Repositioning the social at the heart of the anthropocene · Repositioning the social at the heart...

Programme 1

Repositioning the social at the heart of the anthropocene: A transdisciplinary dialogue

University of Kent, Canterbury, UKFriday 30 October 2015 to Sunday 1 November 2015

This transdisciplinary symposium brings together international pre- and post-doctoral researchers to stimulate critical engagement with the anthropocene. The anthropocene is a contested new (social)geological age in which anthropogenic activities have become the major driver impacting the Earth System. Anthropogenic climate change and the Sixth Great Extinction suggest that human domination of nature is fundamentally challenging our ‘planetary boundaries’, to the point that imminent failure must be considered a possibility(Rockström et al. 2009). Furthermore, but generally overlooked, human social systems are intrinsically intertwined with these processes and are being stressed to potential breaking points by hegemonic neoliberalism and its underlying capitalist logic (Graeber 2014, Williams 2010).

There has been significant intellectual engagement with the anthropocene, but this research has mostly come from the natural sciences with a focus on the ‘facts’ as they can be observed today. Future imaginaries, when they are considered, invariably point to inevitable geoengineering projects rationalised as essential for human survival (Hamilton 2013). In such contexts, human and nonhuman co-socialities are rarely considered. Rather, they presume a reified human ‘society’ that, for the sake of its own survival, is expected to acquiesce and play by new ‘rules’ developed by a de facto plutocratic leadership enforcing technological paradigms in order to completely dominate nature. Indeed, the institutionalisation of such rationales is already manifesting across the globe, theorists argue (Graeber 2014; Hamilton 2013; Klein 2014), through what some scholars are calling ‘global assemblages’ (Ogden et al. 2015). These global assemblages drive significant socioecological change, often accompanied by inequalities (Leichenko & O’Brien 2008; Sassen 2008; Tsing 2005) and a marked repression of human, civil, animal, and environmental rights (Graeber 2014, Klein 2014).

Postmodern and posthuman thinking developed, in part, to engage with such challengeswhile trying to address their underlying nature-culture dichotomies. In practice, though, they are proving inadequate in addressing the anthropocene since they are still constrained by disciplinary boundaries as well as their focus on the micro-level. Thinking through the anthropocene requires a macro-level perspective which can only be achieved through transdisciplinary methodologies and epistemologies.

In such a way, we can begin to make sense of the complexities and political ecology of this emerging anthropocenic governance (Biermann 2012, 2194; Pattberg & Zelli 2015), and the disturbing questions that it raises. Is democracy compatible with anthropocenic governance? Who will control emerging technologies and their implementation? Who will define the rules of the game, its ethics, and its morals? And what is the role of academia relative to this game?

Far from being limited just to environmental change, then, the essence of the anthropocene is about power relations (Hage 2015, Pattberg & Zelli 2015, Trischler 2014) played out within the business-as-usual hegemonic game. To date, the political response to the future has been one of denial: the neoliberal need for continuous growth and profit precludes consideration for any alternative imaginary (Klein 2014).

Through this symposium, however, we hope precisely to open and challenge such imaginaries by bringing together differing schools of social scientific and humanist thought, to move beyond disciplinary paradigms and practices, and to more effectively engage with what Hackmann (2014) calls the ‘social heart’ of global environmental change.

Programme 2

Table of Contents

Programme Pages 3-5

Keynote abstracts Pages 6-10

Panel 1: Fear, hope, and time: Heading into the unknown Pages 11-17

Panel 2: Challenging (im)moralities: Breaking the hegemonic game? Pages 18-24

Panel 3: Living (in) the post-nature? Pages 25-31

Programme 3

Programme

University of KentFriday 30 October 2015 to Sunday 1 November 2015

All events take place in the Marlowe Building at the University of Kent except for the Friday keynote sessions which will be in the Rutherford College. See: https://www.kent.ac.uk/maps/canterbury/canterbury-campus

Day 1 Friday 30/11/2015

16:00 Registration and WelcomeBuffet

18:15 Opening18:30 Keynote: Joanna Zylinska19:30 Opening Presentation &

Provocation: MiguelAlexiades & Craig Ritchie

20:30 Close – PUB (open invitation)

Foyer

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Day 2 Saturday 31/10/2015

09:00 Announcements09:15 Keynote: Alf Hornborg10:15 Panel 1a: Fear, hope, and time:

Heading into the unknown11:15 Refreshments11:30 Panel 2a: (Im)moral challenges:

Breaking the hegemonic game?12:30 Lunch13:30 Panel 3a: Living (in) the post-nature14:30 Roundtable discussions

(refreshments in room – Note 2)16:30 General discussion17:15 Keynote: Christophe Bonneuil18:15 Close19:30 Dinner – The Parrot Pub (limited)

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Day 3 Sunday 01/11/2015

09:00 Announcements09:15 Keynote: Kathryn Yusoff10:15 Panel 1b: Fear, hope, and time:

Heading into the unknown11:15 Refreshments11:30 Panel 2b: (Im)moral challenges:

Breaking the hegemonic game?12:30 Lunch13:30 Panel 3b: Living (in) the post-

nature14:30 Roundtable discussions

(refreshments in room – Note 2)16:30 General discussion17:15 João de Pina-Cabral: Closing

Presentation17:30 Close

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Note 1

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Notes:

1. Roundtables will be as follows:a. Panel 1 – MLT1b. Panel 2 – Swinglandc. Panel 3 – Stirling Library.

2. Afternoon refreshments will be provided in the roundtable discussion rooms. We encourage participants to work through this time!

Programme 4

Panel 1: Fear, Hope, and Time: Heading into the unknown

Saturday 31 October

10:15 – 10:3510:35 – 10:5510:55 – 11:15

Sunday 1 November

10:15 – 10:3510:35 – 10:5510:55 – 11:15

Presenter

Marissia FragkouIrma AllenEllen Potts

Carolyn DebyJessica SymonsDimitrios Bormpoudakis

Title

Hopeful Anxieties/Anxious Hopes in the Age of the AnthropoceneDesire and disaster: The catastrophe of boredom in the anthropoceneDrawing in the future(s)? Experimentation and uneven time in the UK climate justice movement

Experiencing the Anthropocene: Mind–Body–World EntanglementsA Call to Narrative: how rule by doctrine is destabilising futures thinkingConservations of fear/hope and the anthropocene as barriers to utopian conservation

Panel 2: (Im)moral challenges: Breaking the hegemonic game?

Saturday 31 October

11:30 – 11:5011:50 – 12:10

12:10 – 12:30

Sunday 1 November

11:30 – 11:5011:50 – 12:1012:10 – 12:30

Presenter

Rory RowanIan Christie

Thomas Bruhn

Patricia TownsendPeter CoxTony Knight

Title

Contesting Geo-Social Futures: A Bad Case of Optimism?A political theology of the anthropocene: promethean, soterian and girardian approaches to the crisis of planetary-scale growthClimate Engineering – A blueprint for the relation between humans and nature in the Anthropocene?

Putting Humpty Dumpty Together Again: Copper Mining in the AnthropoceneAnti-Politics in the AnthropoceneTBA

Programme 5

Panel 3: Living (in) the post-nature

Saturday 31 October

13:30 – 13:5013:50 – 14:1014:10 – 14:30

Sunday 1 November

13:30 – 13:5013:50 – 14:10

14:10 – 14:30

Presenter

Matt EdgworthBronislaw SzerszynskiFranklin Ginn

Lenore NewmanLuciana Lang

Pamela McElwee

Title

The ground for multi-disciplinary collaborationGods of the Anthropocene: human and inhuman agencies in the Earth’s new epochSix Propositions for Gardening in the Anthropocene

Food and the anthropocene: Life and lunch after peak farmlandDisenchanted Arcadia: the thorny issue of managing human-made waste in protected environmentConservation in the anthropocene: New technologies for species preservation as Biopower in the Global South

Keynote Abstracts 6

Keynote abstracts

Christophe Bonneuil

Senior Researcher in history of science, science studies and environmental history at the Centre Alexandre Koyré (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique & École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris). Christophe’s research explores the co-evolution of ways of knowing and ways of governing nature and the Earth. He has recently published a global environmental history of the Anthropocene (The shock of the Anthropocene. The Earth, history and us, Verso, 2015 [2013 in french], with J-B. Fressoz) and edited The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis : Rethinking Modernity in a new Epoch, (Routledge, 2015, with C. Hamilton and F. Gemenne).

The anthropocene and a new genealogy of power: knowledge and governance in times of planetary uncertainties

The origin and nature of power can be important criteria in framing periodisations of time and, therefore, potentially the anthropocene. Foucault, for example, ascribed modernity to a paradigm shift in power: from let live and make die, to let die and make live. Biopower became the distinctive sign of modernity. Considering that the anthropocene is not only a new geological age but also a new social one, the nature of power needs to be addressed. What forms does power assume in the anthropocene? Which kind(s) of authority are emerging and upon which premises are they legitimised? This talk will sketch a genealogy of geopower, the kind of power that takes the whole earth and its right use as its object of knowledge and intervention, from colonial discourses and practices claiming a "rational exploitation of the globe", to Pax Americana's global conservationist project, and finally to the emerging ways of knowing and governing the Earth system that have accompanied the Anthropocene concept.

Keynote Abstracts 7

Alf Hornborg

Professor and Head of Human Ecology at Lund University. Alf has established himself as one of the foremost researchers of social and ecological relationships within the context of the anthropocene.

The Ecology of Things: The ’Age of Humans’ and the Magic of Money

The predicament of the Anthropocene prompts us to reconceptualize material objects such as organisms and machines as manifestations of wider fields of relations rather than of internal codes such as DNA or technological blueprints. Such a ‘relationist’ understanding of material phenomena has been advocated, for instance, by the anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Tim Ingold. It is implicit in a great number of ethnographic accounts of non-modern ontologies, but also explicitly theorized as ‘field phenomena’ in some versions of systems theory. Its logical opposite is the illusion denoted by the Marxian understanding of ‘fetishism’, i.e. the magical attribution of autonomous agency to artefacts such as money, commodities, and technological objects. However, to understand ostensibly bounded things such as bodies or artefacts as the products of invisible flows within wider and less easily delineated spheres of interchange poses a demanding challenge to modernist ontology. Few would today deny that such a perspective is appropriate for understanding the dependence of biological organisms on their environments, but few would be prepared to extend it to the cognate dependence of modern technological infrastructure on global flows of money and resources. Yet this is precisely the insight that the Anthropocene forces upon us: the so-called Enlightenment may have helped us to dismiss animism and transcend pre-modern forms of fetishism, but its very commitment to objectivism and ‘naturalism’ has buttressed a world society founded on globalized magic. In order to grasp how nature and society are intertwined in climate change, we first need to grasp how they are intertwined in our technologies.

Keynote Abstracts 8

Kathryn Yusoff

Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Queen Mary University of London. Kathryn focuses her research on dynamic earth events such as abrupt climate change, biodiversity loss and extinction. She is particularly interested in the opportunities the anthropocene presents for rethinking the interactions between the earth sciences and human geography in the “geo-social formations” of Anthropogenic change.

Geopower: genealogy after life

The Anthropocene thesis contains within it a notion of geologic planetary agency and a new mode of subjectivity that is constituted by, and constituting of, geologic forces. After a century of biologic thought, a sharp “turn” is being enacted towards a future governed by geophysics. Given the centralisation of life as an organising concept within biopolitical thought, the consideration of political subjectivity in the Anthropocene raises the question of what geopolitics after life might look like. Staying with a notion of “geologic life” (Yusoff 2013) as corporeal condition and a question of political subjectivity, this paper examines the prepolitical condition of geopower as a basis for a genealogy after life.

Keynote Abstracts 9

Joanna Zylinska

Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. Joanna is a cultural theorist writing on new technologies and new media, ethics and art. She has recently worked significantly with anthropocenic issues, in particular she has published a book, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene, 2014, Open Humanities Press, freely available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/ohp.12917741.0001.001

Photography after the human, or how to reimagine the Anthropocene, extinction and the eco-eco crisis while there’s still time

It is the existence of images, and, in particular, light-induced mechanical images known as photographs, after the human that will frame the argument of my talk. The ‘after the human’ designation does not just refer to the material disappearance of the human in some kind of distant future, but also to the present imagining of this disappearance of the human world as a prominent visual trope in art and other cultural practices. Such ‘ruin porn’ has some historical antecedents: from the sublime Romantic landscapes of ruined abbeys by the likes of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, all the way through to paintings such as Rotunda by Joseph Gandy, commissioned by John Soane, the architect of the Bank of England, and depicting the aforesaid bank as a ruin even before it was built. Yet the visualisation of ruins has gained a new inflection in the Anthropocene, a period that is said to be suffering from a dual eco-eco crisis: the current global economic crisis and the impending – and irreversible – environmental crisis. We can think here of the seductive and haunting images of Detroit, a financially bankrupt North American city with a glorious industrial and architectural past – but also of TV series imagining our demise as a species, such as History channel’s Life after People. Extending the temporal scale beyond that of human history by introducing the horizon of extinction into my discussion will allow me to denaturalise our political and aesthetic frameworks through which we humans understand ourselves. It will also help me take some steps towards visualising a post-neoliberal world here and now. The talk will end with a brief presentation of my own artwork, The Anthropocene: A Local History Project.

References: Zylinska, Joanna (2014) Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, an imprint of Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library: Ann Arbor), series: Critical Climate Change edited by Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook. Pdf and web versions available open access: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/minimal-ethics.html

Keynote Abstracts 10

Miguel Alexiades and Craig Ritchie

Miguel is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Anthropology at the School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent. He has worked over the past three decades in Amazonian Peru and Bolivia on questions relating to indigenous knowledge, landscapes, health and rights. His theoretical interests revolve around the “new ecologies” and their contribution to our understanding of the human-environment nexus.

Craig is a PhD candidate in environmental anthropology at the University of Kent, also working across the visual arts. He is the founder of the social media group, The Anthropos.Scene

The anthropocene shock and the destruction of the human

A joint presentation between Miguel Alexiades (environmental anthropology, ethnobiology) and Craig Ritchie (environmental anthropology, visual arts), intended as a collaborative opening and provocation on the Anthropocene and Symposium call.

João de Pina-Cabral

Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Kent. His thematic interests are: the relation between symbolic thought and social power; family and kinship in a comparative perspective; ethnicity in colonial and post-colonial contexts. More recently he has written on Mozambique and the colonial transition and ethnicity and identity in Brazil.

Closing Talk

Panel 1 Abstracts 11

Panel 1: Fear, hope, and time: Heading into the unknown

This panel seeks to connect scholarship to the multiple future imaginaries of the anthropocene. While economics and natural science indeed seek to predict the future, most of the social sciences have been preoccupied with the present and/or past and thus still remain ill-equipped to capture the unknown. However, to gain a deeper understanding of the anthropocene’s complexities, an analytical reorientation towards the future, and thus acknowledgement of co-existing alternative temporalities, will be essential.

It is such epistemological broadening that will allow us to explore both the various facets of imagined anthropocenic futures and possible affects such as hope and fear emerging in the face of anticipation. Affect allows us to view neoliberalism not as a singular entity, but recognising it as an entanglement of subjectivities immersed in affective exchanges. While recent social theory posits hope as a way to critically engage with contemporary politics, and as a driver of social change, we ask whether hope actually generates progressive action. Or, may hope even lead to passive acceptance of the status quo? Similarly, is it fear that produces scope for action, or does fear render actors passive?

Against this background, we invite participants to consider the following questions. How can we move beyond the past and present and merge various disciplinary approaches to the future? What future imaginaries arise from the anthropocene? To what extent is the anthropocene actually present in contemporary future imagination? What affects are evoked in anticipation of anthropocenic futures? And how are such affects mobilised and mobilising?


Irma Allen

PhD Candidate – Environmental Humanities LabKTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Desire and disaster: The catastrophe of boredom in the anthropocene

Why have we not responded adequately to anthropogenic climate change? A lack of information or its overload? Unclear or negative messaging? Or, as this conference ponders, paralysing fear with little engaged hope, or, conversely, myopic hope and not enoughgalvanising fear?

It may be all of these contradictions – or none. The assumption is that people are motivated to avoid catastrophe; that disaster is the antithesis of hope and the pinnacle of fear. But what if disaster is what we are wanting all along, that it is actually desire that imagined catastrophe arouses? What then for mobilising actions to avert catastrophic events?

Cultures have long fantasised about the calamity of their demise. Indeed, millenarian ideas have been with us throughout history. This paper explores the idea of contemporary subconscious anticipation as a broad phenomenon central to a proposed mutually reinforcing ‘culture of [existential] boredom’ (Svendsen 2005) and ‘culture of calamity’ (Rozario 2007) in which meaning is in crisis, while the empty mythical ideal of ‘progress’ is realised through destructive renewal, glorified in image and consumption. In this context, catastrophe and its prospect are thrilling, sensual, desirable; a self-alienated spectacle vital to capitalist survival.

If boredom is the absolute lack of meaning and event, catastrophe is the ultimate ‘figure of eventfulness’ (Juengel 2009). It is thus perhaps perceived as our most likely liberation (Nisbet 2005), a moment of rupture that brings the ‘real’ (Zizek 2002) back into view, even if temporarily. Is this what we inadvertently yearn for? If so, how does this rethink the anthropocene and its possible responses?


Dimitrios Bormpoudakis

PhD Candidate, DICE University of Kent, School of Anthropology and Conservation

Joseph Tzanopoulos

Senior Lecturer, Director of Graduate StudiesUniversity of Kent, School of Anthropology and Conservation

Conservations of fear/hope and the anthropocene as barriers to utopian conservation

As Bill Adams reminds us, conservation historically ‘embraces a complex range of social practices relating to the human use of non-human nature’, from geoengineering projects and indigenous activism against forest clearance to sacred groves in India and biobanking in Australia. However, in the 20th and 21st centuries conservation’s main framing has been dominated by the fear of impending catastrophe and as Donna Haraway argued, the ‘apparatus of apocalyptic wildlife biology’. While fearful or traditional conservation has been repeatedly and rightfully criticized for its post-political framing, a novel development within conservation science and practice has received less attention. For this paper, we delineate for the first time a growing body of work within mainstream conservation science and practice that, recognising the anthropocene and responding to a mounting dissatisfaction with traditional conservation, calls for what we call a ‘new conservation of hope’. From ‘Hope Spots’, a new type marine protected areas, to Peter Kareiva’s call for an ‘optimistic, human-friendly’ conservation, the critical innovation of new conservation is the attempt to install hope in the place of the fear and despair that emanates from conservation-as-a-crisis-discipline. Drawing from utopian studies, we interrogate the imaginaries arising from hopeful conservation and find them to be, along with certain manifestations of the anthropocene concept, symptoms of the acceptance of capitalism as the only future for human/non-human natures and barriers to the articulation of a truly utopian conservation. We conclude with a remark on what utopian conservation as science and practice could look like.


Carolyn Deby

PhD CandidateUniversity of Warwick

Experiencing the Anthropocene: Mind–Body–World Entanglements

How do we experience our lives in the re-manufactured world of the Anthropocene? As a social concept, does the Anthropocene define humans as a force collectively acting upon, and affecting profoundly, some separate realm called ‘Nature’? In my site-based performance practice I seek to engage audiences experientially in real, often urban, places (as opposed to creating performances that take place in theatre or gallery spaces). The work considers the urban as a place of wild nature, of animal and elemental movement – and equally as social space and technologically reconstructed nature – a field of interlinking systems and energies that shape our lived experience.

Exploring our lived experience, becoming more aware of its complex interactivities, might be key to achieving a more nuanced understanding of our entanglement in both natural and manmade systems. ‘Affect’ is a useful way to talk about this charge of potential – we carry with us memories, habits, tendencies, associations – a constantly shifting capacity to affect or be affected (Massumi, 2002).

The paper will itself be framed as an experience or container for possible meanings in relation to the context within which it is presented. Meaning will emerge via an experiential, verbal and non-verbal collage. This is the territory within which site-based urban performance can operate: traversing the unreliability of our human experience of the everyday; noticing potential meaning and disruption while moving through the disregarded currents and voids of urban space; deconstructing accepted patterns of societal interaction; highlighting the insignificant, the unruly, and the poetic.

Massumi, B. (2002). ‘Navigating movements’. Hope: New philosophies for change: 210-242.


Marissia Fragkou

Senior Lecturer in Performing ArtsCanterbury Christ Church University

Hopeful Anxieties/Anxious Hopes in the Age of the Anthropocene

In The Promise of Happiness (2010) feminist cultural theorist Sara Ahmed considers the intersections of hope with anxiety as productive ways of looking at the future and acting upon it. ‘Hope’, Ahmed argues, ‘is a thoughtful way of being directed toward the future, or creating the very thought of the future as going some way. […] Hope also involves imagination, a wishfulness that teaches about what we strive for in the present’ (182-183). At the same time, having hope also produces anxiety as it ‘involves something that might or might not happen’ (p.183).

Using Ahmed’s ideas about the intimacy between hope and anxiety and the significance of the imagination in shaping the present and future as one of its critical lenses, this paper will consider how ecological precarity and the anthropocene can be discussed and practised in the context of the performing arts. The paper will revolve around the axes of affect, imagination, representation and temporality. In doing so, the paper will be asking: what types of representational practices may draw attention to and capture the ‘catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but high in long term effects’ (Nixon, 2006, p. 15)? How might such practices articulate an ‘affective politics of the performative’ (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013, p. 194)? Can precarity be imagined as a positive force that promotes rather than prevents action? If we understand ecology to suggest the interdependency between the human and the ‘other-than-human’, how can creative imagination reconfigure the ways we relate to each other in the anthropocene by offering ‘a glimpse into some other world’?


Ellen Potts

PhD Candidate – AnthropologyUCL

Drawing in the future(s)? Experimentation and uneven time in the UK climate justicemovement.

Against the spectre of catastrophic climate change, the UK Camp for Climate Action set upfleeting ‘future homes’ annually from 2006 to 2010 which mixed low-impact living andsharing of skills, information and resources with direct action against climate changeperpetrators. From 2010 to 2013 and beyond, climate activism in the UK has diffused intomultiple interlinked projects often fused with other campaigns, such as in the case of thegroup Fuel Poverty Action (FPA).

The paper draws on ethnographic material from participation in Climate Camp and FPA toexamine the interwoven practices and socialities in the UK’s climate justice movement, whichhold at their heart a spirit of experimentation along with an openness to change in response toreflexive scrutiny, linking to experiences of time and struggle as intertwined and highlyuneven.

The material suggests that indeterminacy is at the heart of these struggles for change, theflipside of which is a particular experience of time - not as a linear chain of events, but ratheras a constant (though uneven) opening up of possibility and actuality, the boundaries betweenwhich blur and at times collapse altogether. Such prefigurative moments entail a reaching outacross indeterminate intervals, by virtue of an immanent relationality that links to an ethic ofmutuality – the promise of connection. Activists are thus supported to undertake risky actionin the increasingly uncertain world of the anthropocene, and the conditions for social changefrom the ground up – experienced as on- rolling processes of revolution – appear promising.


Jessica Symons

Research Fellow – Centre for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures (SURF)University of Salford

A Call to Narrative: how rule by doctrine is destabilising futures thinking

The Anthropocene or ‘Age of Man’ provides an appropriate bookend for Paine’s ‘Age of Reason’ which challenged the authority of religion. The rule of law, money and scientific rationalism is embedded in the structure of capitalism with its overriding logic that brings natural and social life into the marketplace. However, to address the significant social and environmental problems today, our dominant species needs to be imaginatively engaged and this cannot be developed through reasonable debate. It must be developed through evocative and emotional narrative.

The framework for narrative engagement is already there through science fiction and utopian imaginings but these outputs are not structured, used or developed directly as sources for social engagement. Futurist fiction is currently an ‘addon’ - entertainment to give context to doctrinal debates about sea temperature rises or species collapse.

In this paper, I draw on my ethnographic findings at a social club in Northern England. I draw on the notion of bricolage to show how an artist working at the club weaves together past and present stories to capture the imagination of both the club members and potential funders. He stimulates evocative and emotional engagement with the club and inspires people to careabout its future.

Anthropology is well placed to provide multi-sited narratives exploring possible hopeful futures, a new bible to inspire and initiate change for generations to come. Understanding through narrative is how people can grasp the complexity of the Anthropocene.


Panel 2: Challenging (im)moralities: Breaking the hegemonic game?

This panel seeks to discuss the possibilities and criticalities arising from the engagement of the social sciences and humanities with the hegemonic global assemblages governing the anthropocene, and how this might lead to radically destabilising their ultimate underlying logic.

Moving within a horizon dominated by uncertainty and the anticipation of future catastrophe makes affects such as fear and hope powerful levers for the production of new subjectivities, epistemologies, and (im)moral authorities. The neoliberal paradigm capitalises on this situation. Ideas such as development, conservation, and sustainability provide the language that justifies the implementation of massive infrastructural projects by transnational agents coercing populations to fix anthropocenic disasters through geoengineering. In this scenario, resistance and dissent are political positions sanctioned as irrational and immoral, tantamount to condemning human society to death. In this way, new forms of (im)moral authorities and plutocratic regimes impose themselves as the holders of environmental truths and ethics, thus establishing the rules of the game. Human scientists are well positioned to explore the nature and the operating modes of such an anthropocenic governance, and to deconstruct its ontological and epistemological underpinnings. But in times of growing social inequality, increasing political violence, and environmental devastation, is theoretical deconstruction enough, or should human scientists commit themselves to breaking the hegemonic game? If so, a number of ethical dilemmas come to the forefront. Is it possible to speak out and take action against neoliberalism and its new forms of social-ecological dictatorship? Should human scientists engage in the shaping of alternative moralities that challenge sinister and controversial futures? To whom should our potential actions be accountable? Do we have the moral authority, or are we presuming ourselves as enlightened knowers of ‘the good’?


Thomas Bruhn

Project Scientist (Physicist)Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) Potsdam, Germany

Climate Engineering – A blueprint for the relation between humans and nature in theAnthropocene?

As climate change mitigation efforts still lag behind the desired ambitions so-called climate engineering proposals are increasingly being discussed. These approaches describetechnological suggestions to intervene at large scale in the Earth system to counteract global warming.

While their efficacy is still unclear also the ecological and social risks of these proposals are still uncertain. However, merely their idea raises fundamental questions how to interpret therelation between humans and nature in the Anthropocene.

So far, the impacts of human actions on the Earth system that have led to the emergence ofthe Anthropocene have largely been unintentional. Moving towards climate engineering by contrast would represent a qualitative paradigm shift towards globally coordinated intentional interventions in the Earth system. But would humanity as a collective really beable to take control over the entire Earth system and design a desired designer climate? Are there (or should there be) limits to the scale to the kind of human interventions or doesclimate engineering only reflect a necessary next step of humankind to fulfill its responsibilityand use its power as quasi-geological force in the Anthropocene?

The talk will present a brief introduction to the concept of climate engineering and elaborate on the fundamental questions mentioned above as a stimulus for discussion. Particularly itwill argue why from systems theory perspective humility may be a key competence for developing the relation between humans and nature in the Anthropocene.


Ian Christie

Senior Fellow (political science, human ecology, social science of sustainability)University of Surrey, Centre for Environmental Strategy,

Michael Northcott

Professor of Ethics (ethics, theology, political science)University of Edinburgh

A political theology of the anthropocene: Promethean, Soterian and Girardianapproaches to the crisis of planetary-scale growth

This paper takes as its starting point Clive Hamilton's analysis of geoengineering debates as a complex clash between two broad worldviews and networks of power and resistance. Hamilton identifies these outlooks: 'Promethean' visions of using climate engineering as a means of ensuring the continuity of neoliberal and other growth-based industrial powers; and 'Soterian' critiques of such projects as hubristic (while acknowledging the potential need for some form of emergency interventions in Earth systems). We extend this analysis by relating it to Rene Girard's concept of mimetic desire and escalating rivalry on a planetary scale. This is illustrated by the contest of neoliberal and authoritarian industrial powers for fossil energy and food security and by their resort to scapegoating and violent sacrifice of resistant others and of the ʻmore-than-humanʼlife-world. We identify in Girard's analysis a politics and ethics of shared renunciation for the common good, and of resistance to 'bad mimesis'; and we discuss ways in which this counter-ethic, rooted in Christian anthropology, is being translated into new politics and practices. These include, for example, the revival of Catholic SocialThought and its attractions for secular resistance to neoliberalism; and the emergence of ecologically informed and concerned faith institutions and campaigns linking religious and secular communities of practice. We conclude by outlining an integrated Girardian and 'Soterian' approach to ethics and political economy for a ʻgood Anthropoceneʼinthefaceofescalating violence and hubris among ʻPrometheanʼinterestsworldwide.


Peter Cox

Leverhulme International Academic Fellow – Social and Political ScienceRachel Carson Centre & University of Chester

Ben Revi

Faculty memberUniversity of Chester, Department of Social and Political Science

Anti-Politics in the Anthropocene

The governing logic of the neoliberal world seeks to impose strict policy outcomes without allthe trouble of political debate. Neoliberal governmentality is constructed as ‘apolitical’ or, in James Ferguson’s words, an ‘anti-politics machine’, a function of economic science, conceivedby experts (such as independent reserve banks, committees and advisors) whoserecommendations determine appropriate social behaviours and methods to encourage theirpractice. Politicians are judged not on their skill in delivering agreement and compromise, butrather on their skill at delivering balanced budgets and economic growth.

This sets up an interesting proposition. When the overwhelming majority of the world’sclimate scientists advocate policy to address the threat of climate change, how doesneoliberalism react? Counterintuitively, many neoliberal actors have sought to undermine theauthority of climate science. This has caused a rift in the governing logic of neoliberalism, as itselectively abandons the 'anti-politics’ positivism it is built on. Therefore, the anthropocene asa mode of understanding could present a discursive challenge to neoliberal hegemony,exposing the paradoxes and contradictions that lie within the anti-politics agenda.

We argue, therefore that the nurture of moral political debate is a crucial task of ananthropocene mode of understanding, one already emergent in activist movements. Whilethese movements are frequently characterised as anti-political in themselves, we argue thatinstead they should be understood as prefigurative of new extensions of democracy.


Tony Knight

PhD Candidate – AnthropologyUniversity of Kent, School of Anthropology and Conservation

Working title: It’s the economy, agriculture, climate, biosphere, immigration, terrorism, population… stupid

Abstract to follow.


Rory Rowan

Post-Doctoral Fellow – Political GeographyUniversity of Zurich, Department of Geography

Contesting Geo-Social Futures: A Bad Case of Optimism?

Much of the critical debate around the Anthropocene has thus far highlighted how historically specific forms of social power are concealed in appeals to a supposedly universal ‘Anthropos’, with different stratigraphic markers of the Anthropocene’s origins being mapped against European colonialism, global capitalism and nuclear militarism rather than the actions of ‘humanity’. However, less remarked upon has been how these contested accounts of the Anthropocene’s origins bear on what forms of geo-social future are considered possible and desirable. This paper argues that sharply opposed orientations towards the question of geo-social futures are emerged in the debates around the Anthropocene’s origins that are profoundly shaping discussion of its political stakes. It focuses on the critical reception of the Ecomodernist Manifesto recently published by the ‘new environmentalist’ think-tank, the Breakthrough Institute, particularly critiques of the manifesto’s ‘optimistic’ vision of the future from Left environmentalists. The paper argues that whilst rejecting optimism grounded in technological development and market forces, such as that of the breakthrough Institute, is crucial, Left eco-critics too often risk ceding optimistic orientations to geo-social futures as such to dominant forms of power. It concludes by arguing that in order to avoid melancholic paralysis in the face of massive social and environmental devastation it is crucial for the Left to develop new orientations towards the question of geo-social futures that not only cultivate collective capacities for mourning but refuse pessimism as the necessary correlate of a militant commitment to justice, care and freedom in the Anthropocene.


Patricia K. Townsend

Anthropology (retired)State University of New York at Buffalo

Putting Humpty Dumpty Together Again: Copper Mining in the Anthropocene

With the invention of the steam shovel at the turn of the past century, massive open-pit minesbegan alter the landscape on a scale beyond previous imagination. Mining turns mountains to holes in the ground, moves vast amounts sediment down rivers, and alters water chemistry in ways that affect life downstream. As we look at the future of geoengineering the atmosphere, it is useful to examine the past and present of geoengineering the land and water.

Extending my previous research concerning two copper mines in the United States and PapuaNew Guinea, I look at the place of hope and fear in the technical reports produced by thosecharged with “fixing” the slow disasters created by mining wastes in these two cases. The PNGcase is the Ok Tedi Mine, notorious for its riverine disposal of tailings, and the US case themine in Butte, Montana, pollution from which created the largest U. S. Superfund site to date. Expectations that mining wastes would be contained vary by time and place, as does the useof technologies to reverse previous environmental damage. The paper asks who has voiced an environmental ethic of mining in each of these cases.


Panel 3: Living (in) the post-nature?

This panel focuses on post-natural frameworks in particular, but not exclusively, and seeks to explore the possibilities of a critical engagement with anthropocenic scientific ontologies and strategies. We invite scholars from a broad interdisciplinary angle to participate in building this alternative platform to envision how to be, and stay alive, in the Age of Man. In this Age where the future of life on this planet is being determined by a radical form of human domination, terms such as ‘pristine nature’ and ‘wilderness’ lose their naïve meanings altogether: the nature/culture dichotomy has been violated in the face of industrial and technological manipulations of our bodies and lifeworlds. Not only are we all cyborgs, ‘nature’ itself is being fundamentally (re)engineered. How can we theorise living in this post-human and post-natural threatened Earth? Moving across traditional disciplinary divides, scholars are increasingly engaging with political ecology, science and technology studies, environmental philosophy, and importantly, natural sciences and conservation. However, are we up for the task and what could be our contribution to surviving (in) the anthropocene, a debate as yet controlled by scientists pursuing technocratic solutions? A newly emerging body of literature on materiality and nonhuman agency is alerting us that our relationships with so-called inanimate objects and other organisms cannot be reduced to simplistic economic and ecological dependencies. If animals can feel, forests can think, glaciers can listen, and if mushrooms are also our companions, the door is opened to grasp multispecies worlds and interdependence in more nuanced ways. Paradoxically, this could also be a venue where uniquely human perspectives may be brought to the fore to impinge on how we may care for the place we call home.


Matt Edgeworth

Honorary Research FellowUniversity of Leicester, School of Archaeology and Ancient History

The ground for multidisciplinary collaboration

This paper explores the ground for a multidisciplinary approach to study of the physical traces of the Anthropocene. By ‘ground’ I do not just mean an abstract ontological ground, nor do I mean merely a metaphorical platform. I am referring primarily to a material residue or deposit that humans leave behind on the surface of the Earth, forming much of the surface on which we live, build and work.

Geologists call it ‘artificial ground’. Archaeologists call it ‘archaeological stratigraphy’. Soil scientists refer to it as ‘anthrosols’ and ‘technosols’. Architects, builders and groundworkers know it as ‘made ground’. Geographers and artists see it as ‘landscape’. Large parts of it consist of landfill and rubble. Whatever it is called, this deposit of variable thickness now covers extensive areas of the terrestrial surfaces of the Earth, and is growing at accelerating rates. Rich in human artefacts and synthetic materials, it also contains myriad living beings such as soil microbes and earthworms. Yet this ground is at the same time thoroughly social in character - being steeped in story, legend, anecdote and people’s ‘sense of place’ – and is shaped at least partly though cultural and technological means.


Franklin Ginn

Lecturer – Human geographyUniversity of Edinburgh, Institute of Geography

Six Propositions for Gardening in the Anthropocene

This talk begins by noting a latent tendency shared by many – from progressive policy folk atthe Breakthrough Institute to much-cited biophilosophers – to invoke gardening as metaphorfor planetary ethics. This invocation is underspecified and vague. Drawing on my researchinto real and imaginary gardens, I outline six propositions for a gardening ethic fit for theAnthropocene. These are: judging well claims to space; seeing the planetary immanent inlandscape; crafty composition that rejects sovereign authority; anticipating generously withvegetal philosophy amid a temporality of the stretched-out present; being humble in the faceof the ‘sentient symphony’; doing decomposition and death as well as connection and life.Later this century, when the oil wells, coal seams and gas fields are mothballed forever, wehad better know how to garden well. Meantime, projects are required to help us flourishawkwardly while fighting wars against the enemy. The talk concludes by suggesting thatbeginning from nomadic points of difference we might glimpse beyond the Anthropocene theutopian lure of new collectives and new kinds of humans, composed for more sanity and forfeeling more deeply the earth and all its knotty difficulties. Through better gardening.


Luciana Lang

PhD Candidate – Social AnthropologyUniversity of Manchester

Disenchanted Arcadia: the thorny issue of managing human-made waste in protected environments

This paper focuses on the making of the ethical subject through the ways waste is classified and managed in a protected urban mangrove. The broader discussion on waste is predicated on an opposition between natural and human-made matter, with nature being defined by the non-existence of the latter, but the ethnography on which this paper is based shows that those boundaries are often blurred. The many parts that are assembled around this mangrove, which include fishermen, politicians, environmentalists, Umbanda devotees, herons, crabs, and bacteria, interact with waste in distinct ways, and criteria as to what should be allowed into the assemblage also varies.

Perceptions on discarded human-made materials and sewage, mostly seen as ‘non-natural’, and other forms of visible and invisible forms of pollution are revealing since they bring a variety of oppositions to the surface such as order versus disorder, nostalgia versus progress, and nature versus culture. Ethical stances around the mangrove are negotiated by means of oppositions, namely that of what is considered clean against what is deemed polluted, and the cleaning trope is used by a variety of actors, but categories are not fixed spawning a multiplicity of idiosyncratic ecological strategies and acceptance of a social-natural mangrove. However, the discourse of environmental bodies endorses the idea that the mangrove can only be environment if it is dully purified, failing to acknowledge the local understanding of what nature has become in the Anthropocene.


Pamela McElwee

Associate Professor, Department of Human EcologyRutgers University, NJ, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences

Conservation in the Anthropocene: New Technologies for Species Preservation as Biopower in the Global South

There has been much attention to the idea of the Anthropocene in biodiversity conservation: that no landscape has been untouched by man, and the territorially defined protected area may no longer be sufficient for conservation. Further, scientific advances have presented new opportunities, such as the ability to ‘rewild’ degraded areas with new species, or through assisted migration whereby species are helped to move away from threats like climate change. But what do these changes in Anthropocene thinking and conservation mean for on-‐the-‐ground practice in poor, developing countries? Will advances in synthetic biology and genetic engineering reduce the urgency of responding to immediate conservation threats? Will deextinction, rewilding or assisted migration only be possible in richer countries? These are troubling questions, given the fact that the most biodiverse nations are developing countries in the tropics, which face problems of financing, science and research capacity, and labor for conservation. My paper (part of a larger book project) explores these ethical issues through a case study of conservation threats and practices in the biodiverse country of Vietnam. Taking Foucault’s concept of biopower as a way to explore new approaches to the Anthropocene and biodiversity conservation, I address a new world in which novel technologies are discussed by Western, richer conservationists, but have had little impact on the daily practices of conservation in rural Vietnamese areas, which still focus on territorial protected areas that fall hardest on the poor. To conclude, I explore if Anthropocene conservation thinking can address these burdens on poor areas.


Dr. Lenore Newman

Canada Research Chair, Food Security and EnvironmentUniversity of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford, Canada

Food and the anthropocene: Life and lunch after peak farmland

Agriculture leaves a huge footprint on the Earth's land surface, with 13% of the planet's land area in crops and a further twenty-five percent in grazing. Yet despite this impact new farmland is continuing to be brought into production, and bad management of farmland and conversion of farmland to other uses is disrupting as much as one percent of the total store of farmland per year. This state of affairs is unsustainable, and puts enormous pressure on the Earth's remaining wildlands. As Ruddiman (2013) notes, arguments for an early (pre-industrial) date for the beginning of the anthropocene are largely centred on the beginning of agriculture. Ironically, global agriculture continues on a business as usual approach of exhausting farmland and clearing remnant forest for cultivation. To farm successfully in the anthropocene, society must respect the finite limits to agricultural land. In this presentation I explore the idea of peak farmland as postulated by Ausubel et al. (2013) and the potential for shrinking agricultural footprint radically through technology, improved land use, and changes to the food system, allowing for the potential return of marginal farmland to wildlands. These concepts are illustrated with examples of optimization of agricultural land in British Columbia, Canada.


Bronislaw Szerszynski

Head of Department of Sociology, Reader in SociologyLancaster University, Centre for the Study of Environmental Change

Gods of the Anthropocene: human and inhuman agencies in the Earth’s new epoch

The term ‘the Anthropocene’ seems to evoke the idea of an ‘Age of Humanity’ in which the planet – and perhaps eventually the cosmos – becomes a mere echo chamber in which the Anthropos, the human being, becomes the only source and telos of agency. Yet as a name for the emerging new stage of the Earth’s evolution it surely exhibits an extraordinary level of irony. I have argued elsewhere that, if the Anthropocene is the ‘end of nature’, it is also the ‘end of the end of nature’ – the end, that is, of Homo faber, the human being understood as that being which can carve a stable setting for human affairs out of non-human nature, and in which the latter finds its purpose and meaning (Szerszynski 2013). On the contrary, any Anthropocenic ambition to modulate the dynamics of nature’s becoming on a global scale will see the collective human will progressively entangled in the self-organising potentialities of non-human becoming on the one hand (Serres 1995) and the demands of an increasingly inhuman technosphere on the other (Haff 2013). The Anthropocene will surely be an age not dominated by the will of ‘man’ but by a growing awareness (whether willingly acceded to or forced on human consciousness) that human beings are part of an Earth which is made up of countless agencies that are constantly concatenating and ironising each other’s intentions in intrinsically unpredictable ways (Latour 2013). Whatever the ecomodernists might suggest (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015), in the Anthropocene humans will find themselves more, not less, conditioned by non-human agency.

Yet in this paper I want to extend this account further, suggesting that the advent of the Anthropocene is giving rise to what might be called a Great Acceleration of spirit. As seasonal patterns shift, the old gods known by surviving foraging, agrarian and pastoral societies are withdrawing from human society. As the high modernism of twentieth-century organised industrial capitalism is displaced by the delirium of a financialised, postmodern capitalism, the high god of reason and morality is fading from the public life of the West as harsher, apocalyptic monotheisms spread in parts of the developing world made turbulent by extractive economies and climatic change. And as commodified global flows of matter, energy and value accelerate and undermine local gift economies, reports proliferate in postcolonial contexts of cannibal spirits, vampiric technicians, demonic mine and factory owners, zombie workers and chthonic demons. I will interrogate these three interlinked shifts in sacral ordering, and, drawing on the work of Georges Dumezil, Georges Bataille and Teresa Brennan, suggest that we can use them to better understand the hidden material and cultural logics of the Anthropocene.

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