Violent Atmospheres

Embodying the best of what the 'volumetric turn' in socio-environmental studies has to offer, this carefully edited book provides deep insights into the structural factors and lived experiences of agrarian communities facing livelihood and landscape crises in Southeast Asia. By connecting the subterranean, terrestrial, and aerial spaces and temporalities of abandoned coal mines, failing hydropower dams, palm oil plantations, or peatland fires, contributors expose the brutal multidimensional impacts of capital overaccumulation. This is a major contribution to studies of climate change, extractivism, and political ecologies of violence.--Philippe Le Billon, The University of British Columbia The conceptual terrain addressed by the volume is expansive: atmosphere is both affect and materiality; violence is both slow and eventful; and space encompasses volume, verticality and flow. By approaching this terrain though fine-grained studies grounded in the histories, ecologies, and entrenched inequalities of Southeast Asia, the contributors render the multidimensioned violence of our time palpable. Let's hope they also render it more difficult for techno-optimists and profit-seekers to ignore.--Tania Murray Li, University of Toronto The contributors to Violent Atmospheres drag us through the mud, smoke, and swamps of Southeast Asia, unraveling emblematic and violent volumetric socio-environmental crises. They dissect and recombine the multidimensional and temporal processes at work in viciously complex political ecologies of extraction, overaccumulation, and ongoing dispossession affecting everyday lives across the region. The book's interdisciplinary focus on the volumetric brings a new vision to our understandings of resource territorialities and a new conceptual tool for analyzing the productions of sterile bodies and barren landscapes.--Nancy Lee Peluso, University of California, Berkeley