Thinking Through Levees: How Political Agency Extends Beyond the Human Mind

Nicolas T. Bergmann, Jamie McEvoy, Elizabeth A. Shanahan, Eric D. Raile, Ann Marie Reinhold, Geoffrey C. Poole and Clemente Izurieta

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2020, vol. 110, issue 3, 827-846

Abstract: Emerging new materialism scholarship provides an exciting theoretical space not only for challenging traditional conceptions of human agency but also for rethinking the role of the material world in shaping political outcomes. Although a wildly diverse intellectual movement, this scholarship shares the common goal of widening traditional understandings of agency to include nonhuman objects. This article adopts insights from cognitive science to extend the concept of political agency beyond the confines of human intention. Instead of focusing on the constraining material characteristics of the nonhuman within a large-scale relational framework, we argue in support of a distributive understanding of agency based on the co-constitutional essence of the mind itself. Specifically, we integrate insights from embodied cognition grounded in dynamical systems theory into the established framework of the hydrosocial cycle to argue that residents’ experiences within an active material world help explain the existence of certain flood risk perceptions. In other words, human intention or agency—as it is commonly understood—comes into existence through a co-constitutional process involving brain, body, and aspects of a wider environment. Using qualitative interview data from two communities along the Yellowstone River in eastern Montana, we support our arguments through an investigation of three types of embodied experiences between residents and the levees that shape risk perception. Key Words: embodied cognition, hydrosocial cycle, new materialism, risk perception.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24694452.2019.1655387 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:110:y:2020:i:3:p:827-846

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/raag21

DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2019.1655387

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of the American Association of Geographers is currently edited by Jennifer Cassidento

More articles in Annals of the American Association of Geographers from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().