Author Archives: Allie E.S. Wist

Allie E.S. Wist is an artist-scholar and writer, currently working on an Interdisciplinary Arts PhD at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute, with a focus on the senses, the Anthropocene, and environmental archives. Read more about (her/them) here: https://alliewist.com/
This image has two parts. The left part of the image is horizontally longer than part on the right. In the left part, the author is seen biting into a piece of kaolin clay while standing with one foot forward on a rocky uneven surface, against a background of a towering heap of whitish-pink earth excavated from a kaolin clay mine. The right part of the image shows broken solid pieces and powder of edible kaolin clay, white in colour, that is spread on the surface of a table.

Bodies as Proxies, or The Stratigraphic Evidence of Our Appetites, at Metabolic Scales from the Human to the Planetary, on the Occasion of the Anthropocene’s Ongoing Debate About Itself

The atmosphere of anxiety concerning the Anthropocene amplifies when considering how its eerie and unwieldy forces affect our bodies. Across posthumanist, science studies, and new materialist discourse, the concern about corporeal impacts seems to huddle around a particular set of words: porous, permeable, vulnerable, sensitive. These are invoked as scholars seek to describe the status of bodies threatened by invisible, global, and pernicious toxins. In a looping story of strata and sediment and edible rocks, this essay similarly seeks to articulate the material instabilities of bodies in an epoch that itself resists clear definition. (read more...)