{"id":4499,"date":"2023-06-22T11:50:53","date_gmt":"2023-06-22T11:50:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/openreflections.wordpress.com\/?p=4499"},"modified":"2024-07-09T21:54:34","modified_gmt":"2024-07-09T20:54:34","slug":"ecological-rewriting-situated-engagements-with-the-chernobyl-herbarium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openreflections.org\/?p=4499","title":{"rendered":"Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium, <\/em>edited by Gabriela M\u00e9ndez Cota.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Ecological Rewriting<\/em> is available open access (it can be downloaded for free):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.openhumanitiespress.org\/books\/titles\/ecological-rewriting\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Book description<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium<\/em> is the first book in the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers<\/a> series. Supported by the COPIM<\/a> project, it is the creation of a collective of researchers, students and technologists from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Led by Gabriela M\u00e9ndez Cota, this group of nine (re)writers annotate and remix The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness<\/em> by the philosopher Michael Marder and the artist Ana\u00efs Tondeur (originally published in OHP\u2019s Critical Climate Change series) to produce what is a new book in its own right \u2013 albeit one that comments upon and engages with the original.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Mexican context, experiments with art, writing and technology have a history that is tied less to academic publishing or avant-garde scholarship and more to community-building and grassroots organising. It is important, then, that in creating Ecological Rewriting<\/em> the collective led by M\u00e9ndez Cota <\/em>are inspired by locally influential Cristina Rivera Garza\u2019s theorization of re-writing as dis-appropriation, rather than appropriation of another\u2019s work. Alongside philosophical concepts such as Jean-Luc Nancy\u2019s \u2018literary communism\u2019, Rivera Garza\u2019s ethical poetics is here turned into the proposition that the reuse of open access materials does not need to be understood as appropriation or reappropriation of \u2018knowledge\u2019. Instead, it can be conceived as a creative exercise in \u2018unworking\u2019 or \u2018disappropriating\u2019 academic authorship which responds to The Chernobyl Herbarium\u2019s<\/em> invitation to think through (vegetal) exposure and fragility. Thus, the authors challenge property and propriety by creating singular, fragmentary accounts of Mexico\u2019s relation with Chernobyl. In the process they explore ways of bearing witness to environmental devastation in its human and non-human scales, including the little-known history of nuclear power and the anti-nuclear movement in Mexico \u2013 which they intersect with an experimental history of plant biodiversity. The resulting book constitutes both a practical reflection on plant-thinking and a disruptive intervention into the conventions of academic writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium<\/em> exists as an online version (https:\/\/doi.org\/10.21428\/9ca7392d.07cdfb82<\/a>) and as a print version (forthcoming). The online version is an experimental publication with links to the original sections of The Chernobyl Herbarium<\/em> that the writers responded to, so that the reader can follow an associative trail between the two publications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Authors<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gabriela M\u00e9ndez Cota, Etelvina Bernal M\u00e9ndez, Sandra Hern\u00e1ndez Reyes, Sandra Loyola Gu\u00edzar, Fernanda Rodr\u00edguez Gonz\u00e1lez, Yareni Monte\u00f3n L\u00f3pez, Deni Garciamoreno Becerril, Nidia Rosales Moreno, X\u00f3chitl Arteaga Villamil, Carolina Cuevas Parra<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Editor Bio<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gabriela M\u00e9ndez Cota is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Philosophy at Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de M\u00e9xico. Inspired by deconstruction, psychoanalysis and technoscience feminism, her research explores the subjective and ethical dimensions of technological\/political controversies in specific contexts. Her books include Disrupting Maize: Food, Biotechnology and Nationalism in Contemporary Mexico<\/em> (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Among other places, her work has appeared in New Formations<\/em>, Media Theory<\/em>, Women\u2019s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, <\/em>and the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identities<\/em> (2020). With Rafico Ruiz, she co-edits the open access journal of culture and theory, Culture Machine (culturemachine.net)<\/a>. Between 2019 and 2021 she led a practice-based educational initiative on critical\/feminist\/intersectional perspectives of open access, which included a collaboration with the COPIM project led by the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, UK, and resulted in a collective rewriting of The Chernobyl Herbarium<\/em> (Open Humanities Press, 2015).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Series<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ecological Re-writing<\/em> is published as part of the <\/em>Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers series, edited by Janneke Adema, Simon Bowie, Gary Hall and Rebekka Kiesewetter:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

http:\/\/www.openhumanitiespress.org\/books\/series\/liquid-books\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium, edited by Gabriela M\u00e9ndez Cota. Like all Open Humanities Press books, Ecological Rewriting is available open access (it can be downloaded for free): https:\/\/www.openhumanitiespress.org\/books\/titles\/ecological-rewriting\/ Book description Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium is the first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4981,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,13,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-experimental-publishing","category-open-access","category-remix"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/openreflections.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Screenshot-2024-07-09-at-21.54.00.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openreflections.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openreflections.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openreflections.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openreflections.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openreflections.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4499"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/openreflections.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4978,"href":"https:\/\/openreflections.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4499\/revisions\/4978"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openreflections.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openreflections.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openreflections.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openreflections.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}