Anthropocene Lecture series

2024: Welcome to the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a widely used term that designates the most recent epoch in Earth's history: an epoch in which humans have radically altered (and disrupted) the climate and ecosystems of the planet. 

The annual Welcome to the Anthropocene lecture series invites scholars and researchers across the humanities, social and natural sciences to explore how their disciplines are responding—both to the concept of the Anthropocene, and to the planetary crisis that it designates.

For the 2024 Anthropocene Lecture Series we've invited leading international scholars.  

The lecture series are free and open to the public. You can either attend in person at the University of Oslo or on Zoom. 

2024 Convenors and organizers: Sara Asu Schroer and Anna-Katharina Laboissiere. 

When the land becomes the sea, and the sea becomes the land: disrupting processes of appropriation of Miärralándda

The first Welcome to the Anthropocene lecture of the year will be given by Professor Britt Kramvig and Postdoctoral Research Fellow Tarja Salmela at the Department of Tourism and Northern Studies, UiT - The Arctic University of Norway.

Time and place: Mar. 14, 2024 4:15 PM – 5:00 PM, CEST, Auditorium 3, Sophus Bugges hus or Zoom

At the moment we speak, multiple international and national companies invest in and transform the Sámi Miärralándda. Miärralándda (Miärra = sea or coastland, lándda = land) is an Ume Sámi word that captures the porosity of the land and the sea – worlds that become one, inseparable. Western "stories of progress” materialize in Miärralándda in the Umesámi region, on the coast of Norway, as new land-based salmon farms (iLaks.no, 2023); offshore wind turbines in bodies of water (the Norwegian Sea) (NRK, 2023: NFK, 2023); and onshore wind turbines in the Sámi reindeer herding districts (Fjellheim 2023). In these stories, the governing principal cuts the land/sea/people into different entities, enacting these as colonizable resources, and then appropriates their entanglement through technological innovations. It is in this political landscape that the stories of loss and grief of Miärralándda, as told by the Sámi people, meet neoliberal fantasies of sustainability. Yet, no matter how suppressed, violated, or suffocated, the stories from Miärralándda persist, in dormant reciprocity (Kramvig & Verran, 2019), that can be awakened through storytelling - like Barruk’s vuöllie. In this lecture, we will discuss our ongoing collaborative work that focuses on the processes of colonization in Sámi Miärralándda. We write, talk and act as two friends and colleagues who are curious about the potential of bringing together indigenous Sámi knowledge and feminist posthumanisms. 

About the presenters

Britt Kramvig is a professor in the Department of Tourism and Northern Studies at the Arctic University of Norway. Her research centers around questions of decolonization, locally embedded practices of reconciliation, indigenous/Sámi ways of knowing, and storytelling. Kramvig's work is internationally acknowledged as it embodies a unique dynamic interplay between art and science, fostering collaboration across disciplinary fields within and beyond academia. Kramvig has engaged with the concept of landscape through storytelling throughout her academic career, including her work on Sámi art, land- and soundscape and (de)colonialism, as well as work on the Arctic sea- and soundscape, including collaboration with world-known sound artists and international academic networks. She is a descendant of the sea-Sámi’s in Orjješ-Ráisa /Sørreisa that suffered under the weight of colonialism and a scholar that reclaims and recalls her Sámi heritage.

Tarja Salmela is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Arctic University of Norway, within the Department of Tourism and Northern Studies. Her research centers on collective processes of knowledge production within more-than-human, mobile worlds. Over recent years, she has engaged in crafting decolonizing storytelling practices within landscapes that have been overshadowed by tourism and especially touring narratives. Part of this work is dedicated to understanding the relations that emerge through long-term travel in inhabitable vehicles in these contested landscapes. Decolonizing storytelling practices can evoke and revive alternative narratives of the land and its inhabitants, being sensitive to the many times forgotten, silenced or disregarded histories of places 'driven through'. Salmela’s work draws inspiration from feminist new materialisms, feminist posthumanism, and indigenous methodologies. More information about her current project can be found here. 

Suggested readings

• Kramvig, B. & Verran, H. (2019) Stories, stones, and memories in the land of dormant reciprocity. Opening up Possibilities for Reconciliation with a politics that works tensions of dissensus and consensus with care; in Henriksen, Hydle & Kramvig (eds): Recognition, Reconciliation and Restoration: Applying a Postcolonial Understanding in Social Work and Healing, pp. 163-181, Oslo: Orkana forlag.
• Neimanis, A., Åsberg, C., & Hedrén, J. (2015). Four Problems, Four Directions for Environmental Humanities: Toward Critical Posthumanities for the Anthropocene. Ethics and the Environment, 20(1), 67–97. https://doi.org/10.2979/ethicsenviro.20.1.67

Right(ing) the Wrong: Rivers in the Anthropocene

The second Welcome to the Anthropocene lecture of 2024 will be led by Dr. Rahul Ranjan, writer and Assistant Professor of Climate/Environmental Justice at the Department of Human Geography, University of Edinburgh. 

Time and place: Apr. 18, 2024 4:15 PM – 5:00 PM, CEST, Auditorium 3, Sophus Bugges hus or Zoom

“The great River flows from the mountains to the sea. I am the River, the River is me.”
Rivers in the Anthropocene are transformed into an object. But rivers, as we see above (Maori tribe, Aotearoa New Zealand), are also ancestors. This fundamental description of indivisibility between human/non-human fully captures the interplay between place-based knowledge, lives and shared experiences. Recently, various legislative moves, judicial decisions and social movements have made this prominent through engaged and decisive measures. These emergent responses require addressing longstanding, often conflicting worldviews between different groups and interests. This lecture primarily focuses on the case study from Aotearoa, New Zealand, and India to demonstrate how rivers in the Anthropocene draw seemingly different responses by socio-legal initiatives but are closely tied to the alarming state in the wake of anthropogenic climate change. Both cases help explain how state institutions, communities and movements negotiate the rights of non-humans. 

About the presenter

Dr. Rahul Ranjan is a writer and Assistant Professor of Climate/Environmental Justice at the Department of Human Geography, University of Edinburgh. His recent book "The Political Life of Memory" was published by the Cambridge University Press in 2023. He is interested in how we make sense of living in the midst of environmental grief and crisis that arrests our time.

Suggested readings

• Elizabeth Macpherson, Axel Borchgrevink, Rahul Ranjan & Catalina Vallejo Piedrahíta (2021) Where ordinary laws fall short: ‘riverine rights’ and constitutionalism, Griffith Law Review, 30:3, 438-473, DOI: 10.1080/10383441.2021.1982119

Weird Worlds and Otherwise

Our third Welcome to the Anthropocene Lecture will be given by Alison Sperling, Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University.

Time and place: May 2, 2024 4:15 PM – 5:00 PM, CEST, Auditorium 3, Sophus Bugges hus or Zoom

This talk explores literary ecological imaginaries in a moment that Thomas Friedman in The New York Times named “global weirding” in 2010, exploring the dual way in which "the Weird" has come to be understood as both a mode of re-signifying global warming, and as a modernist literary mode going back at least to the early 20th century. Tracing weird fiction’s role in earlier philosophical accounts of the Anthropocene to the current moment of weirdness as a primary imaginative vector along which environmental catastrophe and transformation is explored, “Weird Worlds and Otherwise” will ask about what it means to rethink Anthropocene encounters through contemporary weird fictions and theories of weirdness that imagine weird affects or aesthetics at the limits of representation. Taking its title cue from James Tiptree Jr.’s essential collection Warm Worlds and Otherwise (1975), this talk looks to both Old and New Weird texts from H.P. Lovecraft to N.K. Jemisin to account for how visions of weirding worlds reflect (or purposefully fail to reflect) our changing environments. What does a concept like "global weirding" and weird fiction itself open up for thinking about the incomprehensible temporalities and unpredictable effects of living in and through the effects of climate change? 

About the presenter

Alison Sperling lives between Berlin and Tallahassee, where she is an Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University. She has held postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin and Technische Universität Berlin, and a Junior Faculty Fellowship at Technische Universität Dresden. She researches in the fields of science fiction and the Weird, queer and feminist theory, contemporary art, and ecology, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rhizomes, Girlhood Studies, Paradoxa, Studies in the Fantastic, interconnections: journal of posthumanism and elsewhere, as well as in over a dozen book chapters, artist monographs, and in exhibitions internationally. She is the editor of “Climate Fictions,” a special issue of Paradoxa, and is currently co-editing “The Anthropocene Sublime” with Ecozon@.

What Are We Talking About When We Talk About ‘Transformation’?

The fourth and final Welcome to the Anthropocene lecture by Laura Mai, Postdoctoral Researcher at Tilburg University. 

Time and place: May 8, 2024 4:15 PM – 5:00 PM, CEST, Zoom (sign up link below)

The global climate crisis response envisioned by the Paris Agreement (the most recently concluded international treaty on climate change) is commonly understood as demanding ‘transformative’ change. Yet, we lack a holistic conceptual framing for making sense of what such change would entail, how it might unfold, and who and what it will involve. Moreover, there has been little critical engagement with the question of what is at stake when invoking the notion of transformation. Contributing to the broader debate about what the climate crisis demands of law and legal institutions, the lecture offers an ontology of transformative change, critically appraises the concept of transformation, and reflects on what engagement with the transformation trope might mean for how we do scholarship.

About the presenter

Laura Mai (@_Laura_Mai) is a postdoctoral researcher at Tilburg University where she works within the ‘Constitutionalizing in the Anthropocene’ project. Laura’s research applies an interdisciplinary socio-legal perspective to explore how ways of thinking about and doing law are becoming reconfigured under conditions of the unfolding climate crisis. Laura’s expertise covers international, transnational, and local climate change law and governance, the ‘Anthropocene’ and its import on legal scholarship and praxis, and critical transformation thinking. Laura has conducted ethnographic research on the 2015 Paris Agreement, worked for the UN Climate Change Secretariat, and advised the UK Parliament on the role of sub-national actors in addressing climate change. Laura’s research has been published in Global Policy, Global Environmental Politics, Transnational Environmental Law, The Leiden Journal of International Law, Transnational Legal Theory, and Earth System Governance amongst others.

Suggested readings

Ian Scoones et al, ‘Transformations to Sustainability: Combining Structural, Systemic and Enabling Approaches’ (2020) 42 Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 65-75

Comic - German Advisory Council on Global Change, ‘The Great Transformation. Climate – Can We Beat the Heat?’ (2013)

2023: Welcome to the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a widely used term that designates the most recent epoch in Earth's history: an epoch in which humans have radically altered (and disrupted) the climate and ecosystems of the planet. 

The annual Welcome to the Anthropocene lecture series invites scholars and researchers across the humanities, social and natural sciences to explore how their disciplines are responding—both to the concept of the Anthropocene, and to the planetary crisis that it designates.

For the 2023 Anthropocene Lecture Series we've invited leading international scholars.  

2023 Convenors and organizers: Pierre du Plessis and Anna-Katharina Laboissiere

The 2023 lecture series are free and open to the public. You can either attend in person at the University of Oslo or on Zoom. 

We are (of) the Earth: Place-based Knowing and Be(com)ing Circular 

March 30, 2023 16:15-17:00 CET, Auditorium 3 Sophus Bugges Hus or Zoom 

About the presenter

About the lecture

April 13, 16:15-17:00 CET, Auditorium 3 Sophus Bugges Hus or Zoom 

About the presenter

Matthew Chrulew (@negentropist) is a writer and researcher from Boorloo/Perth. His fiction has appeared in Westerly, Cosmos and Ecopunk! and his essays in Angelaki, New Literary History and Biosemiotics. He recently edited the anthologies Phase Change: Imagining Energy Futures and (with Thom van Dooren) Kin: Thinking with Deborah Bird Rose. He was a founding associate editor of Environmental Humanities journal, and edits the book series Animalities at Edinburgh University Press. He works as a research fellow at Curtin University.

About the lecture

One aspect of the Anthropocene in need of better concepts and methods of analysis is the behavioural and cultural change among animals exposed to human activity. While environmental discourse is full of generalisations about the reach of human disruption and the inescapability of entanglement, the anthropocentric notions subtending the ‘two cultures’ divide still inhibit better understandings of just how wildlife are changed by various forms of encounter. Drawing on research in the history and philosophy of ethology, zoo biology and conservation biology that explores the value of habituation in behavioural studies, the traumas of captivity and the vicissitudes of domestication and rewilding, this lecture seeks to disentangle some varieties of anthropogenic transformation so as better to navigate the murky ethopolitical terrain of the Anthropocene.

Kinship and cultivation: On the intersection of land, temporality, and ecological justice 

April 20, 16:15-17:00 CET, Auditorium 3 Sophus Bugges Hus or Zoom

About the presenter

Jason Allen-Paisant is Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory and Creative Writing in the Department of English, American Studies, and Creative Writing. He is the author of Théâtre dialectique postcolonial (Classiques Garnier), and of Engagements with Aimé Césaire (Oxford University Press, 2023), which is a philosophical study of poetry from the perspective of African metaphysics. He is also the author of two volumes of poetry — Thinking with Trees (winner of the Poetry category of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature) and Self-Portrait as Othello (a 2023 Poetry Book Society Choice). His creative nonfiction book Scanning the Bush will be published by Hutchinson Heinemann in 2024. He has twice been guest editor of special issues of scholarly journals: Performing Black Futures and Face à l’histoire coloniale (the latter co-edited with Clare Finburgh Delijani), for parallax and Théâtre/Public respectively. His work has also resulted in numerous peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals and in creative/critical writings for various magazines, including Granta.
Among other matters, Allen-Paisant’s work explores embodied experience in the context of Afro-diasporic politics and worldbuilding, often reflecting on the complex meanings of nature in Black life.

About the lecture

Beaconing marginalized positions with respect to land and nature from my intertwined subjectivities as storyteller/poet and academic, this talk, based on my forthcoming book Scanning the Bush (Hutchinson Heinemann), focuses on the particular idea of cultivation. The word ‘cultivate’ circles around ideas of tilling, raising or growing, and caring for. As the art historian Nathaniel Stein notes, these meanings apply to developments one might nurture in society as well as those one might generate in the soil. To cultivate is to improve by care, to care something into existence. Highlighting the significance of the idea of cultivation to my book’s auto-ethnographic project, this talk will address the challenge of a just ecological transition by exploring how these ideas and praxes of ‘cultivation’ might foster an awareness of deep time in mainstream political consciousness, while expanding public discussions around land access for the practising of inter-species kinship and food independence.

Climate Change Research in the Anthropocene: IPCC findings from the last decade

May 4, 16:15-17:00 CET, Zoom 

About the presenter

Dr. Stephanie Roe is WWF’s Global Climate & Energy Lead Scientist, working to advance the science, leadership and progress on climate mitigation, climate adaptation, and nature-based solutions. She is an expert on land-based climate mitigation and biosphere-atmosphere dynamics, is a Lead Author of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report and is a member of the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) Advisory Group. Prior to WWF, Dr. Roe led research on climate and land science and implemented climate mitigation, forest conservation, and food system interventions with various governments and NGOs across 20+ countries. She also worked with the United Nations to implement a program on reducing deforestation in Indonesia, negotiated international climate policy as a Delegate of the Philippines to the UNFCCC, advised the Public Ministry in Brazil on climate change legislation, and collaborated with Fortune 500 companies on sustainability initiatives and climate strategies. Throughout her career, Dr. Roe has worked on addressing climate change, biodiversity loss, and economic development, striving to catalyze the transition to sustainable land-use, food, and energy systems.

About the lecture

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces an assessment every 5-7 years, authored by hundreds of scientists in over fifty countries. It represents the most robust and authoritative source of climate science, and is used to inform international and national policy makers. The assessment includes a series of reports on why the earth’s climate is changing, the consequences of those changes, and solutions to address it. This presentation will go over the latest IPCC assessment’s findings (Synthesis report release, March 20 2023), and discuss the technical, economic, political, and social approaches for mitigating climate change and other key challenges of the Anthropocene.

2022: Welcome to the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a widely used term that designates the most recent epoch in Earth's history: an epoch in which humans have radically altered (and disrupted) the climate and ecosystems of the planet. The annual Welcome to the Anthropocene lecture series invites scholars and researchers across the humanities, social and natural sciences to explore how their disciplines are responding—both to the concept of the Anthropocene, and to the planetary crisis that it designates. For the 2022 Anthropocene Lecture Series we invited leading international scholars.  

2022 Convenors and organizers: Hugo Reinert and Pierre du Plessis. 

The 2022 lecture series will be broadcast on Zoom, free and open to the public. 

Intimate Inheritance: Plastic and Its Relations

March 10, 2022 16:15-17:00 CET

About the presenter

Heather Davis is a writer, researcher and teacher whose work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. She is assistant professor of Culture and Media at The New School in New York.

About the lecture

Thinking through questions of inheritance, intimacy, and queer ecologies, I introduce the concept of plastic matter. Building on the work of scholars in feminist new materialism, petrocultures, and science and technology studies, I use the concept of plastic matter to describe the philosophical assumptions that fostered the conditions for plastic to emerge in the world in the first place. This concept speaks to how the materiality of plastic has been transferred to our expectations of matter more broadly, how matter itself has come to be produced as inherently pliable, disposable, and consumable. I argue that it is important to become more intimate with the objects we abjure, more curious about plastic, not to eschew the very real damage it is doing, but as an invitation to become more accountable.

Suggested readings

• Davis, Heather. 2022. Plastic Matter. Duke University Press.

Ironies of the Anthropocene

March 23, 2022 16:15-17:00 CET

About the presenter

Marcia Bjornerud is Professor of Environmental Studies and Geosciences at Lawrence University in Appleton, where her research focuses on the physics of earthquakes and mountain-building. She is the author of Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth and Timefulness: How Thinking like a Geologist can Help Save the World.

About the lecture

Within the past decade or so, study of the Anthropocene has emerged as a new subdiscipline, with its own conferences, journals, and even post-graduate programmes. In the geosciences, the focus has naturally been stratigraphic: how exactly do we mark the moment in geologic time when we crossed the threshold and left the Holocene?  As a geoscientist not directly involved in this process, I sense the impossibility of capturing the real meaning of the Anthropocene using the tools of the geosciences.  This is one of many ironies concerning the role of geology in defining the Anthropocene.  The most tragic is that in this ‘human-dominated’ time, we will in fact have less agency over our destiny than we enjoyed in the stable Holocene when we had some basis for believing that the past would be a good guide for the future. 

Suggested readings

• Bjornerud, Marcia. 2018. Timefulness. Princeton University Press.

Anthropocene Patches: Space, Time and Position

April 6, 2022 16:15-17:00 CET

About the presenter

Anna Tsing is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Niels Bohr Professor in the Department of Culture and Society at Aarhus University in Denmark. She is the author of In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (1993), Friction (2005) and The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015).

About the lecture

Anna Tsing will be discussing "Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene,"  a project she co-curated with Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou. Feral Atlas offers an original and playful approach for exploring issues critical to the Anthropocence and invites users to explore the ecological worlds created when nonhuman entities become tangled up with human infrastructure projects. 

A Cosmopolitical Challenge: Activating uBuntu in Partnerships between Environmental Management Sciences and the Humanities

April 27, 2022 16:15-17:00 CET

About the presenter

Lesley Green is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Environmental Humanities South at the University of Cape Town. She is currently a Cheney Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds, working to build stronger social science and humanities engagement with earth and life sciences.

About the lecture

Environmental humanities traces and stories relations of all kinds – bio-geo-socio-techno – with the broad goal of shifting modernist consciousness from human exceptionalism and towards the lived experience of planetarity, rethinking and challenging the theory of the world that undergirds neoliberalism and the logics of objectification and commodification. Yet where knowledge of the planetary crisis and its potential remediations translates earthly processes, for their own protection, into data objects to be audited by accountants, objectification and commodification take centre-stage, advanced by their compatibility with the enumerative logics propounded by neoliberalism and technofeudalism. In sum: where climate development and sustainability advocates require knowledge producers to become translators of lived experience into the world of the spreadsheet, environmental humanists and activists address the devastations that not infrequently arise from the implementation of those policies. This may lead to a number of problems between researchers who, while they share the common sense of urgency to address planetary crisis, may find themselves in competition over project concepts, and at loggerheads in respect of critique, methods, and oversights. How can the natural sciences and environmental social sciences and humanities build the alliance that is crucial in addressing our shared planetary crisis? In this talk I aim to open these issues generatively by identifying the problem as the modernist theory of the human-in-the-world dating back to the 1600s, and, taking a leaf from Latour’s proposal to “recall modernity for a product improvement”, propose an African climate-response scholarship that takes as its point of departure an African philosophy of the human—that is, uBuntu.

Suggested readings

• Green, Leslie. 2020. Rock | Water | Life. Duke University Press.

2021: Welcome to the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a contested but widely used term that describes the most recent epoch in Earth's history—an epoch in which humans have radically altered (and disrupted) the planet's climate and ecosystems. Drawing on current research, the annual Welcome to the Anthropocene secture series invites scholars and researchers across the humanities, social and natural sciences to explore how their disciplines are responding to the concept of the Anthropocene, and to the planetary crisis that it designates. For the 2021 series, we invited scholars working at University of Oslo to discuss their work on, and in the light of, the Anthropocene.

2021 Convenor and Organizer: Ursula Münster

Feedbacks and Tipping Points in Nature and Society

February 2, 2021 16:15-17:15 CET, Zoom

Lecturer: Dag O. Hessen

Suggested readings

• Otto et. al. 2020. "Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth's climate by 2050." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 117(5): 2354-2365
• Wiedermann et. al. 2019. "Domino Effects in the Earth System -- The potential role of wanted tipping points." Global Sustainability. 
• Lenton et. al. 2008. "Tipping elements in the Earth's climate system." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 105(6): 1786-93.

When is the Anthropocene? The Multiple Lifetimes of Climate and Nature Emergency

February 9, 2021 16:15-17:15 CET, Zoom

Lecturer: Helge Jordheim

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Decades after the concept of the Anthropocene was first launched in 2000, scientists are still disagreeing about when it began, whether it was the development of farming and sedentary culture some 8000 years ago, the colonization of America, the Industrial Revolution, or the Great Acceleration. However, the question of when goes much deeper. A closer looks quickly prompts us to ask another question: In what time, or rather, in plural, in what times do the Anthropocene and likewise another projected event, the Sixth Extinction, take place. In human, historical time, which are mostly counted from the beginning of writing between 3400 and 3300 BCE? In geological time, which goes back approximately 4,6 billion years? Or in the times of other species, such as the Yangtze Finless Porpoise quickly going extinct? In this talk I will suggest a way to think about these multiple times of the Anthropocene by employing some of the terminology we have developed in the LIFETIMES project (Toppforsk-NFR), currently at work at the university of Oslo. I will also ask the question what kind of time measurement and management practices we need to start to act on what we know.

Suggested readings

• Jordheim, H. 2019. "Return to Chronology". In Rethinking historical time: new approaches to presentism, edited by Marek Tamm & Laurent Olivier, 43-56. Bloomsbury Academic.
• Bastian, M. 2012. "Fatally Confused: Telling the Time in the Midst of Ecological Crises". Environmental Philosophy 9(1): 23-48.

Risks from Climate Extremes in the Anthropocene

February 16, 2021 16:15-17:15 CET, Zoom

Lecturer: Jana Sillmann

Suggested readings

• Sillmann, J. et al. 2021. "Extreme Weather and Climate Change." In CLIMATE CHANGE: Observed Impacts on Planet Earth - 3rd edition, edited by Trevor M. Letscher. Elsevier
• Sillmann, J. et. al. (eds). 2020. Climate extremes and their implications for impact and risk assessment, Amsterdam: Elsevier
• Sillmann, J. et. al. 2018. "From Hazard to Risk". Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 99(8):1689-1693
• Sillmann, J. et. al. 2015. "Climate emergencies do not justify engineering the climate." Nature climate change 5(4): 290-292

Geographies of the Anthropocene: Political Ecology, Feminism, Race and Contested Knowledges

March 2, 2021 16:15-17:15 CET, Zoom

Lecturer: Andrea Nightingale

About the lecture

This session provides an introduction to debates on the Anthropocene in Geography. As a discipline that crosses between social and physical science, geographers of different stripes have been central to Anthropocene conversations. On the one hand, many are involved in designing disaster risk reduction protocols or climate change adaptation plans, while on the other, some of the most vociferous critiques of those same concepts have come from the same discipline. Here we will focus on why this tension exists and how geographers working with political ecology, feminist theory and development studies approach Anthropocene issues. The political economy of governance and knowledge are central concerns while contributions from feminist and race studies have helped to show the importance of power and politics how environmental issues arise and come to be important at different scales.

Suggested readings

• Pelido, L. 2018. "Racism and the Anthropocene". In Future remains: a cabinet of curiosities for the Anthropocene, edited by Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero & Robert S. Emmett. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Swyngedouw, E. & Ernstson, H. 2018. "Interrupting the Anthropo-obScene: Immuno-biopolitics and Depoliticizing Ontologies in the Anthropocene". Theory, culture & society 35(6): 3-30.
• Davis, H. & Todd, Z. 2017. "On the Importance of a Date, Or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene". ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16(4): 761-780.
• Castree, N. 2014. "Geography and the Anthropocene II: Current Contributions". Geography compass 8(7): 450-463.

Speculative Infrastructures: The Future City and the Anthropocene

March 9, 2021 16:15-17:15 CET, Zoom

Lecturer: Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay

Suggested readings

• Jubaili, D. 2016. "The Worker". Iraq + 100: stories from a century after the invasion, edited by Hassan Blasim. Great Britain: Comma Press
• Jingfang, H. 2015. "Folding Beijing". Uncanny Magazine, vol. 2.
• Singh, V. 2013. "With Fate Conspire". Solaris Rising 2: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ian Whates. Solaris.

The Archive of the Anthropocene: The Nature of Political Documents and the Role of Documents in Politics of Nature

March 16, 2021 16:15-17:15 CET, Zoom

Lecturer: Kristin Asdal

Suggested readings

• Asdal, K. & Hobæk, B. 2016. "Assembling the Whale: Parliaments in the Politics of Nature". Science as Culture 25(1): 96-116.
• Asdal, K. 2015. "What is the issue? The transformative capacity of documents". Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 16(1): 74-90.

Sustainability and Law in the Anthropocene

March 23, 2021 16:15-17:15 CET, Zoom

Lecturer: Beate Sjåfjell

Suggested readings

• Sjåfjell, B., Häyhä, T. & Cornell, S. 2020. "A Research-Based Approach to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. A Prerequisite to Sustainable Business and Finance". University of Oslo Faculty of Law Research Paper No. 2020-02.
• Sjåfjell, B. 2019. "Responding to the grand challenge of our time". In Sustainable and Efficient Transport. Incentives for Promoting a Green Transport Market,  edited by Eftestøl-Wilhelmsson, E., Sankari, S. & Bask, A. Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing. University of Oslo Faculty of Law Research Paper No. 2019-53, Nordic & European Company Law Working Paper No. 19-07.

Food Landscapes: Towards a Political Ecology of Pandemics

April 6, 2021 16:15-17:15 CET, Zoom

Lecturer: Mariel Aguilar-Støen

Suggested readings

• Fearnley, L. 2015. "WILD GOOSE CHASE: The Displacement of Influenza Research in the Fields of Poyang Lake, China". Cultural Anthropology 30(1):12-35
• Becheva, S. & Chemnitz, C. (eds.) 2014. "MEAT ATLAS: Facts and figures about the animals we eat, Heinrich Böll Foundation". Berlin, Germany, and Friends of the Earth Europe. Brussels: Belgium
• Wallace, R. G. 2009. "Breeding Influenza: The Political Virology of Offshore Farming". Antipode 41(5): 916-951.

Domestication and Multispecies Relations in the Anthropocene

April 13, 2021 16:15-17:15 CET, Zoom

Lecturer: Marianne Elisabeth Lien

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Human civilization is often presented as a story of domestication. According to this story, domination and control of animals and plants are key to cultural progress and prosperity, and foundational for the world as we know it.  Ethnographic and archeological studies show, however, that human ways of living with other species are far more diverse than scholars have typically portrayed them. Recent findings in archeology and anthropology emphasize reciprocal relations, reversible change, and gradual and open-ended processes of mutual adaptation. 
In this lecture, I suggest that a critical understanding of stories we live by is crucial in order to address the challenges of the Anthropocene.  Cross-disciplinary curiosity is called for sensitive to the unfolding of multispecies relations beyond the agricultural realm. I propose seeing domestication as a multispecies relation, with unexpected ripple effects. Domestication then, is not only about human control over a single species, or confinement as such, but a set of relational practices through which multiple landscape formations are generated.

Suggested readings

• Lien, M. E., Swanson, H. A. & Ween, G. B. 2018. "INTRODUCTION: Naming the Beast—Exploring the Otherwise". In Domestication gone wild: politics and practices of multispecies relations, edited by Heather Anne Swanson, Marianne Elisabeth Lien & Gro B. Ween, 1-30. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
• Lien, M. E. 2017. "Unruly Appetites: Salmon Domestication 'All the Way Down'". In Arts of living on a damaged planet, edited by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan & Nils Bubandt, 107-125. University of Minnesota Press.
• Blanchette, A. 2015. "HERDING SPECIES: Biosecurity, Posthuman Labor, and the American Industrial Pig". Cultural Anthropology 30(4): 640-669

2021: New Environmental Archaeologies

What should be the main agendas for archaeology in the Anthropocene? Inviting to a dialogue across disciplines, the aim of this seminar series is to discuss and build a manifesto for New Environmental Archaeologies. Are we asking the right questions? Focusing on the right materials? Using the right terms to the right audiences? A series of interconnected key concerns are addressed in 11 seminars, each devoted to a particular theme.

Ambition

The Environmental Humanities have emerged over last decades as an intellectual response to the increasingly acute and increasingly obvious impacts that climate change is exerting on societies globally. This renewed attention to climate and environment as a significant facet of human lives and livelihoods is now also widespread among historians – but it does not seriously include archaeologists. Instead, archaeologists mostly approach issues of contemporary climate change and the Anthropocene from the perspective of either Contemporary Archaeology or from a stance that seeks to highlight the temporal depth of human impacts on climate. And while significant in their own right, these perspectives rarely confer or join forces.

The ambition of this seminar series is to discuss and define new agendas for Environmental Archaeology. In this, we seek not to belabor false dichotomies between scientific and political approaches. Instead, we seek to address the conjoined politics, poetics and potentials of ‘human palaeoecology’ with regard to the deep past, the present, and distant futures; we seek to query what theoretical ambitions and arguments to field and what forms of narrative to adopt – in academic and popular writing as well as in other interactions with diverse publics. Together the series will build a manifesto for New Environmental Archaeologies, including empirical prospects, theoretical configuration, methodological approaches, and novel articulations. 

Where are we going?

We posit that it is the urgency and opportunities of contemporary climate change that have stimulated many of these responses, but that a wider rethinking and recasting of Environmental Archaeology has become a necessity. If we accept Chakrabarty’s (2009) core thesis that history – political, economic, or otherwise – can no longer be analysed, understood, written about and exhibited without including the environment as valid also for archaeology, then all archaeology should be a form of environmental archaeology. Yet, as a disciplinary specialism, this long-established subfield of archaeology derives its identity largely from a methodological fellowship with the Earth Sciences rather than a particular conceptual or theoretical stance. But if Earth Science now is equally a Social Science and if Earth Scientists are following the lead of Latour in shifting their emphasis from ‘matters of fact’ to ‘matters of concern’ it is time, we believe, for new agendas – Anthropocene agendas – for Environmental Archaeology.

Many practitioners are already pushing the envelope on numerous fronts and in that endeavor we extend an invitation to a seminar series that openly seeks to discuss and set such new agendas together. Climate Science has long had the methods to interrogate past climates and environments, as well as to demonstrate human impacts since the commencement of industrialization. Similarly, Environmental Archaeology has many of the necessary methods at its disposal. But are we asking the right questions? Addressing the right materials? And, talking in the right terms to the right audiences?

FRAMINGS 

February 5, 2021 14:15-16:00 CET, Zoom

Contributors: Joy McCorriston, Ohio State University and Julie Fields, Ohio State University

ANIMALS

February 12, 2021 14:15-16:00 CET, Zoom

Contributor: Shumon T. Hussain, Aarhus University

PLANTS 

February 19, 2021 14:15-16:00 CET, Zoom

Contributor: Benjamin Gearey, University College Cork

GENDER 

March 12, 2021 14:15-16:00 CET, Zoom

Contributor: Christina Fredengren, Stockholm University

MUSEUMS 

March 19, 2021 14:15-16:00 CET, Zoom

Contributor: Bergsveinn Thorsson, University of Oslo

ARTEFACTS 

March 26, 2021 14:15-16:00 CET, Zoom

Contributor: Stein Farstadvoll, UiT The Arctic University of Norway

CAPITALISM

April 9, 2021 14:15-16:00 CET, Zoom

Contributor: Suzi Richer, Richer Environmental

COMMONS 

April 13, 2021 14:15-16:00 CET, Zoom

Contributor: Mette Løvschal, Aarhus University

GEOPOLITICS 

April 16, 2021 14:15-16:00 CET, Zoom

Contributor: Mona Bhan, Syracuse University

BECOMINGS

April 23, 2021 14:15-16:00 CET, Zoom

Contributor: Colin Sterling, University of Amsterdam

TRAJECTORIES 

April 30, 2021 14:15-16:00 CET, Zoom

Contributors: Joy McCorriston, Ohio State University and Julie Fields, Ohio State University