What is the Anthropocene Curriculum?

The Anthropocene Curriculum began in 2013 as a long-term initiative exploring frameworks for critical knowledge and education in our ongoing transition into a new, human dominated geological epoch—the Anthropocene. The project has drawn together heterogeneous knowledge practices, inviting academics, artists, and activists from around the world to co-develop curricular experiments that collectively respond to this crisis of the customary. It has done so by producing experimental co-learning situations and research possibilities for transdisciplinary collaboration that are capable of explicitly tackling the epistemic and geo-social dimensions of knowledge that are at stake in this new epoch.

What should a body of “earthbound” knowledge contain that traverses from the global to the local and back? What forms of knowledge transmission are appropriate and lasting in these trans-scalar conditions and mutual interdependencies? Taking into account issues of access and agency, asymmetrical justice, traditional knowledge forms, and ways of inhabiting the Earth, the project has accounted for the varied means of experience and sought to find a common ground for future scholarship and practice.

The Anthropocene Curriculum was initiated by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) as part of The Anthropocene Project, expanding into a collaborative network spanning the globe. The website archive is now hosted by the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology (MPIGEA) while the network continues its activities via a decentralized, self-organized approach as the Anthropocene Commons.

Anthropocene Curriculum. Genealogy 

What is the Anthropocene?

The Anthropocene denotes a proposed geological epoch in which the impact of human activities on the Earth system as a whole has become distinctly visible. Humans have now become a dominant and disruptive factor for the future fate of Earth history, making essential domains such as the biosphere (life), the atmosphere and the oceans (climate), or the cryosphere (ice) dependent on today’s collective action.

The idea of a human-led era has a longer history, however, it wasn’t until 2000 that the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen promoted the term “Anthropocene” in the face of ever-increasing signs that the Earth is no longer in the quasi-stable conditions of the Holocene—the last 11,700 years during which human civilization has thrived. Since 2009, the International Commission on Stratigraphy has tasked a multidisciplinary Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) with examining the geological reality and onset of the ensuing epoch. In an interim report in 2016, the AWG provided preliminary evidence that the world has indeed entered the Anthropocene; a systematic study was then launched to gather more material evidence in line with the requirements for defining a new Earth epoch. In November 2023, the AWG concluded their research and proposed a reference point in order to have the Anthropocene officially recognized as a new subdivision of the geologic time scale. 

Regardless of the formal process, the Anthropocene concept has already unleashed a wealth of scientific literature, artistic engagement, and public debate all around the world. At the core of these debates is recognition of the unevenly distributed power of human forces and a globalized “technosphere” causing the planet and its inhabitants to undergo a profound crisis while entering an interval that barely has an analogue in the billion-year history of life on Earth.

What is the AC approach?

The Anthropocene is a concept of contested terrain and therefore any approach to it must be adaptive, exploratory, and useful for everyday concerns in this new age. Appropriately enough, the term “curriculum”—in its original Latin referring to the course in a race—figures the type of pathway the AC has been concerned with. This course-making is not only about acquiring knowledge, it also cartographically implicates conceptual beacons with which to guide how one comes to know the planet, and, most importantly, the methods and strategies that enable all to thrive as we do so. The curriculum is therefore an attempt to form conceptual and sensory tools that hone and couple planetary-scale dynamics and local knowledge traditions. This entails giving shape to a “curriculum” in the complete sense of the word: running the circuits of epistemic and aesthetic loops that inform the way earthly creatures can survive, thrive, and collaborate in a knot of conflicting concerns, needs, and ways of life.

Situated learning has been at the core of the AC approach. Since 2013, through a series of intensive, weeklong educational events—Anthropocene Campuses—and a wider range of small-scale workshops, public programs, field trips, and exhibitions, a broad array of formats have been developed and experimented with over the years in different cities and regions across the world.

Each of these local iterations of the Anthropocene Curriculum idea have been independently organized and tailored to meet the local demands and concerns of each specific cultural, geographical, and institutional context. The individual projects and people have been linked through this open web platform, a common space that has facilitated exchange, shared experiences, practices, and results, and offered a participatory knowledge base for a global community of Anthropocene research and education. Following the conclusion of the project under the stewardship of HKW in 2022, the web archive is maintained by the MPIGEA, while the AC network continues under a new title: the Anthropocene Commons.

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