Phillip Drake
- Associate Professor
- Director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction
Contact Info
Personal Links
Biography —
My teaching and research explore the ways cultural expression both shapes and is shaped by interactions with the nonhuman world. This work involves examining and problematizing human and nonhuman relationships through literature, public discourse, cultural beliefs and practices, and political movements. I am particularly interested in the ways conceptions of nature, humanity, technology, and art become contested and change across historical and cultural contexts, and the effects of this mutability on our social and ecological relationships in the world.
My current book project, Parasite Economies: Exploitation and the Multispecies Politics of Living and Dying Well in the Anthropocene, incorporates an interdisciplinary set of methods and analytical perspectives to examine scenes of multispecies (human-animal-plant) exploitation in economic activity, science, health policy, and literature. With chapters focusing on parasitic actors that exploit at various scales, from nematodes and insects to companion animals and capitalists, this is a work that rethinks economic relations beyond anthropocentric notions of value and exchange to rethink the use and abuse of living bodies in the pursuit of durable multispecies alliances.
Research —
Areas of Research
Environmental Rhetoric and Literature, Marxism, Animal Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Southeast Asia, Political Ecology, Cultural Studies, Science Fiction
Selected Publications —
Books
Indonesia and the Politics of Disaster: Power and Representation in Indonesia's Mud Volcano. Routledge, 2016.
Refereed Journal Articles and Book Chapters
“Encounters with the Most Animal Other: Rabies, Biopolitics, and Disease Prevention in Bali.” Animals & Society (Forthcoming, 2020).
“Taking the Trigger Debate Above Ground: Comment of “More than ten years of Lusi: A review of facts, coincidences, and past and future studies” by Miller and Mazzini (2018).” Marine and Petroleum Geology (Forthcoming 2019)
“Emergent Injustices: An Evolution of Disaster Justice in Indonesia’s Mud Volcano.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1:3 (2018): 307-322.
“Indonesia’s Accidental Island: Composing the Environment in the Echo of Disaster." Environmental Communication 12:2 (2018): 261-273.
“Seeing Disaster in Double: Indonesia’s Mud Volcano and the Politics of Representation.” Disasters 40:2 (2016): 346-364.
“Marxism and the Nonhuman Turn: Animating Nonhumans, Exploitation and Politics with ANT and Animal Studies.” Rethinking Marxism 27:1 (2015): 107-122.
“Under the Mud Volcano: Indonesia’s Mudflow Victims and the Politics of Testimony.” Indonesia and the Malay World 41:121 (2013): 299-321.
“The Goat that Couldn’t Stop the Mud Volcano: Animal Sacrifice, Subjectivity, and East Java’s Mud Volcano.” Humanimalia: A Journal of Human/Animal Interface Studies 4:1 (2012).
“Forbidden Love and Productive Friction: Taking Transgression Mainstream in the Pop Song, ‘Cinta Terlarang.’” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 28 (2012).
“Art and Power in the Age of Empire: Greg Egan’s Society of Control.” Extrapolation 52:1 (2011): 5-25.