Fortun, Kim, Tim Schutz, Jason Ludwig, James Adams and Scott Knowles. 2019. Quotidian Anthropocenes Project. Disaster-STS Network. http://disaster-sts-network.org/content/quotidian-anthropocene/essay
The Open Seminar will direct collaborative attention to the many scales and types of systems that interlace and synergize to produce anthropocenics on the ground in particular locales and vernanculars. These questions will guide our engagements.
QUESTIONING QUOTIDIAN ANTHROPOCENES...Read moreComing Soon.
Throughout 2019, the Quotidian Anthropocene project was supported by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin for the 2018-19 Year of German-American Friendship. The Newkirk Center for Science and Society at the University of California Irvine also provides generous support.
The Quotidian Anthropocene project explores how the Anthropocene is playing out on the ground in different settings. The aim is to create both situated, place-based and comparative perspective, building new modes of collective knowledge and action.
Extending from Eli Elinoff and Tyson Vaughan’s conceptualization of the “quotidian Anthropocene” in work on environmental crises in urbanizing Asia, the project is designed to be global in scope while also fine-grained and local. The focus is on anthropocenics -- the dynamic interactions between scales (local to planetary) and systems (ecological, atmospheric, technological, economic, political, social, cultural and so on) -- that produce the Anthropocene at the local level.
The project is organized around a shared set of questions, addressed through a series of Field Campuses, an on-going Open Seminar and a lively archive project.
The Quotidian Anthropoene Project is designed in keeping with popular education and participatory research projects of the past, such as those run by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Highlander Research and Education Center, and Paulo Freire. The project is oriented by and continually works to update literacy goals for Anthropocene EcoEd.
Follow the instructions to become a collaborator in the research project.
A Critical Link for Communities in Crisis University of California Irvine Social Sciences News. April 2020.
Archiving for the Anthropocene: Notes from the Field Campus. Platypus. The CASTAC Blog. October 2019.
Tactics for Quotidian Anthropocenes. 4SBackhannels. August 2019.
Quotidian Anthropocenes (Part 1 – 4). Disaster STS YouTube Channel, July 2019.
Tactics for Quotidian Anthropocenes: A Field Campus Report. Anthropocene Curriculum, June 2019.
The QA Field Campus in Austin, Texas USA (originally scheduled for March 24-27, 2020) has been postponed because of the COVID-19 disaster. The campus focuses on efforts to fully transition the city's electrical grid to renewable energy.
The Quotidian Anthropocene Archive is created by project participants as they collect and analyze material about different places in ways that encourage comparision and movement between different scales and systems.
Participants in the Quotidian Anthropocene project are tracking numerous themes across sites, guided by people and frameworks focused on these themes (thus sharing thematic expertise across sites). Thus far, frameworks have been developed and shared to focus on land use, energy transition, envirnmental education and civic infrastructure.
Partnerships developed through the Quotidian Anthropocene project are sustained through collaborative development of civic archiving and research capacity supporting local work. See, for example, the digital collection and virtual tour, "Sugar Plantations, Chemical Plants, COVID-19." Also see the Formosa Plastics Archive.
Work on the Quotidian Anthropocene project extends into teaching through the Beyond Environmental Injustice teaching collective.
