Karen Sarkisov

  • Logistics


    Critical Theory of Flows and Cosmography

    Armen Avanessian, Werner Boschmann, and Karen Sarkisov

    New insights and key classic views on the genealogy, theory, and critique of logistics.

    In a globalized economy, new strategies, architectures, and technologies organizing flows of resources, goods, persons, and services have been developed, resulting in the development of a new market logic and even a new science. Logistics hasn't just altered our infrastructure and our landscapes, it has also standardized labour laws and politics all over the globe. It has grown obvious that the word "logistics" covers more than the mere articulation of production and consumption. This is why it has become more urgent than ever to understand the history and logic that has driven this new force that has so deeply affected our daily lives and reshaped our planet. How do the concepts of space, movement, agency, governance, and calculation shift in this regard? Presenting new insights and key classic views on the genealogy, theory, and critique of logistics, this volume explores alternative narratives in the historiography of infrastructure and globalization—and even mankind itself—in the era of the Anthropocene.

    Edited in dialogue with Laurent de Sutter

    Copublished with the V-A-C Foundation


    Peter Klaus/Stefanie Müller, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Chermaine Chua, Jesse LeCavalier, Deborah Cowen, Keller Easterling, Vladimir Prebilic

    • Paperback $19.95
  • Microbiome


    Armen Avanessian, Werner Boschmann, Karen Sarkisov, and Klaus Spiess

    The microbiome and the coming micro-biopolitics.

    Over the past two decades, scientists have discussed a new scientific subject that reevaluates the human condition and requires a completely new scientific methodology—the microbiome. Thousands of different bacteria, fungi, archaea, and viruses form a microbial flora that coexist in our gut, and fulfill important functions in our intestines, mouths, and on our skin. Understanding microbiota alters and challenges our concepts of immunology, metabolism, an the relation between nutrition and mental health, and creates new shapes on pathogenesis. It even shapes our biological definition of living creatures at all levels of life, up to the largest structures created by living organisms.

    Every biological system is governed by bacteria and wherever its diversity is put in danger (for example, poor hygienic practices, the development, production, and administration of antibiotics, etc.) the consequence is an increase in diseases (including diabetes and Alzheimer's). Studying and understanding the microbiome not only sheds new light on the relation between humankind and nature but also underscores the foreign within us. We are facing a new micro-biopolitics.

    Edited in dialogue with Klaus Spiess

    Copublished with the V-A-C Foundation


    Augusto J. Montiel-Castro, Rina Maria González-Cervantes, Gabriela Bravo-Ruiseco, Gustavo Pacheco-López, M. N. Frissen, Scott Gilbert, P. F. de Groot, Nicolien de Clercq and Max Nieuwdorp, Jamie Lorimer, Vitor Cabral, Sway Chen, Krithivasan Sankaranarayanan, Stephanie Schnorr, Nicola Segatta, Ravi Sheth, Alfred I. Tauber, Harris Wang, Cecil Lewis Jr. and Christina Warinner

    • Paperback $19.95
  • Oceanography


    Marine Monitoring, Microbiology, and Materiality

    Armen Avanessian, Werner Boschmann, and Karen Sarkisov

    New approaches to the ocean enabled by the new field of (microbial) oceanography.

    In recent years, a new field of scientific research has been put forward, the so-called (microbial) oceanography, which offers a new mapping of the ocean from its shiny surfaces to lightless sea floors. Oceanography combines techniques of molecular biology, gene sequencing, bioinformatics, and remote sensing, among others. Oceans are a crucial factor in global climate and necessary condition for human survival on earth, and findings from oceanography can help people better understand life (and survival) in the Anthropocene.

    Not only are all life forms of marine origin, but the oceans also host extremophiles—that is, microbial life forms living under extreme conditions of heat, cold, lack of light—which are integral to understanding what possible alternative life forms might look like. It may be that such mainly anthropogenic forces as overfishing, pollution, deep-sea mining, and acidification suggest that a new concept of the ocean—Anthropocean—needs to be discussed. New approaches in cultural studies as well as in the history of sciences are shifting our vision of the ocean, considering the previous realm of immeasurable broad and depth as a fundamental contrast to a human history and culture in order to rewrite it.

    Edited in dialogue with Stefan Helmreich

    Copublished with the V-A-C Foundation

    • Paperback $19.95