Nonhuman Witnessing

“The work of Michael Richardson is like a four dimensional cartography to navigate the hyperaesthetics of our post-photographic present.” - Eyal Weizman, coauthor of Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth

“Foregrounding the ethical dimensions of the convergence between the fields of security and ecology, Michael Richardson explores whether witnessing is taking place beyond the boundaries of the human. By making a fantastic case for the reversal of the humanist concept of witnessing, Richardson impacts what kinds of research questions can be asked across the disciplines.” - Jairus Victor Grove, author of Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World

"Richardson examines what it means to bear witness in the modern world. In an era of escalating geopolitical tensions and instability, impending climate disaster, and technological transformation with artificial intelligence, the book makes a case for expanding our conception of what forms witnessing can take." - University of New South Wales Sydney

"Nonhuman Witnessing is ingeniously structured and beautifully written, and for geographers concerned with questions of testimony and trauma it provides a provocative and original rendering of witnessing as a concept, while the array of examples and theoretical arguments speak directly to geographical work on violence, (non)relationality, the Anthropocene and more." - Richard Carter-White, Social and Cultural Geography

"Nonhuman Witnessing is an exciting contribution to the interdisciplinary study of aesthetics and witnessing. One of its greatest strengths is its capacious archive, in which military surveillance technologies and the artworks that critique them—such as Pakistani American artist Mahwish Chishty’s visual work on drones—share the common cause of nonhuman witnessing." - Delia Byrnes, ASAP Journal

"Alongside an empirically-diverse selection of case studies, it is rich in analytical depth, bringing the nonhuman to the fore. Nonhuman Witnessing provides a conceptually innovative resource for students, scholars, and practitioners in media studies, environmental humanities, philosophy (applied ethics), and security studies, looking at the role of nonhuman entities – such as machines, data systems, and ecological processes – in witnessing. It creates space for an interdisciplinary engagement and invites further research into contemporary developments in communication, knowledge production, and the construction and dissemination of registers and data." - Janica Ezzeldien, LSE Review of Books

"Readers who are interested in the connections that span manifold challenges in the world today, across technology, the environment, and geopolitical aggression, will find much of value in Nonhuman Witnessing, which provides both a rich vocabulary for articulating their affects, and a wide selection of case studies that draw these together in provocative and insightful ways." - Richard A. Carter, Continuum

"Nonhuman Witnessing is theoretically adventurous, wandering in and out of cultural studies, media theory, visual arts, political ecology, and environmental humanities and grapples with questions that are – if not new – of accelerating importance in the context of digital globalisation and the climate crises." - Mark Filipowich, Visual Studies