Welcome to the Anthropocene: Agency in the Era of Climate Change

Introduction

Introduction

In 2008, a proposal was presented to the International Commission on Stratigraphy to officially recognize a new geological era defined by the planetary scale of human activity: the Anthropocene. While the Commission has yet to decide on whether to formally adopt the term, the Anthropocene serves as a rich, if problematic, concept with which to designate what is utterly unique about our current conditions. It isn’t simply that human action has impacted the Earth; it is that humans have impacted the Earth to the point of altering its biogeochemical profile. Human agency, in other words, has become geological agency.

This, however, is also the era in which we are experiencing drastically changing environmental conditions that are beginning to impinge on our way of life. From rising atmospheric temperatures to mass species extinctions, the Earth no longer seems able to sustain the agricultural, energy, and capital networks that humanity has built to drive itself.

The concept of the Anthropocene thus figures human beings as the agent of a grand planetary drama at the same time as it stymies our ability to act. It challenges the dominant perception of human beings as separate and superior to nature, raising many philosophical and political questions of what it means to be human in our current environmental conditions. As Dispesh Chakrabarty puts it, “to call human beings geological agents is to scale up our imagination of the human.” How might the intertwining of the human with the geological challenge traditional assumptions about human ethics, responsibility, power, and capacities for meaning-making?

Engaging with the growing scholarship within the humanities and social sciences on these questions, this module examines how the acknowledgement of humans as geological agents might change the ways in which we think of and realize our agency. Does the planetary scale of our agency mean we are in total control? Does the dawn of the age of the Anthropos culminate in species narcissism? Or do our imbrications with the geological reveal our entanglements with all sorts of non-human agencies from the movement of carbon molecules to those of tectonic plates? Do they also reveal that the notion of ‘human agency’ is itself multiple, made up of differentials of power and exploitation? Further, since the Anthropocene is also the age of mass species extinctions and mounting environmental disasters, what does the realization of our geomorphic power mean in the midst of so much human and non-human death? What, this module ultimately asks, does a warming, liquefying, and dying world reveal about the realities and limits of human agency?

Learning Outcomes

  • Gain insight and familiarity with some of the philosophical and political dimensions of climate change
  • Gain critical understanding of the key dimensions of the Anthropocene concept
  • Identify and pursue connections between “theory” and “event”
  • Apply the writing and analytical skills learnt in academia to public discourses and spaces of debate

Schedule

Weekly Schedule (readings subject to change)

Section I: Anthropo-WHAT?

Week 1 –The Anthropocene Narrative I

  • Steffen, et. al. 2011, ‘The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Science, vol. 369, pp. 842-867.
  • Steffen, et. al 2011, ‘The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship’, Ambio, vol. 40, pp. 739-761.

Week 2: – The Anthropocene Narrative II

  • Crist, E 2016, ‘Poverty of our Nomenclature’ in Moore J.W. ed, Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, PM Press, Oakland, pp. 14-33
  • Baskin, J 2015, ‘Paradigm Dressed as Epoch’, Environmental Values, vol. 24, pp. 9-29
  • Hamilton C et. al. 2015 ‘Thinking the Anthropocene’ in Hamilton C. et. al. eds, The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis, Routledge, Oxon, pp.1-14

Week 3 – Resituating the Anthropocene Narrative

  • Chakarbarty, D 2009, ‘The Climate for History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 197-222
  • Yusoff, K 2013, ‘Geologic life: prehistory, climate, futures in the Anthropocene, Environment and Planning D, vol. 31, pp. 779-795

 

Section II: Anthropo-WHO?

Week 4 – Agency in the Anthropocene

  • Gabrielson, T 2016, ‘Bodies, Environments, and Agency’ in Gabrielson T. et. al. eds, The Oxford Handbook of Environment Political Theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 399-412
  • Bennett, J 2010 ‘The Force of Things’ in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, Durham, pp.1-19.
  • Latour, B 2014 ‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene’, New Literary History, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 1-18

Week 5 – A Relational view of agency: ‘Agency as Assemblage’

  • Bennett, J 2010 ‘The Agency of Assemblages’ in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, Durham, pp.20-38.
  • Ellsworth, E and Kruse, J 2013 ‘Introduction (sections 1 & 3 only)’ & ‘Power of Configuration: When Infrastructure Goes off the Rails” in Making the Geologic Now, Available:http://www.geologicnow.com/index.php

Week 6 ­­– Human-non-human assemblages I

  • Haraway, D 2008, ‘When Species Meet: Introductions’ in When Species Meet, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 3-44
  • Lorimer, J 2010, ‘Elephants as companion species: the lively biogeographies of Asian elephant conservation in Sri Lanka’, Trans Inst Br Geogr, vol. 35, pp. 491-506.

Recess Week

Week 7: Human-non-human assemblages II (mourning and extinction)

  • Butler, J 2004 ‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’ (excerpt), Precarious Life: The Powers for Mourning and Violence, Verso, New York, pp. 19-32
  • Stanescu, J 2012 ‘Species Trouble: Judith Butler, Mourning, and the Precarious Lives of Animals’, Hypatia, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 567-582
  • Van Dooren, T 2014 ‘Mourning Crows: Grief in a Shared World’, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction, Columbia University Press, New York, pp. 125-144

Week 8: Human-non-human assemblages III (Capitalocene)

  • Moore, J 2015, ‘The Rise of Cheap Nature’ in in Moore J.W. ed, Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, PM Press, Oakland, pp. 78-115
  • Tsing, A 2015 The Mushroom at the End of the World (excerpts tba)

Week 9: Radical Agency I

  • Clark, N 2011 ‘Ways to Make a World: From Relational Materiality to Radical Agency’, Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet, Sage Publications, London, pp. 27-54
  • Clark, N 2010, ‘Ex-orbitant generosity: gifts of love in a cold cosmos’, Parallax, vol. 16, 80-95.

Week 10: Radical Agency II

  • Morton, T 2013, ‘A Quake in Being’ & ‘The End of the World’ in Hyperobjects, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 1-26, 99-133

 

Section III: Anthropo-How

Week 11: Agency in the Apocalypse

  • Swyngedouw, E 2010, ‘Apocalypse Forever?: Post-political Populism and the Specter of Climate Change’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 27, pp. 213-232
  • Grove, J 2015, ‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Everything: The Anthropocene or Peak Humanity?’, Theory & Event, vol. 18

Week 12: Possibilities of a new environmentalism

  • Bennett, J J 2010 ‘Political Ecologies’ & ‘Vitality and Self-Interest’ in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, Durham, pp. 94-122.
  • Schlosberg, D and Coles, R 2015 ‘The new environmentalism of everyday life: Sustainability, material flows and movements’, Contemporary Political Theory, advanced online publication

Week 13: Debating the ‘Good Anthropocene’ (Research essay discussion)

Assignments

  • Reflection Essay (10%)
    The aim of this assignment is to get students personally engaged with the ideas and arguments raised in this module by asking them to:
    • At the end of Week 1, write an essay (it can be as long or short as you like) on what the Anthropocene and climate change more generally means to you
    • In Week 13, return to what you wrote in Week 1 and critically reflect on whether your assessments have changed
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  • Blog (4 posts; 15% each)
    The aims of this assignment are to first, get students to make connections between the theories and arguments discussed in class and realities of climate change and second, get them to do so in non-academic spaces and modes. I will be creating a blog for the class of which students will be members. They will be required to post 4 entries, 2 of each of the following type:
    • The Connected Writing Post
      Everyday news reports, commentaries, and discussions on climate change are circulated on the Web, people are talking about climate change! This assignment asks you to join in on the conversations by blogging to a community of peers who are interested in climate change. In this regard, many bloggers serve as “intelligent filters” for their publics by selecting, contextualizing, and presenting links of particular interest for that public. In this context, a “public” differs from an “audience” because you, in your role as a blogger, are writing to a community who not only read but actively respond to what you write by joining you in discussion.Post a link to any site on the Web—a blog post, a mainstream news item, an op-ed piece, an online community or marketplace, audio or video content—related to climate change. Explain the source of the link, why you think the link is interesting, and how it relates to the issues/readings discussed in class. Note that it is necessary to bring to bear at least one reading discussed in class thus far to your commentary on the link. Frame your commentary in ways that provoke a response. I don’t mean be “provocative” but present your link as an invitation for further discussion.
    • The Annotated Link Post
      One of the defining ways in which blog writing differs from academic writing is that one writes for and with a community, connecting ideas as the conversation progresses.Choose a fellow blog member’s Annotated Link post you wish to engage with. In engaging with it, introduce another link to any site on the Web (again, a blog post, news item, op-ed piece, etc.) related to climate change. Make clear the connections you see between these two links. This “connection” can be affirmative or critical or anything in between; the point is that you are adding to the conversation and moving it forward. In making this connection, you can either continue with your classmate’s engagement with the reading used in the Annotated Post or you can use another reading to further the conversation.
      •  

    Each post should be about 500-700 words in length with the first set of Annotated Link Post and Connected Writing Post due in week 5 and the second set in week 9.

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  • Research Paper (30%)
    The purpose of this assignment is more traditional. Students will, using the theories and arguments introduced in the module, examine An Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015) in order to (i) identify the image of agency assumed in the Manifesto and (ii) make an argument for what might be problematic and/or missed with such an image.
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