Research report: Ute Berns: The Steam Engine as an Object of Speculation in Romantic Literature and Science

Our environment is deeply familiar to us, yet it increasingly appears threatening, alien, and destructive. According to the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, no other term describes the strangeness of the ecological crises of our anthropocentric present more aptly than the word »uncanny.«

Based on Juliane...

One way in which people today realize their relationship to nonhuman beings is through the experience of their absence. In the wake of the sixth mass extinction of species, the uncanny feeling that »there is nothing where there should be something« (Mark Fisher) points to a loss that has yet to be...