School of History, Classics & Archaeology

Munro Lecture - Professor Anna Tsing: 'What scale is the Anthropocene?'

This event has now passed, but you can watch a recording at the link below: 

Video: HCA Munro Lecture - Professor Anna Tsing
2021 Munro Lecture by Professor Tsing, part of the Munro Lecture series.

 

Too often, we accept the “planetary” nature of climate change, the extinction crisis, and other elements of the Anthropocene as settled; we imagine the role of anthropologists as checking out local interpretations and effects of these planetary phenomena. Yet take a page from the ontological turn: what if local situations are constitutively different? This talk argues that the Anthropocene is patchy and particular as well as planetary, and that the job of anthropologists is to better describe those patches, at multiple scales. Analysis of patches shows us social formations and ecologies that may disrupt our sense of the whole; patches matter in how we address environmental catastrophe. Using the project Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene, this talk explores how to work across spatial, temporal, and positional differences in the formation of Anthropocene patches.

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The event is free, but ticketed. Please reserve tickets at the Eventbrite link. Open to all and will be followed by a reception.

Professor Anna Tsing

Currently Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (1952) is an internationally renowned anthropologist. In addition to over forty articles, Prof Tsing is the author of several award-winning books, including In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (1994) and Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005). In 2010, Prof Tsing received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her project On the Circulation of Species: The Persistence of Diversity, an “ethnography of matsutake,” a mushroom highly prized by the Japanese. Her most recent, multiple award-winning book,The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), traces the commodity chain of the matsutake. In 2013, Prof Tsing was awarded a five-year Niels Bohr Professorship at Aarhus University in Denmark to establish a transdisciplinary program encompassing the humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and the arts in an exploration of what has been called the "Anthropocene", i.e. the geologic epoch defined by human disturbance of the earth’s ecosystems.

 

More on the Munro Lectures

May 20 2021 -

Munro Lecture - Professor Anna Tsing: 'What scale is the Anthropocene?'

Professor Professor Anna Tsing will deliver the Munro Lecture, 'What scale is the Anthropocene?'.