Andrew Biro
Professor in the Department of Politics at Acadia University. I am also a core faculty member in two interdisciplinary programs: Environmental and Sustainability Studies (ESST) and Social and Political Thought.
My work is in the areas of critical political theory, environmental politics (esp. water issues), political economy, and cultural studies. I'm particularly interested in where and how these areas intersect.
I'm on the editorial boards of the journals "Capitalism, Nature, Socialism," and "Studies in Political Economy," and I am a Research Associate with the Nova Scotia office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Phone: (902)585-1925
Address: 10 Highland Ave.
Wolfville, NS B4P 2R6
Canada
My work is in the areas of critical political theory, environmental politics (esp. water issues), political economy, and cultural studies. I'm particularly interested in where and how these areas intersect.
I'm on the editorial boards of the journals "Capitalism, Nature, Socialism," and "Studies in Political Economy," and I am a Research Associate with the Nova Scotia office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Phone: (902)585-1925
Address: 10 Highland Ave.
Wolfville, NS B4P 2R6
Canada
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Books by Andrew Biro
Introduction: The Paradoxes of Contemporary Environmental Crises and the Redemption of the Hopes of the Past - Andrew Biro
Part One: Science and the Mastery of Nature
1 Modern Science, Enlightenment, and the Domination of Nature: No Exit? - William Leiss
2 Societal Relationships with Nature: A Dialectical Approach to
Environmental Politics - Christoph Görg
3 The Politics of Science: Has Marcuse’s New Science Finally Come of Age? - Katharine N. Farrell
Part Two: Critical Theory, Life, and Nature
4 Sacred Identity and the Sacrificial Spirit: Mimesis and
Radical Ecology - D. Bruce Martin
5 From ‘Unity of Life’ to the Critique of Domination: Jonas, Freud, and Marcuse - Colin Campbell
Part Three: Alienation and the Aesthetic
6 Adorno’s Aesthetic Rationality: On the Dialect of Natural
and Artistic Beauty Donald A. Burke
7 On Nature and Alienation - Steven Vogel
8 Fear and the Unknown: Nature, Culture, and the Limits
of Reason - Shane Gunster
9 Ecological Crisis and the Culture Industry Thesis - Andrew Biro
Part Four: Critical Theory’s Moment
10 Natural History, Sovereign Power, and Global Warming - Jonathan Short
11 Adorno’s Historical and Temporal Consciousness: Towards a
Critical Theoretical Environmental Imagination - Michael Lipscomb
12 Towards a Critique of Post-Human Reason: Revisiting ‘Nature’ and ‘Humanity’ in Horkheimer’s ‘The Concept of Man’ - Timothy W. Luke
Afterword: The Liberation of Nature? - Andrew Feenberg
Biro develops an environmental political theory that takes seriously both the materiality of the ecological crises generated by industrial and post-industrial society and the anti-foundationalist critiques of "nature" developed in postmodern social theory. He argues that the theoretical basis for ecological politics can be better advanced through the lens of alienation from nature, sidestepping some of the pitfalls of debates over conceptions of nature itself.
Biro traces the development of the concept of alienation from nature through four modern political thinkers - Rousseau, Marx, Adorno, and Marcuse - each of whom are read as arguing that human beings are not biologically separate from the rest of nature, but are nevertheless historically differentiated from it through the self-conscious transformation of the natural environment. In so doing, Biro provides the starting point for a "denaturalized" rethinking of ecological politics.
Papers by Andrew Biro
Introduction: The Paradoxes of Contemporary Environmental Crises and the Redemption of the Hopes of the Past - Andrew Biro
Part One: Science and the Mastery of Nature
1 Modern Science, Enlightenment, and the Domination of Nature: No Exit? - William Leiss
2 Societal Relationships with Nature: A Dialectical Approach to
Environmental Politics - Christoph Görg
3 The Politics of Science: Has Marcuse’s New Science Finally Come of Age? - Katharine N. Farrell
Part Two: Critical Theory, Life, and Nature
4 Sacred Identity and the Sacrificial Spirit: Mimesis and
Radical Ecology - D. Bruce Martin
5 From ‘Unity of Life’ to the Critique of Domination: Jonas, Freud, and Marcuse - Colin Campbell
Part Three: Alienation and the Aesthetic
6 Adorno’s Aesthetic Rationality: On the Dialect of Natural
and Artistic Beauty Donald A. Burke
7 On Nature and Alienation - Steven Vogel
8 Fear and the Unknown: Nature, Culture, and the Limits
of Reason - Shane Gunster
9 Ecological Crisis and the Culture Industry Thesis - Andrew Biro
Part Four: Critical Theory’s Moment
10 Natural History, Sovereign Power, and Global Warming - Jonathan Short
11 Adorno’s Historical and Temporal Consciousness: Towards a
Critical Theoretical Environmental Imagination - Michael Lipscomb
12 Towards a Critique of Post-Human Reason: Revisiting ‘Nature’ and ‘Humanity’ in Horkheimer’s ‘The Concept of Man’ - Timothy W. Luke
Afterword: The Liberation of Nature? - Andrew Feenberg
Biro develops an environmental political theory that takes seriously both the materiality of the ecological crises generated by industrial and post-industrial society and the anti-foundationalist critiques of "nature" developed in postmodern social theory. He argues that the theoretical basis for ecological politics can be better advanced through the lens of alienation from nature, sidestepping some of the pitfalls of debates over conceptions of nature itself.
Biro traces the development of the concept of alienation from nature through four modern political thinkers - Rousseau, Marx, Adorno, and Marcuse - each of whom are read as arguing that human beings are not biologically separate from the rest of nature, but are nevertheless historically differentiated from it through the self-conscious transformation of the natural environment. In so doing, Biro provides the starting point for a "denaturalized" rethinking of ecological politics.