell 2018, 214).

“The Anthropocene involves us in a kind of deep-time negative capability, inducting us into the strangeness of a temporality that vastly exceeds both personal experience and intergenerational memory” (Farrier 2019, 86).

“The deep time the Anthropocene invites us to consider is not only the past. It also projects a deep future which explodes the temporal horizon of all established forms of prognostication and planning” (Horn and Bergthaller 2019, 165).

“There’s a deep connection between [deep time] and the space zone of unthinkable distance, hundreds of thousands of miles or even light-years away. Both are almost beyond our capacity to imagine: the sedimentary layers of Earth a kind of weighty corollary to the almost infinite expanses of outer space” (Dick 2023, 35).

“Water may be a mirror into which rural society gazes or through which power operates, but it is rarely a medium of rigid social structures. Because water moves, it erases as well as makes social boundaries; it changes landscape, provides the basis of new claims and threatens established orders” (Mosse 2008, 944).

“In its simplest form, the hydrosocial cycle represents the process by which alteration or manipulation of water flows and quality affect social relations and structure, which in turn affect further alteration or manipulation of water” (Linton and Budds 2014, 175).

“Social and hydrological relationships are hardly distinguishable in a world where water flows are not innocent, natural occurrences, but shaped by economic inequalities, government priorities, and power differentials” (Krause 2017, 405).

“Irony is the refreshing and consistent noncoincidence of what is in our heads with what is the case. Far from being a symptom of political or spiritual burn-out, it is the oil that keeps the engine running” (Morton 2007, 193).

“On this point of productive irony, I believe [Morton] opens up the possibility of an escape from the charge often levelled at nature writing (both the discipline of ecocriticism and, by association, creative writing itself) that is of earnestness” (Patrizio 2019, 12).

“How would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies? By ‘vitality’ I mean the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own. My aspiration is to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due” (Bennett 2010, viii).

“Material Engagement Theory’s focus on 'vital materiality' enables us to ponder what makes us all human and at the same time so different” (Malafouris 2013, 248).

“Social change means people behaving, interacting, engaging with the world differently. Social change is, in other words, always perceptual/cognitive/emotional but it always also involves a changed mediated material engagement” (Graham 2019, 73).

“The claim is that things actively participate in human cognitive life or that human thinking is better described as thinging. We think with and through things, not simply about things. In particular, for the material-engagement approach, withness and throughness take precedence over aboutness” (Malafouris 2020, 4).

“Doubtless the catastrophe of the Anthropocene is by no means as recent as we would like to imagine. The narcissistic man-made destruction of the planet is age-old. We know this from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s great poem, Ozymandias . . . We also know human vainglory through the Dutch vanitas tradition. The list is endless” (Jamal 2024, 26).

“Art that addresses the great acceleration [the surge in human activity during the twentieth century] must . . . contend with moments prior to human thought as well as the idea of a time after humanity itself. Necessarily, it will traffic in the rhetoric of memento mori” (Samman 2014, 37).

“The frenzy of moving more and more stuff around the world—fueled by growing human numbers and increasing affluence within a capitalist profit-driven system—is at the core of civilization’s superficial definition of ‘prosperity,’ and a death knell for the more-than-human world” (Crist 2013, 135n.16).

“A reconfigured cultural memory studies is needed in the face of radical changes in atmospheric, hydrospheric, lithospheric and biospheric conditions brought about by climate change that reveal the interconnectedness of human and more-than-human worlds through their mutual devastation” (Crownshaw 2016, 33).

“It is essential to develop a political analysis rooted in decolonizing nature, that is in helping the more-than-human world break free from the grip of capitalist economic dominance” (Demos 2025, 34).

“Entangled territories composed of heterogeneous beings (humans, animals, elements, plants, viruses, and many more more‑than‑humans) generate new problems of co‑existence. New politics of livability attentive to ontological divergence are sorely needed for a planet in transition” (Jensen 2025, 4).

“To acknowledge this predatory dimension of nature, to recognize both danger and fear, is no less critical to a multispecies perspective than is welcoming among our human world the multitude of worlds composed by our companions” (Davis and Turpin 2015, 13).

“Specifically, unlike either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen—yet” (Haraway 2016).

“This sense of self as part of the planetary Earth System, as opposed to guardian, protector and/or defiler of it, is precisely what many today have argued for as the beginning of a solution to the ecological problems facing us, ‘us’ conceived as multi-species, and ‘solution’ conceived as partial, and situated” (Ballard and Linden 2019, 143).

“Beginning with the Special Theory of Relativity, time increasingly came to be seen not as an inevitable progression along a linear scale to which all humans were subject, but as a construct that could be conceived in different ways” (Katherine Hayles, quoted in Haraway 1991, 207).

“Anachronic and anachronistic concepts of time have long preoccupied art historians . . . prompting radical reconsideration of periodisation, chronology, and the very concept of linear time” (Smith and Patrizio 2026, 63).

“This linear Newtonian past → present → future structure, although useful as an organising principle, derives from a very specific—and biased—tradi­tion . . . Oral Western and non-Western cultures have conceptualised time in cosmogo­nies that transcend [this structure]” (De Rebetz 2023, 12).

“For some, the topic of climate change liability may still seem like nice legal ‘hocus pocus’, useful for academics with too much imagination, but not a tool that realistically could be used to force emitters of greenhouse gases towards preventive measures” (Faure and Peeters 2011, 255).

“Each country is . . . responsible for its own share. That means that a country cannot escape its own share of the responsibility to take measures by arguing that, compared to the rest of the world, its own emissions are relatively limited in scope and that a reduction of its own emissions would have very little impact on a global scale” (Netherlands v Urgenda, summary of §5.61–5.8).

“The posthuman condition introduces a qualitative shift in our thinking about what exactly is the basic unit of common reference for our species, our polity and our relationship to the other inhabitants of this planet. . . . Discourses and representations of the non-human, the inhuman, the anti-human, the inhumane and the posthuman proliferate and overlap in our globalized, technologically mediated societies” (Braidotti 2013, 1–2).

“Posthumanism . . . is the idea of the human being as a social and historical construct, as opposed to the essentialist concept of humanity of the tradition of humanism” (Haapoja 2020, 12).

“On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue” (Williams 1975, 1).

“The meaning of rurality . . . nearly always carries with it the promise of self-actualisation” (Hildyard 2013, 142).

“Creating ‘nature’ as the world that is ‘not us’ is an ontological conceptualisation that struggles to be meaningful in rurality” (Parry 2013, 114).

“Race and rurality . . . seem to overlap as heirs of a history of analysis that has both privileged (and indeed fetishized) them as explanatory categories and then denied their very relevance to understanding (social) spaces and the lived experiences within them” (Crichlow, Northover, and Giusti-Cordero 2018, 11).

“A fundamental challenge for designers and the design community is to move from designing ‘things’ (objects) to designing Things (socio-material assemblies)” (Bjögvinsson, Ehn, and Hillgren 2012, 102).

“Situated design acknowledges the tinker-ing and negotiation involved in designing things—tangible as well as intangible—and making them happen as intended. Phrased in a slightly different manner, a situated design deals with all the ‘thinging’ that goes into the making of things” (Simonsen et al. 2014, 1).

“[Situated design] refers to practices in which artists and researchers anchor their creative processes in specific physical or social locations. This approach focuses on investigating and understanding the unique dynamics and meaning arising from the interaction between art and the environment in which it is created” (Berkers et al. 2024, 95).

“I define ‘solastalgia’ as the pain or distress caused by the ongoing loss of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory. . . . In direct contrast to the dislocated spatial dimensions of traditionally defined nostalgia, solastalgia is the homesickness you have when you are still located within your home environment” (Albrecht 2009, 38–39).

“Climate change affects mental health . . . by causing anxiety-related responses, and later chronic and severe mental health disorders . . . These effects will fall disproportionately on individuals who are already vulnerable, especially for indigenous people and those living in low-resource settings. Additionally, individuals might feel a distressing sense of loss, known as solastalgia, that people experience when their land is damaged and they lose amenity and opportunity” (Watts et al. 2015, 1877).

“Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (United Nations 1987, 8).

“Sustainability has all too often been taken for granted as a self-evident good in artistic discourses, [leading] many Left-oriented critics to dismiss the term out of hand as so much neoliberal ‘greenwashing’ serving to neutralize properly political analyses and demands in favor of superficially eco-conscious forms of lifestyle, design, and consumer-citizenship” (Mckee 2010, 25).