This thesis explores in what way the organisation IHOPE discuss the concept of Anthropocene in text. The texts analysed are based on a selection from publications on IHOPE’s webpage that encompass the word ‘Anthropocene’. The thesis further discusses the role of archaeology in the Anthropocene debate and glances at the agency theory in a discussion of the emergence of Anthropocene as defined as a new geological era. The thesis also discusses this definition and compares it to other alternative definitions as well as diving into the debate of the starting point of this proposed era. A short introduction is made of environmental determinism and its role in archaeology, and how that possibly relates to the background for the idea of Anthropocene. The texts analysed are presented through John Dryzek’s categories for discourse analysis on environmental issues in order to answer the research questions. / Studien utforskar hur organisationen IHOPE diskuterar konceptet Antropocen i sina texter. Texterna som analyseras baseras på ett urval av publikationer från IHOPE:s hemsida, specifikt de som använder ordet ‘Antropocen’. Studien diskuterar även rollen för arkeologi i debatten kring Antropocen och tittar på agensteori i en diskussion kring uppkomsten av Antropocen i dess definition som en geologisk period. Studien diskuterar även denna definition and jämför den med andra definitioner samt dyker in i debatten gällande när denna geologiska period anses ha börjat. En kort introduktion till miljödeterminism ges och dess roll inom arkeologi samt hur det kan relatera till bakgrunden för idén om Antropocen. Texterna som analyseras presenteras genom användningen av John Dryzeks kategorier som är utformade för diskursanalyser av miljörelaterade frågor. Metoden används för att söka besvara forskningsfrågorna.

This dissertation examines end-of-world and posthumanist themes in speculative fiction and theory through the concept of “world unmaking.” Reading for world unmaking in three popular U.S. works of speculative fiction — Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren (1974), Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014), and N. K. Jemisin’s the Broken Earth Trilogy (2015-17) — it explores how varying representations of “the end” are deployed to destabilize normative ideals of the human and the world that undergird conventional notions of the subject under late liberal humanism. While much attention has been paid to world building and how inherent logics cohere within fictional worlds, world unmaking asks how representations of world disorder, instability, and breakdown might hold important insights for narrating and navigating disordered worlds. Contemporary posthumanist critical theorists increasingly vie for speculative practices that disrupt the inherited onto-epistemologies of liberal humanisms and settler colonialisms. In particular, new materialists and speculative realists argue urgent work must be done to expand thought beyond naturalized and neutralized discourses that subtend conventional versions of reality, especially as the pressures of multiple ecological and geopolitical crises bear down unequally upon the lives of both humans and nonhumans on a shared planet Earth. The rise in popularity of post-apocalyptic, eco-catastrophe, and survival narratives in recent decades suggests a growing appetite for speculative imaginings of the end. While some representations of the end of the world serve as an escape from the intersecting crises of the environment, the resurgence of right-wing politics and white supremacy, and the ongoing violence of settler colonialism, this dissertation illustrates the importance of attending to speculative imaginings that use the end-of-the-world conceit to destabilize dominant culture and pose more expansive questions about what it means to be human. / Graduate / 2022-04-19

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[pt] O Antropoceno, signo de um tempo de profundas mutações e colapsos, o nosso tempo do mundo, tem assistido ao ressurgimento do uso abundante da palavra apocalipse. Este termo fundamental da escatologia ocidental, originariamente referido ao Apocalipse de João, último livro da Bíblia cristã, tem sido empregado – mesmo por acadêmicos e cientistas – com o sentido comum de grande e generalizada destruição, ou, se quisermos, fim do mundo. No contexto da civilização ocidental, no entanto, a influência da interpretação canônica do Livro do Apocalipse, consolidada pelos chamados Pais da Igreja na emergência da Era Comum, se constituiu também em um dos pilares de sustentação do regime de verdade, da noção de tempo e do sentido de História, que, justamente no Antropoceno, entram em crise agônica. Nesta tese, um estudo filosófico que considero preambular, propõe-se uma reflexão a partir de referências não normativas – logo, dissonantes – sobre a mensagem, as disputas e o conturbado processo de recepção do Livro do Apocalipse na cultura ocidental, que ele também contribuiu para definir. Recusando a adesão aos sistemas hermenêuticos que, como parte da escatologia secularizada na Modernidade, foram apropriados em termos políticos pela esquerda como utopia milenarista e, de forma cada vez mais perigosa, pela direita, como justificação para a violência cristã, a tese se propõe a apresentar uma leitura vinculada aos esforços contemporâneos do pensamento crítico, que contribua para convocar uma aliança imanente entre humanos e não humanos, que ajude a frear os fins de tantos mundos ameaçados pelo avanço insustentável das formas capitalistas de predação material e ontológica do planeta. / [en] The Anthropocene, sign of a time of survival and profound collapses, our time of the world, has witnessed the resurgence of the abundant use of the word apocalypse. This fundamental term of Western eschatology, originally referred to the Apocalypse of John, the last book of the Christian Bible, has been used – even by academics and scientists – with the common sense of great and generalized destruction, or, if you like, end of the world. In the context of Western civilization, however, the influence of the canonical interpretation of the Book of Revelation, consolidated by the so-called Fathers of the Church in the emergence of the Common Era, also constituted one of the pillars of support for the regime of truth, the notion of time and of the sense of History, which, precisely in the Anthropocene, are intertwined in an agonizing crisis. In this thesis, a philosophical study that I consider preambular, a reflection is proposed based on non-normative references – therefore, dissonant – on the message, the disputes and the troubled process of reception of the Book of Revelation in Western culture, which it also contributed to define. Refusing to adhere to the hermeneutical systems that, as part of secularized eschatology in Modernity, were appropriated in political terms by the left as a millenarian utopia and, in an increasingly dangerous way, by the right, as a justification for Christian violence, the thesis proposes to present a reading linked to contemporary efforts of critical thinking that contributes to convening an immanent alliance between humans and non-humans. An alliance that helps to curb the ends of so many worlds threatened by the unsustainable advance of capitalist forms of material and ontological predation of the planet.

This dissertation is an ecological philosophy rooted in dance as a somatic mode of knowing and as a way of perceiving the world through and as movement. It is phenomenological, drawing meaning from a dedicated practice of improvisational dance and from extensive dialogue with dance and somatics artist/philosopher Sondra Horton Fraleigh. This emergent knowledge is integrated into discourses and practices addressing the relationship of the human and more than human world in the context of a deepening environmental crisis in the 21st century. Employing both somatic and conceptual ways of knowing, I investigate dance as a tool for restoring a sense of ecological kinship with nonhuman co-habitants of planet Earth. The pretext for the dissertation is the emerging concept of the Anthropocene, a term introduced by Paul Crutzen in the early 2000s which defines human activity as the dominant geophysical force affecting the movements of the Earth system, including weather patterns and chemistries of soil, air and water. This concept, while subject to debate both in and out of the sciences, highlights the entanglement of humans and Earth and calls into question anthropocentric notions placing humans at the center of the universe of significance and meaning. In light of growing challenges associated with the Anthropocene, including climate change and mass extinction, the dissertation makes a case for greater inclusion of ecological and environmental contexts in dance studies scholarship as an epistemological move towards increasing reciprocity with Earth. I argue that environmental crisis, while daunting, presents an opportunity for radical creativity in re-thinking the interconnected movements of human bodies and planet Earth. In summer 2015, I conducted a one-month, fieldwork-based interview with Fraleigh, which included verbal dialog, dancing, and exploration of the landscape of southern Utah, where she lives following retirement from university teaching. Fraleigh, whom I had known personally and professionally for twelve years since studying with her as an MFA student in the early 2000s, is a dance artist, philosopher and somatic educator widely known within and outside the academic dance community for her writing and teaching in phenomenology, dance aesthetics, somatics, and butoh. Her decades of inquiry into the nature and meaning of dance and human embodiment have consistently included questions about the relationship of humans and nature, and she has argued that humans are ecological as well as cultural beings. Through collaborative somatic and intellectual processes, we extended questions we shared about the relationship of humans with Earth through its contextualization within the emerging paradigm of the geologic Age of Humans. The dissertation is organized into two parts. Part One describes the onto-epistemological context for the fieldwork I conducted in Utah and includes background literature on the subjects of body, perception, matter and environmental ethics, followed by an explanation of the research methodologies I employed. Part Two is a phenomenological account of the fieldwork, which spirals between thick description of specific experiences and theoretical reflections on emergent meanings. Through this format, I integrate somatic and conceptual ways of knowing and illuminate dance as a mode of meaning making and response to geologic transformations taking place on Earth. By engaging dance as a tool for thinking about and with the Anthropocene, I aim to promote more scholarly inquiry into ways that dance can and does transform, heal, revitalize and aestheticize human-Earth relations in the context of a planet in crisis. / Dance

Yes / Global water security presents a complex problem for human societies and will become more acute as the impacts of climate change escalate. Water security connects the practical water and sanitation challenges of households to the dynamics of global hydroclimates and ecosystems in the Anthropocene. To ensure the successful deployment of attention and resources, it is necessary to identify the most pressing questions for water research. Here, we present the results of a scoping exercise conducted across the global water sector. More than 400 respondents submitted an excess of 4,000 potential questions. Drawing on expert analysis, we highlight 100 indicative research questions across six thematic domains: water and sanitation for human settlements; water and sanitation safety risk management; water security and scarcity; hydroclimate-ecosystem-Anthropocene dynamics; multi-level governance; and knowledge production. These questions offer an interdisciplinary and multi-scalar framework for guiding the nature and space of water research for the coming decades.

This essay explores the dynamic landscape of Anthropocene fiction, using novels such as John Lanchester’s The Wall and Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City as lenses through which to explore the aftermath of climate change. Both narratives tackle the question: what unfolds in the wake of environmental disaster? Focused on the consequences of flooding, these novels depict worlds grappling with diminishing resources and an acute scarcity of habitable land, intensifying the challenges of overpopulation. In response, the remaining governments resort to authoritarian measures, fostering oppression and control. This exploration unfolds through the lens of four primary Anthropocene themes: climate change, overpopulation, authoritarianism, and rebellion. By examining how these novels navigate these themes, the essay contributes to the emerging field of Anthropocene fiction. Moreover, it highlights the urgent need for addressing climate change while underscoring the social justice implications embedded in these narratives. John Lanchester’s The Wall and Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City serve as vital contributors to this literary landscape, shedding light on the intricate interplay between humanity and the environment in the face of Anthropocene challenges.

The Arctic—warming at twice the rate of the rest of the planet—is a source of striking imagery of amplified environmental change in our time, and has come to serve as a spatial setting for climate crisis discourse. The recent alterations in the Arctic environment have also been perceived by some observers as an opportunity to expand economic exploitation. Heightened geopolitical interest in the region and its resources, contradicted by calls for the protection of fragile Far North ecosystems, has rendered the Arctic an arena for negotiating human interactions with nature, and for reflecting upon the planetary risks and possibilities associated with the advent and expansion of the Anthropocene—the proposed new epoch in Earth history in which humankind is said to have gained geological agency and become the dominant force over the Earth system. With the Arctic serving as a nexus of crosscutting analytical themes spanning contemporary history (the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century until 2015), this dissertation examines defining characteristics of the Anthropocene and how the concept, which emerged from the Earth system science community, impacts ideas and assumptions in historiography, social sciences and the environmental humanities, including the fields of environmental history, crisis management and security studies, political geography, and science and technology studies (STS). The primary areas of empirical analysis and theoretical investigation encompass constructivist perspectives and temporal conceptions of environmental and climate crisis; the role of science and expertise in performing politics and shaping social discourse; the geopolitical significance of telecoupling—a concept that reflects the interconnectedness of the Anthropocene and supports stakeholder claims across wide spatial scales; and implications of the recent transformation in humankind’s long duration relationship with the natural world. Several dissertation themes were observed in practice at the international science community of Ny-Ålesund on Svalbard, where global change is made visible through a concentration of scientific activity. Ny-Ålesund is furthermore a place of geopolitics, where extra-regional states attempt to enhance their legitimacy as Arctic stakeholders through the performance of scientific research undertakings, participation in governance institutions, and by establishing a physical presence in the Far North. This dissertation concludes that this small and remote community represents an Anthropocene node of global environmental change, Earth system science, emergent global governance, geopolitics, and stakeholder construction in an increasingly telecoupled world.