Whose lives are grievable in the capitalist logics of the Anthropocene?

Shared by Randa Khattar, Lisa-Marie Gagliardi, and Maya Simon

A sign is posted on a fence cordoning off where a new college cafeteria is being constructed.  The pine trees need to go down, we are told by the construction crew.  

On whose lands is the cafeteria being erected? Feeding, dwelling, growing  spaces; visiting places for children and educators; parking spots for families at the early childhood centre.  Who counts as being of this community? Who decides? For the betterment of whom? 

We pine for the pines. Yet how might we respond to dominant human-centered salvific and redemptive teleologies? How do we live instead in what Anna Tsing calls the capitalist ruins “to work within our disorientation and distress to negotiate life in human-damaged environments” (2015, p. 131)?  And how do we pedagogically engage in spaces that perpetuate capitalist logics that position the betterment, improvement and expansion of usable, profitable and consumerist spaces as commonsensical progress?

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References

Tsing, A. L. (2015): The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.