Amanda Machin

Amanda Machin is associate professor of political sociology at the University of Agder in Norway. Her research focuses on radical democracy, citizenship, populism, embodiment and the discourses and imaginaries of environmental politics. Together with Marcel Wissenburg, she is currently editing the Handbook of Environmental Political Theory in the Anthropocene for Edward Elgar.

Democracy and Resilience in the Anthropocene: The Anthropos as Political Subject?

The Anthropocene diagnosis has undermined modern liberal conceptions of the political subject. Previously understood to be constituted apart from the nonhuman world, today, the political subject has been radically decentred; reconfigured within a rich pluriverse of life and matter. What are the implications of such decentred political agency for theories, practices, and imaginaries of democracy? What would it mean to make democracy ‘resilient’ in this context? Can the extension of political rights and representation to non-human subjects offer to augment, improve, and protect democratic institutions and processes? Or is resilience fostered instead through embracing the periodic disruption of bounded identifications and frameworks of knowledge by their constitutive outside? Does the irresistible emergence of ontological and epistemic otherness potentially enliven and enrich, while also destabilizing, democratic life? In this paper, I consider the resilience of democracy, focusing particularly on the radical rupture of the Anthropos into bounded conceptions of political expertise, authority, and subjectivity.