Conversations on a multispecies approach to pandemics, the Anthropocene concept, and the visualization of knowledge.

The Cosmic Conversations project brings together researchers from across disciplines to discuss ecological, artistic, political, and philosophical issues related to Anthropocene research.

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.

Knowledge of the onset of the Anthropocene is intimately connected to nuclear technoscience on the one hand and to the governance of environmental problems, such as atmospheric pollution, on the other.

In search for the normative elements of technofossil classification, Anna Echterhölter reflects on this history of mineral classification in the European tradition and the thick classification of Pacific totemism.

Media scholar Adam Wickberg outlines ​​how knowledge about the environment and media technologies ​have always ​evolve​d​ in tandem​; the history of anthropogenic markers can therefore be understood as a process of environing media.

How do tropes and images of a changing ocean operate in a larger system of cultural sensemaking? Killian Quigley collects a range of threads to map the disfiguration and deformation of an anthropocenic biosphere that swells below the sea’s surface.

Geographer and writer Adam Bobbette describes the reciprocal and porous relationship between society and geology in early twentieth-century Java, and Julia Adeney Thomas argues that the novelty of the Anthropocene lies in the shift from local geology to the chronicling of the Earth system

Christoph Rosol reflects on the disturbing schism between geoscientific insights and the info-capitalist modus operandi diluting these insights to mere noise. Are we ready to comprehend what the Earth has already recorded?

Seminar moderators Nishant Shah and Felipe Castelblanco reflect on how communicating in the Anthropocene entails making sense of an intellectual and sensorial force.

Brian Holmes contemplates how our natural surroundings are suffused with the aftermath of colonial trauma and racial exploitation.

Parallax Lisboa is an initiative that experiments with novel ways of knowing and teaching in the Anthropocene. Spanning across a broad range of disciplines, the initiative seeks to make the interdependence of anthropocenic processes sense-able.

How does the Anthropocene inform practices of knowledge production? A conceptual treatment of the guiding questions of the project launch of Mississippi. An Anthropocene River. 

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

This text is excerpted from an ongoing project looking at the relationship between Blackness and the Mississippi River.

What can the mounds of North America—from temples to landfills—tell us about the history of settlement and the anthropogenic condition we inhabit today?

Opening words to the symposium and the Anthropocene River project.

What modes of collecting, representing, and knowing are appropriate to meet the conceptual and practical challenges of the Anthropocene? Which narrative forms and styles can help us to document states of flux and transformation, across multiple scales of space and time?

Focusing on the limits—and opportunities—exhaustion engenders, in this seminar the difficulties of being out of energy and out of ideas will be related to the challenges posed by the Anthropocene.

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.

A home-built device travels downstream to explore the limits of digital representation and the possibilities of uncertain knowledge.

A sculptural comment on our apathetic frivolity in the face of climate catastrophe. 

Significant and Insignificant Mounds looks to read two landscapes across one another in order to complicate our understandings of authenticity, meaning, and form.

In the St. Louis region, memories and meanings of millennia of settlement collide. Anthropocene Vernacular investigates how everyday culture has been cultivated in the midst of social, environmental, economic crises.

“The Elemental” served as the analytical focal point of the ACM18. But how does the ACM18’s commitment to questions of matter shape and affect processes of knowledge production and reproduction?

At the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne (ACM18), participants engaged in a range of lectures, field trips, and workshops in Melbourne and the wider area exploring the theme of “the Elemental”.

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

A reflection on the ideological underpinnings and modes of thought that have enabled the Anthropocene.

How can the concept of “the Elemental” inform the ways in which we speak about the Anthropocene?

Recapitulation of the ACM18 with Andrea Ballestero (Rice University), Nicholas Shapiro (University of Toronto/UCLA), Aadita Chaudhury (York University), and Juan Francisco Salazar (Western Sydney University), hosted by Manuel Tironi (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile).

How can the debate on the environmental crisis be re-politicized? Akeel Bilgrami argues in favor of anti-capitalist, radically cooperative perspectives.

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

Is the Anthropocene soluble in ontological pluralism?

A collaborative campus hosted by Drexel University, Philadelphia, from Oct 22–26, 2017.

How have ideas of equity, security and inclusion become central to scholarship of the Anthropocene?

The historians’ task in the age of the Anthropocene: Finding hope in Japan?

Conceptual, material, and immaterial cultural forms through which environmental knowledge has been recognized, organized, activated, and transmitted in Japan.

Becoming an embodied researcher requires training.

With a critical eye to what aesthetics in/of/through the Anthropocene might mean, we will engage with ways that established forms of perceiving might be transformed in the broadest sense—toward new sensitivities of the long now, and the emergent technosphere that conditions our understanding of it.

In order to rearrange our mental landscapes, we must learn not to pull on one end of the thread, but to engage the knot as a whole. Instructions for a complex relationship role-play.

Hurry, there are limited seats! Exploring social stratification and the limits of cooperation with the help of peanuts and musical chairs.

Is a different technosphere possible? Exploring this concept from the perpsective of the Aerocene: a nascent, collaborative, speculative vision of the future.

A poetic reflection on co-evolutions towards the Holocene Museum.

For the Kogi in northern Colombia, talk of the Anthropocene and the technosphere it not news. For centuries, they have been living in a hyperdimensional ecology that needs constant maintenance to avoid apocalypse for the entire planet.

When the ticker was replaced by the monitor. A lecture on the information architecture of the global financial market.

The Anthropocene presents us with a unique set of epistemological challenges. From this vantage point, convener Bronislaw Szerszynski reflects on the discussions and activities of this seminar.

The history of forestry management in Germany shows how economic and scientific practices merged to represent the perfect order of nature and state.

The Anthropocene remains peculiarly flat and colorless when it comes to concrete images, which are lacking cultural nuance and historical depth. New imaginaries and imaginations are needed to engage with alternative futures of infrastructure and anthropogenically altered landscapes.

Applying transdisciplinary systems models to problems such as climate change or global food supply gives us useful heuristics, while forcing us to think about complexity and witness nonlinear and counterintuitive outcomes.

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.

A cartographic exercise that broaches a conceptual framework for thinking about possibilities of inclusion under the umbrella of Slow Media.