Anthropocene Transitions
The University of Sydney, 12-15 December 2016
Today human activities are changing geophysical processes on a planetary scale, prompting atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and ecologist Eugene Stoermer to propose a new epoch starting in the eighteenth century when humankind began to remodel the planet’s ecosystems with the chemical revolution and invention of the coal-fired steam engine, the emergence of industrialised societies and modern forms of capitalism.
The idea of Anthropocene goes to the heart of anthropological enquiry. It pushes practitioners to rethink fundamental boundaries, values and suppositions, including expectations of the perpetuity of homo sapiens and the prospect of extinction. It lends urgency to the task of widely communicating our knowledge about the limits and potentials of human adaptive capacities.
This conference calls on anthropologists to bring our skills, knowledge and wisdom to bear on a fleeting and fragile moment in the human career, when the species condition of Anthropos intersects with the transitional epoch of the Anthropocene.
The conference program is available here: Anthropocene Transitions
Keynote Speakers
Investigating the ‘complexity of change’ and ‘adaptive challenges’ of the Anthropocene: Anthropology, interdisciplinarity, and methodology
Professor Susan Crate, Department of Environmental Science and Policy, George Mason University
December 13, 2016
Susan A. Crate is a Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at George Mason University. An environmental and cognitive anthropologist, she has worked with indigenous communities in Siberia since 1988. Her recent research has focused on understanding local perceptions and adaptations of Viliui Sakha communities in the face of unprecedented climate change—a research agenda that has expanded to Canada, Peru, Wales, Kiribati, Mongolia and the Chesapeake Bay. She is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and one monograph, Cows, Kin, and Globalization: An Ethnography of Sustainability (AltaMira Press 2006), and she is coeditor of Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions (Left Coast Press, Inc. 2009), with its second volume, Anthropology and Climate Change: From Actions to Transformations published in 2016 (Routledge). She also served on the American Anthropology Association’s Task Force on Climate Change.
Beyond the Anthropocene and back to environmental justice: Anthropogenic impact in the Pacific Islands
Professor Aletta Biersack, Department of Anthropology, The University of Oregon
December 14, 2016
Aletta Biersack is Professor Emerita of cultural anthropology at the University of Oregon, USA. She has conducted long-term research among the Ipili speakers of the Porgera and Paiela valleys and has published on their gender system, cosmology and Christianity, social organisation, mythology and ritual, history, and experiences with gold mining. She has also written theoretical papers on historical anthropology, political ecology, masculinities, and the international human rights system and its effects on several Pacific Island postcolonial states. Her present research focuses on gender and change among Ipili speakers in the context of the Porgera and Mt. Kare gold mines. She is editor or co-editor of Clio in Oceania, Papuan Borderlands, Ecologies for Tomorrow, Reimagining Political Ecology, Emergent Masculinities in the Pacific, and the forthcoming Gender Violence and Human Rights: The Struggle for Justice in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu.