A research project run by the KTH Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment from 2021-2025 exploring the global environment as emerging through environmental data.

What does it mean to live in a city already deemed “unsavable” and why is the contemporary art made in Miami that deals directly with climate change often so innocuous?

Publication of processes and projects that build on and continue from six case studies of the Mississippi. An Anthropocene River project by design students at the University of Applied Sciences, Potsdam.

What is the new geological epoch made of? Unearthing the Present connected the geological analysis of the present with a discussion of the changing scope for social and political agency.

What insights can artistic research data produce in the scientific analysis of the natural archive? Xandra van der Eijk addresses the value of artmaking with, through, and between the materiality of place in the sediment samples of Sydney Harbour.

Through the case of the nuclear accident at Palomares, Spain, historian of science Xavier Roqué shows the importance of local actants and scarce resources in registering and understanding Anthropocene-scale phenomena.

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.

Comparing the approaches to radioactive fallout in the US and USSR, Kate Brown retraces the ways in which radio biologists and ecologists assessed and contorted radioactive contamination to study the resilience of ecosystems and human bodies.

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.

Air pollution is currently the top environmental killer, but the fleeting nature of atmospheric pollution often keeps it from being observed through a global perspective and being included in the planetary cycles of the Anthropocene.

Venice’s critical environment is a paradigmatic case for comprehending socio-environmental history in dialogue with the Earth sciences.

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

How are the relationships between state, market, natural environments, and citizens understood? And how does this create or foreclose political and ethical agency?

How can archival production be a catalyst for urgently needed action? Researchers Jason Ludwig and Tim Schütz reflect on networks of solidarity via the Formosa Plastics Archive.

From opioids to the Anthropocene: a video project on addiction as the substantial mode of our existence

Artist Ellie Irons documents her travels to Natchez, Mississippi, to meet the American kudzu plant on the contested terrain it has colonized.

A brief history of New Orleans’ industrial canal and the risk to life posed by obsolete ideas in an era of planetary change.

The installation The Current presented field studies by artists, scholars, and activists who were involved in the AC project Mississippi. An Anthropocene River.

How can we move from the archive (as an institution) to archiving as a practice that sustains many lives (like oral history, dancing, singing, cooking)?

In the seminar, the practice of communication was explored as one in flux to address some of the underlying power structures that shape communicative practices.

By focusing on the embodied, the extended, and the environing qualities that sensing has, the seminar oriented around how perception can be habituated as well as unlearned.

With myriad different perspectives, tools and methods for describing the planet in transformation, how is it that consensus and verification can be established?

Two case studies focus on two very different landscapes, and attempt to account for the changing relationships that make them over time.

Space for studying Anthropocene-related changes can occur intentionally, through institutions and other projects, but it can just as easily occur by accident.

Some of the most interesting work on the Anthropocene takes place in between places, in between disciplines, and even in between the lines.

How do materials from different forms of research communicate with each other?

Histories can often be told through the changes in a landscape; about what has changed and come to form, but most of all, what is excluded altogether.

How can we build communities that share knowledge about climate issues, both locally and at the planetary-scale?

Artists discuss sturgeons pushed to the edge of extinction and the future of a chemically polluted river near Cape Town.

A dynamic virtual landscape served as a venue for The Shape of a Practice.

The week-long The Shape of a Practice event, which took place in October 2020, was a product of a diverse collection of case studies.

The Shape of a Practice constituted an experiment in negotiating the particularities of context, purpose, and method.

Taking Venice as a point of departure to collectively reflect on geo-environmental politics in the water city and beyond.

A River Journey reflection on power, the simultaneously planetary and molecular petrochemical industry, and the petrostate.

Architect and urbanist Nikos Katsikis describes the assemblage of “operational landscapes” that are tied to the Mississippi basin.

Lake Chad is a central feature in the livelihoods and economies of several countries. Local and regional pressures have always been a challenge, but the new stress of diminishing rainfall is deepening this challenge.

In addition to its position as a pillar of New Orleans cuisine, the humble oyster has also taken on another, more troubling role—serving as an indicator of water contamination in the Mississippi River Delta and the Lousiana Gulf.

An essay collection exploring the past and future infrastructural interventions into the Mississippi River.

A reflection by archaeologist and ethnobotanist Natalie G. Mueller on how sharing meal of long lost plants transformed her research perspective.

Findings of a project considering anthropogenic impact upon air quality along the Mississippi River, exploring shifts in pollution concentration patterns.

In this short film, Adrian Pochel, one of the lead organizers of the Chi-Nations Youth Council talks through the group’s work promoting Indigenous rights in the city of Chicago.

Damming as a means to achieve economic prosperity. A comparison with similar interventions around the world.

In keeping with many of the themes underpinning the Anthropocene River Campus, Eleonora Rohland explains how the question of adaptation so present post-Katrina has a much longer history in NOLA.

A welcome service laborer turned invasive pest in the Mississippi River, Asian Carp are subject to a variety of efforts to exert control upon their spread and attempts to extract them from the Illinois River.

The annual “All Species Puppet Parade” in Carbondale prompts Andrew Yang to contemplate just how all-encompassing the phrase really is.

Anthropologist Dominic Boyer and sociologist Mark Vardy describe the amphibious futurism that needs to prevail if Houston is to survive the twenty-first century.

Introduction to season 2 of the podcast. The field station finds itself stationed in Berlin, Germany where Abbéy Odunlami sits down with various interlocutors to understand what migration means to this section of the global north.

A conversation on how the object of the punkah fan speaks to histories of both subjugation and liberation, and how we might relate such narratives to contemporary climate injustice.

Cooperation Jackson is an emerging vehicle for sustainable community development, economic democracy, and community ownership. Listen to episode 5 now!

On the spatial politics of plantation economies and the connection between faith and environmentalism. Episode 4 available now!

Jared Richardson and Dr. Justin Hosbey grapple with neoliberalism’s effects on Black communities within New Orleans. Listen to episode 3 now!

Talk with Dr. Chelsea Frazier about the importance of Black feminism’s political and artistic engagements with environmentalism. Episode 2 available now!

Abbéy Odunlami and Jared Richardson introduce their individual research projects and discuss Field Station 5’s broader themes. Episode 1 available now!

How the “edible matter” of food as a leading agent in landscape change along the Mississippi River.

Punkahs brought climate control into the American South from early on, using enslaved peoples to laboriously fan plantation owners in the summer heat.

Ancient agricultural practices in the American Bottom were significant in the shaping of the landscapes and foodscapes that exist today.

The introduction of Kudzu into the American South has a storied history connecting rhetoric around migration and race with ecology.

What can the Mississippi River Valley teach us about how to read the planetary shifts of the Anthropocene through its local waterways and landscapes?

As an effect of human intervention, the former prairie of the Mississippi region has been turned into agricultural farmland. But what are the energy-based effects of land use changes?

The exploratory research project Technosphere 2015–2019 investigated the origins and future itineraries of technological agency in the Anthropocene.

How have early agricultural practices shaped and altered the environment of the Mississippi? This research project turns to the cultivation of maize to tackle this question.

What do the layers of river sedimentation reveal about the human impact on the Mississippi river system?

In what ways is the Anthropocene embodied in communities and everyday life? An introduction to the conflicting histories of Sauget, Illinois, formerly known as Monsanto Town.

In the context of the seminar “Anthropocene and the Media,” students of new media theorist John Kim have developed diverse approaches and perspectives of examining the Mississippi River in relation to the Anthropocene.

Listening to the stories and sounds that resonate around the Mississippi can show how ecosystems exist within multiple crisscrossing interrelations.

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 role of engineering river systems toward human aims and the consequences this has on multiple scales is the key concern of this seminar.

The articulation of risk assessment and management as being at the heart of environmental justice is the focus of this seminar, which explores the paired concepts of risk and equity through lived experiences.

This seminar engages the complicated entanglements of property claims that cut across the social, racial, and ecological landscapes of the Mississippi Delta, as they pertain to the Anthropocene.

This seminar brings concepts of time, layers, and sediment into close contact with the human sciences, the arts, and Pierre Part, a community who live according to the movements of the River.

The relations between extraction, synthesis, and exploitation, and the effects of commodity dependencies across scales are explored in this seminar, by mapping commodity flows and energy cycles in the Mississippi basin.

The Anthropocene River School integrates the work of the Anthropocene River Field Stations and transforms the research into an ongoing, collaborative teaching enterprise.

A narrative-based podcast that discusses how geography determines many people’s relationship to resources, land, and wellbeing.

The art initiative Laboratory for a Radical Suburbia explores human connections to both land and to the environmental impacts of capitalist cycles of extraction, production, and consumption on that land.

A multi-scale map of the Mississippi watershed around St. Louis for the “river rats” of the Anthropocene.

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

Corporate personhood has rearticulated how agricultural giant Monsanto operates legally on the landscape.

A multilayered project towards the de-regulation of nature.

The stretch of the Mississippi between Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa is marked both by its “natural” and “anthropogenic” origin.

What does it mean to become a responsible guest? This set of field guides and accompanying exercises offer an adaptable tool for the uninvited traveler.

A traveling seminar on the relations between settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and environmental concerns in the Upper Midwest territory.

Essays from members of the AWG and other researchers discussing some of the crucial aspects that make the Mississippi River an icon of global Anthropocene transformations.

Ryan Griffis’ pamphlet in the Deep Time Chicago series traces the networks, economies, and monochrome landscapes of US agribusiness.

Activist and artist Subhankar Banerjee and engineer Lois Epstein depict the threatening environmental impact of an extractivist technosphere.

How does the current notion of “spheres” infiltrate thinking about the bio-techno-sphere, which today seems the best descriptive model for our own habitat?

Political scientist Kim Rygiel investigates the difficult values that underlie the enforcement of who belongs in a political structure and who does not.

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

Life cannot be coded. With unexpected genetic deviations, matter bites back at the colonizing hand of man.

In the current design of large-scale infrastructural projects, the planetary future hinges on a new norm: perpetual prototyping and demoing.

Julian Henriques looks at the Jamaican reggae dancehall sound system to explore how this street technology has found creolizing ways to prevail in the neocolonial power struggle between popular culture and Jamaica’s ruling elite.

In this artistic formulation, Florian Goldmann makes popular risk indexes fungible, specifically their conflation of natural disaster with financial disaster.

Artist and photographer Axel Braun collects case studies on contentious infrastructure projects in order to trace humanity’s development as a geological force.

Deep Time Chicago’ pamphlets delve into the problems, paradoxes and potentials of human and non-human life in a rapidly destabilizing ecosystem.

Gerda Heck demonstrates how Pentecostal churches have become powerful infrastructural actors that hold together mobile communities between Africa and Europe.

Petrol generators are an essential part of the energy supply in Nigeria. Brian Larkin explores the consequences of these generators and their parasitical relationship to more formal infrastructures through the presence of noise and pollution.

An algorithmic intermediation between the next mega-earthquake and you: instructions for turning risk into facing up to your danger.

Measuring and calculating the twenty-first century. A collection of incidents.

What forms of futurity, speculation, and life do algorithmic intermediations produce? To explore this it seems expedient to focus on “smartness,” a term legitimating—as in the “smart home”—the increased introduction of computation in social life.

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

How is the Technosphere governed? And how could it be governed otherwise? One way to tackle these issues is by looking at cybernetic finance—showing how a complex system can be overtaken by an excess of self-reference.

If the technosphere is a condition of the Anthropocene, we ought to acknowledge the dangers of making technology seem “natural.” Critical discard studies can help us make visible the violence that has gone into making the technosphere.

How did the former Freshkills landfill in New York City, USA, transform into the wild, yet highly engineered landscape of the landfill mounds?

A case study on the consequences of the mining industry in one of the former biggest mining enclaves in southern Europe: the town Trapagaran in the Basque country, Spain.

The phenomenon of Arctic amplification enhances the effects of climate change in the northern latitudes, making the region a “barometer” for future environmental impacts elsewhere. A case study on the scientific community of Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, Norway.

A case study on field recordings of the “absence” of a large section of trees that had recently been removed from the site and installed in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, as part of the gallery’s current exhibition

Alongside the handbook, a pair of practical applications has been conceived to substantiate the “Valuing Nature” issue.

What images do we get if we try to go beyond aiming to depict the Anthropocene as a general phenomenon? How can we and our everyday practice be visualized?

Field work at the former VEB Elektrokohle Lichtenberg, a site characterized by industrial debris and self-made entrepreneurship

A geological map of Paris, layering the “human” with the “natural”.

How might we observe the Anthropocene in our local context? What, in other words, is the scenery of the Anthropocene?

Plastic is one of the most ubiquitous materials of the contemporary moment. How do we deal with its effects on the health of both humans and animals?

How can monstrous occurances help us to sense and imagine the sublime?

A reflection on how drilling and fracking technologies have transformed much of North Dakota and Montana.

A visual essay on the site of the former VEB Elektrokohle and the Dong Xuan Center Lichtenberg

Lake Chad, in the arid and semi-arid Sahel corridors of west Central Africa, represents one of Africa’s greatest life forces. The lake’s water-based, life-supporting services support an integrated small-scale economy made up of agricultural livelihoods, and provide a lifeline to over 30 million people in four countries (Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria).

A visual essay on the remains of VEB Elektrokohle after its demolition

Do extreme climate events affect people in equal measure? And how do environmental changes intertwine with pre-existing social inequalities?

How can we ge beyond a Romantic ideal of nature? A visual narration on representations of nature.

The low-lying Maldive Islands face the problem of too much water. Melting ice far away is slowly inundating their homeland, posing an existential threat.

Using the Maldives as our (anthropo)scene, we explore how a monolithic and simplistic “We” can be questioned and reframed. Picture Lake Chad as an island of water in the desert and the Maldives surrounded by the rising “blue.”

Plastic is a broad and rather deceptive name for a group of synthetic polymers that have become one of the most ubiquitous materials of the contem- porary moment. Composed of long chains of molecules, and derived from oil and natural gas, plastics are incredibly durable. They do not decompose and are predicted to last well beyond human biological time.

Unintended consequences and slippages in time—Ele Carpenter, Ayesha Hameed, Hanna Husberg, and Laura McLean discuss “The Free Sea”.

A case study exploring the religious life of the Vietnamese community in Versailles and Village de l’Est, New Orleans, USA

Why do botanical collections and collecting spaces come from, and how have they played (an ever changing) part in shaping the world and our shifting understandings of it?

A study on a particular ant, the Pheidole morrisi, across a wide latitudinal gradient

A series of case studies on anthropogenic landscapes