Every crisis according to Rebecca Solnit “is in part a storytelling crisis. This is as true of climate chaos as anything else. We are hemmed in by stories that prevent us from seeing, or believing in, or acting on the possibilities for change.” Characterized by rapid change and radical uncertainty in biological, ecological, and climactic systems, the Anthropoceneis a new geological epoch in which humans are the dominant force in shaping earth systems dynamics (Crutzen and Steffen). The Anthropocene highlights how humans have reshaped and destabilized human and nonhuman relations across spatio-temporal scales. At the same time, it has been read as a hegemonic construct in postcolonial, indigenous, and racial contexts that flattens geopolitical and cultural differences, and glosses over the role of empire (historical and present) in the climate crisis. These dynamics present fundamental challenges to traditional disciplinary silos and their capacity to understand systems and take action. To tell the story of the Anthropocene better, so that it allows acting on the possibilities for change, this project brings together an interdisciplinary group of humanists, scientists, social scientists, and artists.
The planet is awry. We awakened oil from its ancient slumber to fuel our own fossil dreams. We combusted the deep time of the past—aeons of compressed ocean shells, ancient plants, and animal bones—into an alchemy of black energy and our fantasy of a forever fossil future. Now the ice sheets are vanishing faster than ever thought possible. Greenland is melting. The ice is leaving Iceland. Lightning torches the tundra, turning permafrost into permafire. Firestorms so vast they are visible from space rage across Amazonia, Australia, Siberia. In Harare, Zimbabwe, the taps run dry. Farmers watch mile-high dust storms rub out the sky. The great burnings of the trees, the vanishing of the bees, and everywhere the stealthy rising of the seas.
Anne McClintock, “Monster: A Fugue in Fire and Ice”
New interdisciplinary narratives about the Anthropocene are needed to engage the deep past and shared futures, human and non-human communities. What are, and how are, dominant narratives about the Anthropocene created? Which interdisciplinary practices and research agendas create better narratives for equitable futures? The Lab is piloting a survey of critical literature on the Anthropocene from multiple disciplines via cross-campus seminars entitled “Thinking the Earth.” This seminar series will also host key national and international thinkers on the subject.
In addition, keeping in mind that the Anthropocene can be understood as “patchy,” the team will collaborate to document the pedadogical and intellectual effects of, and responses to, Anthropocene discourse. (Tsing et al).
The Lab will also host artists to help visualize a more just Anthropocene to pioneer pliable research strategies and practices that bring together questions of sustainability and social justice in relation to the climate crisis.
To enter to the Anthropocene is to enter a period of “shocked space and torn time,” writes Anne McClintock. She asks, “How do we write a history of fragments? How do we record a history of forgetting?” Keeping these questions are the center of deliberations, the Anthropocene Lab, is an attempt at interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary conceptualizations, negotiations, and articulations that the contemporary epoch demands.