Matthew Gandy and Sandra Jasper have a new paper Geography, materialism, and the neo-vitalist turn published in Dialogues in Human Geography, Vol 7, Issue 2, 2017.

In her article ‘Rethinking the subject, reimagining worlds,’ Susan M. Ruddick adds to a growing body of geographical literature that adopts a neo-vitalist approach to the understanding of nature and the human subject. In this brief article we suggest that whilst Ruddick’s argument raises many interesting points it is nonetheless hampered by a limited engagement with the historiography of scientific metaphors and the wider ethical and political tensions engendered by a contemporary recourse to vitalist ontologies.