Critical Anthropocenes: Cultures, Transitions, Ecologies
This cross-disciplinary group, encompassing researchers from the humanities and sciences, focuses on exploring and critiquing traditions of thought about the natural environment in a broad range of socio-historical contexts in order to deepen understanding of the urgent ecological issues facing the earth and its inhabitants today. We are leading experts in ecocritical and ecofeminist theories, the ethical traditions of ancient and modern philosophies, critical toponymy, language endangerment, petrocultures, and the energy humanities. We bring these diverse approaches into conversation to enquire into narratives of nature and the human, to uncover the long history of human transformations of the natural world, and to lay bare the ideologies that underwrite extractivism and exploitation. At the same time, we aim to challenge the simplicities of the culture / nature divide by restoring agency to non-human actors and marginalised others and by emphasising the ‘natural’ in the ‘human’ and the sociocultural forces shaping the more-than-human. We seek to combine the urgency of a decisive geopolitical context with a cultural legacy of haunted ‘pastoral’ imaginings.