Scale-Critical Stories from the Casula Parklands

Abstract

This thesis offers the concept of the scale-critical story as a mode of attentive critical and ethical engagement with the more-than-human world. Using Derek Woods’ notion of scale critique, and thinking with other scholarship on the rich concept of scale, I offer three modest examples of scale-critical stories to show how they might be used to do the urgent work of thinking the whole planet by attending to multiple, specifically situated sites of relating. These examples, concerning mosquitoes, bellbirds (Manorina melanophrys), and algae, begin from place-based empirical material primarily gathered at the Casula Parklands and Georges River in southwest Sydney, New South Wales. These stories consider some of the many contexts and scales of these creatures in more-than-representational — personal, political, performative, affective, speculative, and other — registers, drawing attention to their divergences and contradictions. I show that the critical and ethical posture of scale critique does not seek certainty or synthesis but rather one of experimental togetherness, which seeks in good faith to hold multiple modes of being together, to cultivate more complex attachments and solidarities in a time of distributed agencies, and ultimately to reaffirm the place of nonhumans in a living, lively ethics and politics of personal-planetary proportions.