What kind of sign is a marker? Jürgen Renn and Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson sketch the dual role of markers as traces in the strata and symptoms of a destabilized Earth System—an interface between natural archives and human societies.

Assessing the effects of artificial radioactivity on human bodies and natural environments has a special place in the history of risk regulation, and has provided a key basis for understanding and defining the anthropogenic danger to life on Earth.

Literary scholar Eva Horn unpacks air as an environing medium that has always entangled human life and the environment in very specific ways.

Christoph Rosol sketches out the marriage of paleoceanography with isotope chemistry in the middle of the twentieth century, part of a synchronism between the onset of the Anthropocene and the emergence of the technical means of understanding it.

Which connotations does the Anthropocene concept carry? What does it hide and obscure? An input on the conceptual implications of the Anthropocene term by Bruce Braun

Over the course of eighty days, this canoe expedition offers an immersive research program on and along the Mississippi River.

The Anthropocene River Campus: The Human Delta synthesized the downstream Mississippi within a week-long field research and educational event at Tulane University, as well as sites in and around New Orleans.

Mississippi. An Anthropocene River aims to make the Mississippi River Basin legible as a zone of ecological, historical, and social interaction between humans and the environment using novel forms of exchange, research, collaboration, and pedagogy.

The German publication Technosphäre collects contributions thinking through the conditions and evolution of this new Earth system player. Included here are two selections from the book in English translation: the editorial introduction and a conversation between Peter K. Haff and Jürgen Renn.

An examination of the multifaceted endeavor of making sense of the Anthropocene

In this closing discussion, Akeel Bilgrami and Bernd Scherer debate their mutual arguments and, together with the audience, weigh in on the presented lectures.

Bernd Scherer discusses how technology shapes human society, calling attention to how algorithmic software modifies our view of the world.

This lecture presents a framework for centering the natural world in the writing of history, arguing that without nature historians cannot understand time.

John McNeill reflects upon the role of historians in the work of the Anthropocene Working Group and the implications for historians of the debates surrounding the Anthropocene.

The interlacing between knowledge and the technosphere has a very subtle yet decisive dimension: the collectively ingrained practices and routines that are the preconditions for adequately responding to the non-human dynamics of a world in transition. What are the regimes of sense training, ascetic modes of inquiry, and techniques of mental cultivation that let us learn and understand something? What might be needed to reshape and modify these in light of the predicament of the Anthropocene?

The blurring of distinctions between Earth processes and human history requires us to be “transdisciplinary” and sometimes even “undisciplinary” – in order to combine the knowledge base and research capacities of a wide variety of stakeholders.

The Anthropocene compels us to re-think our modes of knowledge production. A statement on the necessity for radically interdisciplinary modes of research.

A reflection on the epistemological experiments and contributions that emerged out of the seminar on Disciplinarities.