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Martin Savransky

Staff details

Martin Savransky

Position

Reader and Director of the Centre for Critical Global Change

Department

Sociology

Email

m.savransky (@gold.ac.uk)

Martin's research critically probes processes of planetary change and unruly social life on an unstable earth

Martin Savransky joined the Department in 2015. He is Director of the Centre for Critical Global Change and Convenor of the MA Ecology, Culture & Society. Prior to joining Goldsmiths, Martin taught at University College London, and held visiting positions at the University of Freiburg, and the University of Barcelona.

Working in the interstices between philosophy, the geo- and environmental humanities, and critical social thought, Martin's research critically probes processes of planetary change and unruly social life on unstable terrain. His work seeks to expand the imagination by exploring how histories of imperialism and colonialism have shaped contemporary planetary and ecological transformations, and how an attentiveness to modes of thought and practice outside the territory of Modernity and Progress might inspire other ways of inhabiting the earth.

Martin's latest book is Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Politics of the Pluriverse (Duke University Press, 2021).

Teaching and supervision

Research interests

Working in the interstices between philosophy, the geo- and environmental humanities, and critical social thought, Martin's research interests include political ecology, political ontology, pragmatism, radical pluralism, postcolonial thought, social improvisation, speculative practices, and methodologies of life on unstable terrain.

Publications and research outputs

Book

Savransky, Martin. 2021. Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Politics of the Pluriverse. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ISBN 9781478014126

Savransky, Martin. 2016. The Adventure of Relevance: An Ethics of Social Inquiry. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781137571465

Edited Book

Savransky, Martin and Lundy, Craig, eds. 2022. After Progress. London: SAGE Publications. ISBN 9781529607413

Wilkie, Alex; Savransky, Martin and Rosengarten, Marsha, eds. 2017. Speculative Research: The Lure of Possible Futures. Abingdon: Routledge. ISBN 9781138688360

Edited Journal

Savransky, Martin and Lundy, Craig, eds. 2022. After Progress, The Sociological Review, 70(2). 0038-0261

Savransky, Martin, ed. 2021. Problematizing the Problematic, Theory, Culture & Society, 38(2). 0263-2764

Savransky, Martin, ed. 2018. Isabelle Stengers and The Dramatization of Philosophy, SubStance: A Review of Theory & Literary Criticism, 47(1). 0049-2426

Book Section

Savransky, Martin. 2024. A New Taste for Life? Value Ecologies and the Aesthetics of the Outside. In: Melanie Sehgal and Alex Wilkie, eds. More-than-Human Aesthetics: Venturing Beyond the Bifurcation of Nature. Bristol: Bristol University Press. ISBN 9781529227789

Savransky, Martin. 2024. Ghosts. In: Rebecca Coleman; Kat Jungnickel and Nirmal Puwar, eds. How to Do Social Research With…. London: Goldsmiths Press, pp. 121-130. ISBN 9781913380427

Savransky, Martin. 2023. The Principle of Invention (Outside In). In: Tomás Sánchez Criado and Adolfo Estalella, eds. An Ethnographic Inventory: Field Devices for Anthropological Inquiry. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 15-22. ISBN 9781032124391

Article

Savransky, Martin. 2024. In the Fourth Person Singular: Pragmatism, Anarchism, and the Earth. Subjectivity, ISSN 1755-6341

Savransky, Martin. 2023. Passages to the Outside: A Prelude to a Geophilosophy of the Future. Dialogues in Human Geography, ISSN 2043-8206

Savransky, Martin. 2022. Depois do Progresso: notas de uma ecologia do talvez (Portuguese translation). Anãnsi: Revista de Filosofia, 3(1), pp. 216-227. ISSN 2675-8385

Art Object

Levy, Sonia and Savransky, Martin. 2020. For the Love of Corals: An Ecology of Perhaps.

Exhibition Catalogue

Savransky, Martin. 2012. 'Poetik der Gewalt' (A Poetics of Violence).

Project

Savransky, Martin; Gabrys, Jennifer; Rosengarten, Marsha and Wilkie, Alex. 2014. 'Speculation and Speculative Research Workshop', International Workshop with participants from UK, US, and Australia on speculation in social and cultural research and STS.

Savransky, Martin. 2014 'Techniques of Existence: Efficacy, Ethics, Practice' Public Seminar Series, funded by DTC-ESRC Multidisciplinary Funding Scheme.

Show/Exhibition

Savransky, Martin and Lundy, Craig. 2022. After Progress: Digital Exhibition in Collaborative Storytelling. In: "After Progress", Online, United Kingdom.

Thesis

Savransky, Martin. 2014. The Adventure of Relevance: Speculative Reconstructions in Contemporary Social Science. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London

Other

Savransky, Martin. 2014. 'The Many Lives and Deaths of The Social: A Comment on CSISP's 10th Anniversary Symposium'. CSISP Online.

Savransky, Martin. 2014. On Relevance (The Very Idea). Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, Anthropology.

Savransky, Martin. 2012. Capturing the Social Sciences: An Experiment in Political Epistemology. Critical Legal Thinking.

Professional projects

–––After Progress: Digital Exhibition of Collaborative Storytelling–––
Martin co-curated (with Craig Lundy) a digital exhibition of collaborative and multimedia storytelling to probe, through different genres and media, imaginative social practices, artefacts, environments, arts of living and dying, forms of political action, kinship, subjectivity, and more-than-human worlds in a possible future no longer governed by modern coordinates of progress.

This project was generously funded by The Sociological Review Foundation.

–––For the Love of Corals: An Ecology of Perhaps (with artist Sonia Levy)–––
In 2020, Martin engaged in a collaboration with artist Sonia Levy to create an offshoot of her cinematic project, "For the Love of Corals," for the Critical Zones: Observatory of Earthly Politics exhibition, curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel at ZKM (Karlsruhe). Entangled with it are polyphonic writings that take as their starting point Derek Walcott’s famous poem “The Sea Is History” (1979) to weave together Levy’s research at the Horniman Museum and Gardens with Martin Savransky's thoughts on the precarious lives of corals in the ecological hold of a perhaps, of the faint possibility of inhabiting the Earth otherwise.

Areas of Supervision

Martin welcomes doctoral proposals by prospective students interested in any of his areas of research and teaching. These may include (but are not limited to): critical social thought, environmental humanities, political ecology, postcolonial thought, non-western cosmologies, anarchism, pluralism, philosophy and social theory.