forthcoming publications

Please contact me to learn more about any of my forthcoming publications or if you would like to collaborate on a future publication. If a draft of my forthcoming publication is available, I will gladly share it with you.

in press

Sea Farming and Feminist Blue Humanities. Special Issue

Journal for Agricultural and Environmental Ethics. Co-edited with Cecilia Åsberg. (Forthcoming 2024).

This special issue features contributions that disclose past, current, and future transformations regarding how societies might nourish life through, by and with the seas, suggesting modes of thinking and consuming in ways that allay our high-energy and high-consumption societies. Nourishment in theory unmakes modern distinctions between individual consumer choice and planetary belonging, self and other, body and environment – generative to what has been termed for instance low trophic theory-practices (Radomska and Åsberg 2021; Åsberg and Radomska 2021). Thus, contributors to this issue explore the political and ethical terrain in contemporary nourishing practices surrounding sustainable food system transitions located along the coasts and in the oceans. Attention towards farming at sea needs be aware of the cross-border, trans-material, multi-species, posthuman entanglements in which it is embedded. For instance, we need to understand how posthuman and more-than-human ethics (Probyn 2016, 20) might be implemented in ocean farming. We need to understand how privatization and increases in oceanic productivity (Motichek et al. 2008) may impact environmental justice at different scales. We need also to think with the original meaning of “farm” as “something payable” and consider how to repay and replenish the oceans for what humans and society take from them. Hence, this special issue aims to address the themes of ocean farming and situate them within the context of coastal nourishment to address ethical and political implications that come with specific challenges, such as innovating ocean farm technologies for the harvesting of new materials, cultivating terrestrial plants and marine vegetables at sea, altering food webs, establishing policies and regulations on ocean farming, and reshaping aquatic relationships between humans and other beings. This special issue discusses critical ocean studies, indigenous, anti-colonial, queer, gender and intersectional approaches to marine and coastal sea farming. It honours inventive and societally relevant traditions in feminist STS, environmental ethics, blue – and multispecies humanities and the long histories of indigenous peoples’ connections to coastal areas. By doing so, we hope to showcase the uses of arts and humanities to policy and society but also the creativity emerging out of postdisciplinary meetings between (eco- and bio-) art, the environmental humanities, the natural sciences and diverse societies of the world.

“Ethical Challenges in Mariculture: Adopting a Feminist Blue Humanities Approach.” 

Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics.

As mariculture— the production of aquatic organisms in seas and oceans—intensifies to meet the demands of sustainable blue growth and national policies, novel ethical challenges will arise. In the context of ethics, primary concerns over aquaculture and mariculture tend to stay within differing value-based perspectives focused on benefits to human and non-human subjects, specifically animal welfare and animal rights. Nonetheless, the burgeoning field of feminist blue humanities provides ethical considerations that extend beyond animal subjects (including humans), often because of its concerns with new materialist, posthumanist, and other relations-based theories. This article examines feminist blue humanities and the contributions it may bring to understanding contemporary and future ethical challenges posed by mariculture and its intensification, especially the cultivation of low-trophic organisms. By offering an overview of feminist blue humanities, this article explores some of its particularities by drawing out three major ethical concerns facing contemporary mariculture, specifically material reconfigurations, radical alteration of the lives of low-trophic species through industrialisation and increases in maricultural waste products.

in review

“‘Extending’ the Oceans: How VR Technology Mediates Oceanic Space.” 

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences: Special Issue Values at Sea. Eds. E. Jones, J. Cañada, and S. Leonelli. (in review)

Oceanic Mobilities: Walking as method in Aquatic Environments.” 

For the One by Walking Anthology. Eds. Camilla Brudin Borg et al. (in review).

“Birdsong and feathers in the digital age: how technologies shape our relationships to birds.” 

Co-authored with Elin Lundquist, Minh Xuân Truong, Gabriel Gumucio, and René van der Wal. (in review).

'"A Gentle Touch': Imaginaries for Killing Fish Humanely on Social Media"

for Queer Death Studies Handbook, Routledge. Nina Lykke, Marietta Radomska, and Tara Mehrabi (eds.). (In review).

Averaging the weight of an adult human to 70 kg, the total weight of fish, crustaceans, and mollusks slaughtered annually equate to approximately killing 2,5 billion people or 30% of the human population every year. Most fish taken from the sea for human consumption die by way of asphyxiation. However, scientists, policymakers, and advocates urge anglers to adopt more humane ways for killing fish. Yet, what form of compassion or benevolence does this kind of killing take? What affordances does killing fish humanely offer society? This article builds on these questions by adopting “’low-trophic theory,’ a situated ethical stance that attends to entanglements of consumption, food, violence, environmental adaptability and more-than-human care from the co-existential perspective of multispecies ethics,” (Radomska and Åsberg 2021), to assess audio-visual and textual documents from YouTube, nonprofit organizations, policy and with supporting literature from scientific reports, related to ethical methods for killing fish. Utilizing an audio-visual analytic methodology, this chapter explores the ways these videos reinforce and counter human exceptionalism, support certain slaughter regimes, and mourn for fish. The chapter makes an analytic contribution to queering human-fish relationships by addressing the interrelationships among the representation of humane fish killing and the tensions that arise in respect to its immediate tropes, specifically the methods for killing fish along with their purposes and effects.

“Does eBird Contribute to Environmental Citizenship: A Discursive Analysis.” 

Co-authored with Dick Kasperowski and René van der Wal. (In review).

Environmental citizen science projects could play a role in fomenting environmental citizenship. Yet, the extent to which existing environmental citizen science projects contribute to environmental citizenship remains unexplored. Therefore, we apply a discursive analysis to one of the largest environmental citizen science projects in the world, eBird, to assess how its “institutional technologies” contribute to the formulation of specific social roles (e.g., user, eBirder) and environmental objects (e.g., species, hotspots, checklists). From this analysis, we discuss how these social roles and objects relate to the concept of environmental citizenship. Specifically, we show that eBird strengthens an eBirder community but maintains separations between researchers and birders; encourages attachment to birds but primarily through identification and competition; and connects eBirders to some key environmental issues but not others. We demonstrate that eBird discourse contributes to defining what rights and duties as well as to which kind of environment “eBirders” gain citizenship.

Coming apart at the Swedish Higher Environmental Court: Associating and disassociating citizen observations with legal obligations

Co-authored with Dick Kasperowski and Niclas Hagen. (In review).

This paper takes an interest in what characterizes citizen observations (COs) in cases that reach the highest legal institution concerning environmental regulation in Sweden. Explicating judicial controversies over observations from two report systems important for public decision-making on environmental regulation, the paper asks what makes COs fail to produce obligations and why within the legal reasoning of the Swedish environmental regulation system. Observations are found to change as they are associated and disassociated with certain temporal and spatial qualities of biodiversity. Understanding the multitudes of how COs in environmental regulation are made is important; as activistic citizen science—in response to political possibilities, perceived as marked either by lack of responsiveness, unwillingness, or inability to tackle pressing environmental challenges—seeks other means of influence and representation. In this context, legal courts have become an alternative for advancing political decisions on pressing environmental concerns. 

The New Naturalist in the Anthropocene

co-authored with Brendon M. H. Larson and Rene van der Wal. (In review).

Given ongoing decline in field-based natural history, several commentators have affirmed its critical role for maintaining first-hand experience and knowledge of nature. Recent accounts, however, equate natural history with scientific study and assume a stable Holocene context. The Anthropocene jettisons these and other assumptions about who naturalists are, the context in which they operate, and what they bring to society. We propose six considerations to bring natural history in step with the Anthropocene. By broadening the nature studied, diversifying naturalist values, consciously engaging with affect, navigating new technologies, and connecting activities to wider contexts, a new naturalist may emerge with a distinctive role in a world where nature is in peril.