Sun, November 10, 10:00 to 11:30am, Fiesta Americana, Floor: Lobby Level, Yucatan IV
Session Submission Type: Futures Roundtable
Session Organizers: Claire Sabel and Sebastian Felten
Motivated by a sense of planetary crisis, recent historical scholarship on the earth and environmental sciences highlights the plurality of worlds, livelihoods, and forms of knowledge created and destroyed by changing relationships to the environment, and by changes in the environment itself. These analyses tend to converge in narratives of uneven and unjustly distributed causes and effects of global climate change. But fault-lines of periodisation and chronology emerge when the urgency of collective endeavour meets pluralised histories. Among the most high-profile was the International Union of Geological Science’s official rejection of the Anthropocene Epoch in February 2024. Critics cited the modern bias of the proposed period, which would have marked 1952 and nuclear fallout as the dawn of a new Anthropocene era, as insufficiently attentive to the deep history of humanity’s planetary influence. Regardless of its official geological status, the Anthropocene debate signifies the promise and pitfalls of a totalizing framework for historicising humanity’s impact on the environment. This roundtable brings together scholars of human-environment interactions, from the pre-modern to the present, who are collectively exploring methods to understand changing ideas and practices of extractive labour, resource use, and of “the earth” itself. What kinds of new comparisons between times and terrains (e.g. subterranean, littoral, atmospheric, celestial) can undergird future histories of the earth? How can historians build new partnerships across disciplines, and within their own, to better understand the possible futures of earth’s history? And what role will historical research play in the environmental science, policy, and activism of the future?
Panel participants:
- Sebastian Felten, Universität Wien, Institut für Geschichte
- Lydia Barnett, Northwestern University
- Deborah Coen, Yale University
- Joshua Howe, Reed College
- Robert Rouphail, University od Iowa
- Nydia Pineda de Avila, University of California, San Diego
For more information visit the HSS Website.