My new article on marine plastic and global ethics in Political Geography is now available as a free download here until 2 July, 2015. Here’s the abstract: 

Gyre 1 by Audra Mitchell and Liam Kelly. All rights reserved.2015. Here’s a little bit about the article: 

Marine plastic has received significant attention as a spectacle of consumer waste and ecosystemic fragility, but there has been little discussion of its ethical implications. This essay argues that marine plastic poses a direct challenge to the basic frameworks of global ethics. These frameworks are dominated by the image of the ‘circle’, an abstract boundary intended to separate ‘humanity’ from the rest of the universe and insulate it against harm. However, this article argues that marine plastic undermines the ‘circle’ in two ways. First, it embodies conditions of ‘hyper-relationality’, including entanglement and the properties of toxicity, that penetrate the boundaries of ‘the circle’…