Fear of a Dead White Planet
Fear of a Dead White Planet
by Joseph Masco, Tim Choy, Jake Kosek and M. Murphy
Duke University Press, 2025
ISBNs
Cloth: 978-1-4780-2884-0
Paper: 978-1-4780-3210-6
eISBN: 978-1-4780-9433-3 (OA)
eISBN: 978-1-4780-6105-2 (standard)
About the Book
Fear of a Dead White Planet asks: How does one study when the planet is on fire? The More Worlds Collective challenges the contemporary rush to planetary technofixes for environmental emergency. Instead, it tracks how such planetary-science frames are enmeshed in the longstanding projects of White Supremacy, settler colonialism, and epistemological violence. Calling for unlearning and joined-up study, the collective reclaims terraforming from off-earth engineering schemes to think through how our more modest efforts to study differently are also world-making and world-breaking. In orienting its work toward terra and formation, the collective commits to a place-based, non universal study scaled at levels both intimate and massive. Through its serious but unruly methods, Fear of a Dead White Planet invites readers to recognize and conjure alternate worlds in and around the university.
About the Author
Joseph Masco is Samuel N. Harper Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.
Tim Choy is Professor of Science and Technology Studies and of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis.
Jake Kosek is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.
M. Murphy is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Environmental Data Justice and Science and Technology Studies at the University of Toronto.
Tim Choy is Professor of Science and Technology Studies and of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis.
Jake Kosek is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.
M. Murphy is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Environmental Data Justice and Science and Technology Studies at the University of Toronto.
Reviews
“What can you break? What can you block? Jump on the Intergalactic Bummer Train (formerly known as planet Earth); they’re killing us, so throw words out the window and dance with rage. Fear of a Dead White Planet offers a sharp wit and sharper words: Land matters, and anything that doesn’t fix it is truly the problem.”
-- Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, coauthor of Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature
-- Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, coauthor of Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature
“Fear of a Dead White Planet is a compelling manifesto and blueprint for figuring out collective approaches to politics, life, and inquiry on matters of shared concern. Humanists, social scientists, and others working within and against the university will find it to be welcome reading. Think of this book as a kind of polymorphously pessimistic version of R. Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, in which the urge toward ‘Charismatic Mega-Concepts’ is undone, to be replaced with calls for attention to how One World systems are often totalitarian—a fact that demands inquiry into their conditions of possibility and therefore the conditions under which some version of the we may dismantle them.”
-- Stefan Helmreich, author of A Book of Waves
-- Stefan Helmreich, author of A Book of Waves
“Fear of a Dead White Planet is a necessary moment of introspection for academics and researchers critical of green capitalism and its impossible promises."
-- Raffaele Sindoni Antipode
-- Raffaele Sindoni Antipode
“In the writing and teaching of Fear of a Dead White Planet, the authors demonstrate one of the many ways in which collective study and organized terraforming can help us embrace and work through our knotted attempts to co-construct more habitable realities. This book is a wonderful example and nourishing read for both scholars and learners of the humanities and the sciences committed to building a better world.”
-- Hosaena Tilahun AAG Review of Books
-- Hosaena Tilahun AAG Review of Books
"One of the more original interventions in recent debates over the politics and epistemology of planetary thought."
-- Lauren Judge H-Environment, H-Net Reviews
-- Lauren Judge H-Environment, H-Net Reviews
Tags
Environmental degradation, Ecocriticism, Global environmental change, Human ecology and the humanities, Geography, Environmental Science, Earth Sciences, Chemistry, Environmental, Study and teaching, Cultural & Social, Nature, Anthropology, Science, Philosophy, Social Science
Open Access Information
Label: University of California, Berkeley
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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