(Guest Lecture) Parker Krieg, "Conjunctures of the Anthropocene: From the Plantation to Post-Fordism", February 26, 2020
Conjunctures of the Anthropocene: From the Plantation to Post-Fordism
Parker Krieg
Environmental Humanities Fellow
Faculty of Arts &
Helsinki Institute for Sustainability Science University of Helsinki
With rapid speed, the concept of the Anthropocene has traveled from scientific to popular discourse and back. It has given a name to an era that many have struggled to define. Is it a new grand narrative? A more intensive regime of global capitalism? A new task in the unfinished project of modernity? This talk will introduce the Anthropocene as a conjunctural concept, one that ties scientific, social, and cultural practices together in new ways to recontextualize the geographic and cultural histories of the present. As these different disciplinary fields redefine themselves by way of the Anthropocene, it falls to the humanities and social sciences to explore the uneven development of the human (the anthropos) at the heart of it. The struggle over this figure will define the struggle over the economic, technological, and ecological future of planetary development.
February 26, 2020, 2pm, room B1, Campus Luigi Einaudi