#the microbial state

[irwonder]

My argument relies on IR's widening its scope and taking more 'agents' into its disciplinary sights, but many of these agents will not be actors as we have previously understood them. In fact, The Microbial State presses IR, as a discipline, to take agent-centered theory more seriously—even more seriously than it has been asked to do previously. Beyond the sovereign state, agents may be invisible, like a virus, or large and complex, like the biosphere, and IR needs new words and conceptual apparatuses to engage and understand agents that have no 'will' as we would define it. This is nonvolitional agency that is hard to locate within the anthropocentric agent-structure paradigm.

Stefanie R. Fishel, The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic

[irwonder]

The Microbial State challenges the reader to think of politics as immanent to the biospheric rather than the anthropic: we humans live in many overlapping worlds and experience many globalizations depending on where we find ourselves geographically. These politics are involute, composite, often discordant, but entangled within and supported by the biosphere we share; a biosphere that is quickly becoming unable to support much of the life we see on it today. We will have to open our hearts to matters of concern that are multidisciplinary, multiracial, and multigendered. We must be sensitive to oppression and the needs of the most vulnerable, to be open to viewpoints from multiple origins, and to think creatively across species lines. The future demands poets and visionaries.

Stefanie R. Fishel, The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic