The New Orleans Anthropocene Field Campus will develop tactics for interdisciplinary engagement with the Anthropocene at the local level. Throughout the Field Campus, we will use the concept of the Anthropocene to catalyze meaningful exchange not only among scholars but also with non-academic practitioners, activists, and artists. Participants will work closely with community partners and local experts who are striving to expose processes of environmental change and injustice within the Greater New Orleans Region.

A major goal of the New Orleans Anthropocene Field Campus is to investigate the history of labor in New Orleans in within the context of the Anthropocene: How was the environmental violence wrought on the land and riverscapes of the region by plantation agriculture and the petrochemical industry also registered in the bodies of slaves and workers? How do we record, measure, and archive these effects? And what can we learn from this history to contribute to broader strategies for recovery and healing, surviving and growing in the Anthropocene?

We will strive to place ourselves meaningfully and helpfully into local discussions concerning histories of environmental change as well as possible futures. Organizers will create venues for discussion that might not be possible otherwise, serving as a corps of researchers willing to work towards useful outcomes while training people in archiving, public data collecting and analysis, and ethnography.