The Anthropology of the Anthropocene: Borders and Boundaries of the Anthropos

Date: Friday 23 February 2024
Time: 13:00 - 17:30 hour
Address: Pieter de la Court
Wassenaarseweg 52
2333 AK Leiden
Room: 1A15

This masterclass is part of the course Contemporary Anthropology of the Netherlands School of Anthropology. Each masterclass takes 3-4 hours and offers a combination of a lecture and a seminar.

The NESA masterclasses are for all Cultural Anthropology PhD students from Utrecht University, University of Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Radboud University and Leiden University.

Registration is mandatory.

About the masterclass

In the first part of this master class on the Anthropology of the Anthropocene the concept Anthropocene will be discussed as well as the critique on the term and alternatives to talk about this time of environmental crises. We will further ask who the Anthropos is, linking the concept to debates about diversity and inequality, the field of political ecology and ontology. We will discuss how we can take debates about the Anthropocene to include impacts on and of ‘more-than- humans’, and delve into the field of multi-species ethnography.

In the second part of the master class we will ask participants to reflect on the relevance of these debates for their own research projects. This can be linked directly to the concept of the Anthropocene, or the way in which we connect global environmental change to those other central debates in anthropology. We will ask each of you to present your ideas in a 5-minute pitch (you are welcome to be creative and use any means for your presentation).

Preparation

Please read the following texts:

Davis, H., & Todd, Z. (2017). On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene1. ACME: An international journal for critical geographies, 16(4), 761-780.
Mathews, A. S. (2020). Anthropology and the Anthropocene: criticisms, experiments, and collaborations. Annual Review of Anthropology, 49, 67-82.
Tsing, A. L., Mathews, A. S., & Bubandt, N. (2019). Patchy Anthropocene: landscape structure, multispecies history, and the retooling of anthropology: an introduction to supplement 20. Current Anthropology, 60(S20), S186-S197.
Optional (blog): https://aeon.co/essays/if-we-talk-about-hurting-our-planet-who-exactly-is-the-we

Please prepare the following assignment:

a. Select an article you think is relevant to the masterclass and which connects the topics of the masterclass to your own research project.

b. Prepare a 5-minute pitch on the relevance of the masterclass to your research project (3 slides maximum, but please note that you are not obliged to use slides).

Drinks

After the masterclass there will be drinks in the common room of the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, and a possibility to continue the discussion and to connect with your peers.

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