Nonhuman Witnessing

Michael Richardson is Associate Professor of Media and Culture at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, and author of Gestures of Testimony: Torture, Trauma, and Affect in Literature.

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction. Nonhuman Witnessing  11. Witnessing Violence  372. Witnessing Algorithms  803. Witnessing Ecologies  1124. Witnessing Absence  150Coda. Toward a Politics of Nonhuman Witnessing  174Notes  185Bibliography  207Index  229

“The work of Michael Richardson is like a four dimensional cartography to navigate the hyperaesthetics of our post-photographic present.” - Eyal Weizman, coauthor of (Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth) “Foregrounding the ethical dimensions of the convergence between the fields of security and ecology, Michael Richardson explores whether witnessing is taking place beyond the boundaries of the human. By making a fantastic case for the reversal of the humanist concept of witnessing, Richardson impacts what kinds of research questions can be asked across the disciplines.” - Jairus Victor Grove, author of (Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World) "Richardson examines what it means to bear witness in the modern world. In an era of escalating geopolitical tensions and instability, impending climate disaster, and technological transformation with artificial intelligence, the book makes a case for expanding our conception of what forms witnessing can take." (University of New South Wales Sydney) "Nonhuman Witnessing is ingeniously structured and beautifully written, and for geographers concerned with questions of testimony and trauma it provides a provocative and original rendering of witnessing as a concept, while the array of examples and theoretical arguments speak directly to geographical work on violence, (non)relationality, the Anthropocene and more." - Richard Carter-White (Social and Cultural Geography)