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The world deanimated

Inter-species attention in an age of extinction
by
December 2022, no. 449

Kin: Thinking with Deborah Bird Rose edited by Thom van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew

Duke University Press, US$25.95 pb, 239 pp

The world deanimated

Inter-species attention in an age of extinction
by
December 2022, no. 449
Deborah Rose Bird (photograph via Centre for Environmental History)
Deborah Rose Bird (photograph via Centre for Environmental History)

Deborah Bird Rose (1946–2018) was an interdisciplinary thinker who helped establish the field of the environmental humanities (or ecological humanities); in 2012 she also co-founded the scholarly journal Environmental Humanities. Having initially trained in anthropology, Rose strove to push that field and other ethnographic studies beyond their stubborn anthropocentrism. She came to Australia in 1980 from Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, to undertake PhD research in Aboriginal Australia. Her thinking was shaped by the decades she spent with Aboriginal mentors and friends, in the Northern Territory communities of Lingara and Yarralin. Across her writing, in books such as Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and extinction (2011) and Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal views of landscape and wilderness (1996), Rose demonstrated and promoted attentiveness to, and ethical engagement with, the plethora of beings on Earth.

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