Nonhuman Witnessing

Summary:"In Nonhuman Witnessing, Michael Richardson argues that we must decenter humans as the subjects of witnessing and expand the concept of witness to encompass nonhuman and machinic perception. Richardson contends that by opening witness to the nonhuman, we can gain a more finely tuned understanding of events in an era of escalating technoscientific war, algorithmic enclosure, and planetary ecological catastrophe. Further, nonhuman witnessing provides a lens for understanding the complex ways in which witnessing is enmeshed with violence itself in the forms of automated warfare which increasingly dominate global political violence. Richardson examines the media specificity of nonhuman witnessing across a varied archive: nuclear testing on First Nations land; digital infrastructures that produce traumas in everyday life; scientific imagery that probes beyond the spectrum of the human sensorium; algorithmic investigative tools; the surveillance of global climate monitoring; and remote warfare enacted through autonomous drones. In bringing together the converging fields of ecology and security, Richardson seeks to foreground the urgent ethical stakes of this convergence"-- Provided by publisher