UCL Anthropocene
About
Founded in 2020, UCL Anthropocene(Opens in new window) works as a virtual school by assembling projects, people, courses, and events from across the social sciences, arts, humanities, life, environmental, and health sciences. We understand the Anthropocene as the historical complex of human interactions with other species and environments that are generating planetary transformations at multiple levels, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere, oceans, and living organisms.
Our understanding of the Anthropocene directs us to consider how social, political, economic and destructive environmental changes are fundamentally entangled. The Anthropocene is the name for a proposed geological epoch, but it also marks a series of emergencies and unpredictable events. Our work is motivated by the conviction that the Anthropocene’s most intractable problems arise from particular historical ways of being human.
Adapting to conditions on a damaged planet must involve cultural, societal, political and psychological invention, alongside the formulation of evidence-based environmental policies. In this context, UCL Anthropocene raises questions of environmental and social justice, of responsibility and meaning, together with the need to develop new technologies and governance mechanisms. We acknowledge the complementary insights that different disciplines bring, but question the academy’s usual division of labour between the social and natural sciences. We are specifically interested in the value of indigenous knowledge and non-scientific and artistic forms of practice.
Twitter: @AnthropoceneUCL(Opens in new window)
Projects
UCL Anthropocene hosts a large number of internationally collaborative research projects and continuous seminar series. This includes, for example, "Writers of the Anthropocene", a regular series of public events in which we invite speakers to discuss the Anthropocene through the lens of their writing and writing practices. Past speakers include Amitav Ghosh, Jessie Greengrass, Daisy Hildyard, Tom McCarthy, and Pola Oloixarac.
In July 2021, members of UCL Anthropocene organised four pre-COP26 events with scholars and activists, “Sustainability as Cultural Practice: Verbal and Visual Art, History and the Environmental Humanities”, which were hosted by the British School at Rome and the British Embassy in Italy, in collaboration with the Italian Ministry for Ecological Transition and Sapienza University Rome, and which saw the participation of ninety-four student delegates from twenty-four universities in twelve countries.
Partnerships
International partnership activity is structured around numerous ongoing research initiatives. For example, a recently launched partnership with Cornell University, led by Karen Pinkus and Florian Mussgnug, has been bringing together artists and researchers in the humanities, social, and life sciences. Activity on this project has included a workshop on ideas of carbon dioxide removal, "What to do with Carbon?", where participants were asked to present a brief proposal, image, object, model, poem, and so on. These could be anywhere on a spectrum from the imaginary to practical; from the preposterous to the mundane. In this regard, the workshop represents an opportunity for scholars from the Humanities, Arts, Geography and other fields to vet ideas and to consider the very role of the speculative in approaches to both climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Contact
Professor Florian Mussgnug, Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies (f.mussgnug@ucl.ac.uk)
Professional Service Contact: Ms Zoe Paskett (z.paskett@ucl.ac.uk)