The house of man: Sheltering in the Anthropocene

When the pandemic struck, many countries went into lockdown mode;India did so for 21 days starting on March 24, 2020. In addition to the people who were already in quarantine, the experience during the lockdown has impacted our "normal" experience of home as people have been asked to stay at home. In the Anthropocene, the geological epoch where humans are acting as a planetary force, the questions of "home" and "ownership" have come under intense scrutiny because various species are losing their natural habitats and face extinction. This chapter proposes to investigate the elementality of home that marks the pandemic and the Anthropocene. To locate this threshold, we follow the conceptual motif of sanctuary and shelter to illuminate the structure of home during the pandemic. The chapter discusses the various inflections of home in the pandemic and its construction as a scientifically validated shelter from the virus. It focuses on the figure of the migrant and how the rootlessness of the migrant can be understood in the face of Gaia, our planet as a sanctuary in the Anthropocene. To discuss on futures that are lost, the chapter reflects on images of home-as-sanctuary relative to the pandemic and the Anthropocene. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Compassion, Hunger and Animal Suffering: Scenes from Kerala, South India.

Animal narratives have not been a major part of the coronavirus pandemic other than to frame animals as "epidemic villains" whose relations with humans are either zoonotic or pathological. In this context, this article considers stories of compassion from Kerala, where activists and ordinary people started feeding stray dogs and other street animals during the state instituted lockdowns. State sanction and media coverage of feeding these hungry animals allowed them to be instated as part of a multispecies community in the pandemic, allowing them for the first time, legitimized access to food and water. Compassion was prescribed and validated on the basis of perceiving suffering synergistically or as mutually experienced during the pandemic. However, a linear history of compassion cannot be constructed as Kerala has an antagonistic relationship with street dogs framing them as violent free-ranging dogs that carry diseases and attack people. This article draws on insights gleaned from multispecies ethnography to explore the hidden everyday lives of the animals during the pandemic. It raises questions about how people come to occupy relations of care in societies where animal suffering is not acknowledged and explores the possibilities opened by the way compassion was constructed as a practical and moral value during the pandemic.

COVID-19, microbiopolitics and species precarity in the anthropocene

The turn towards deep entanglement precipitated by the Anthropocene has seen a rise in probiotic approaches towards microorganisms that highlight human-microbe relationalities. However, COVID-19 complicates this relationality not least considering its staggering effects on human society which have reinforced notions of solidarity and common crisis, as evidenced in the various biopolitical measures or the ‘outbreak narrative’. In this regard, Heather Paxson’s formulation of microbiopolitics as the construction and evaluation of categories of microorganisms serves as a useful model to ask what kind of microbiopolitics the coronavirus pandemic makes possible and what these strategies imply for collaborative human-microbe relations or multispecies flourishing. The microbiopolitics that marks the pandemic as new mutations and strains of viruses are being identified and a future of zoonotic diseases is anticipated shows this microbial relationality as already present. However, to make sense of entanglement in the pandemic is to recognize microbiopolitics as socio-politically contingent and undercut by anthropocentric anxieties for our own well-being but also as a species precarity. This species precarity for humans shows that the pandemic is differentially experienced as a self while negotiating its relations with non-human others. It is what demands of us that we develop strategies for living along with the virus or other microbes for the foreseeable future. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Culture, Theory & Critique is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)