Mick Hartley

Here you can see why my leaving academia was the only sensible option.

The synopsis of a 608-page academic book published in May 2024 is below. I can’t understand even one paragraph. 608 pages is unimaginable.

I think it says mountains are racist.

‘In Geologic Life, Kathryn…

— Dr Diane Rasmussen McAdie – UK Column (@dianeukc) January 18, 2025

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Here's the Amazon synopsis:

In Geologic Life, Kathryn Yusoff theorizes the processes by which race and racialization emerged geologically. Examining both the history of geology as a discipline and ongoing mineral and resource extraction, Yusoff locates forms of imperial geology embedded in Western and Enlightenment thought and highlights how it creates anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and anti-Brown environmental and racial injustices. Throughout, she outlines how the disciplines of geology and geography—and their conventions: surveying, identifying, classifying, valuing, and extracting—established and perpetuated colonial practices that ordered the world and people along a racial axis. Examining the conceptualization of the inhuman as political, geophysical, and paleontological, Yusoff unearths an apartheid of materiality as distinct geospatial forms. This colonial practice of geology organized and underpinned racialized accounts of space and time in ways that materially made Anthropocene Earth. At the same time, Yusoff turns to Caribbean, Indigenous, and Black thought to chart a parallel geologic epistemology of the "earth-bound" that challenges what and who the humanities have chosen to overlook in its stories of the earth. By reconsidering the material epistemologies of the earth as an on-going geotrauma in colonial afterlives, Yusoff demonstrates that race is as much a geological formation as a biological one.

I've posted on this before, but it's always worth reminding ourselves of the exciting new intellectual frontiers being explored by our academic elite.

Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London:

I am a transdisciplinary geographer focused on inhuman geographies. I understand the inhuman as a place from which to think about earthly relations and inhumane histories. Theoretically, I engage historical, geophilosophical and black feminist methods to speak to issues of environmental change, empires of geologic practices and the politics of planetary states.