Talks on the Anthropocene from outside of UCSB

Bruno Latour

The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image of the Globe (source)

Bruno Latour has been professor at the Centre de sociologie de l’Innovation at the Ecole nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and, for various periods, visiting professor at UCSD, at the London School of Economics and in the history of science department of Harvard University. He is the author of Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy.

Dipesh Chakrabarty

The Anthropocene Project. An Opening (source)

Dipesh Chakrabarty is currently the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College at the University of Chicago, and holds a visiting professorial fellowship at the Research School of Humanities at the Australian National University. He is a founding member of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, a co-editor of Critical Inquiry, and a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies. He was one of the founding editors of the series South Asia Across the Disciplines. He also serves on the Board of Experts for the Humboldt Forum in Berlin.

Noam Chomsky

The Anthropocene Period and its Challenges (source)

Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, political commentator and anarcho-syndicalist activist. Sometimes described as the “father of modern linguistics”, Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy. He has spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is currently Professor Emeritus, and has authored over 100 books. He has been described as a prominent cultural figure, and was voted the “world’s top public intellectual” in a 2005 poll.

David Suzuki

The Anthropocene Epoch (source)

David Takayoshi Suzuki was a professor in the genetics department at the University of British Columbia from 1963 until his retirement in 2001. Since the mid-1970s, Suzuki has been known for his TV and radio series, documentaries and books about nature and the environment. He is best known as host of the popular and long-running CBC Television science program, The Nature of Things, seen in over forty nations. A long time activist to reverse global climate change, Suzuki co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation in 1990, to work “to find ways for society to live in balance with the natural world that does sustain us.”

Mike Osborne and Miles Traer

Generation Anthropocene Is Upon Us (source)

Michael Osborne is a graduate student in the department of Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford University. He has developed and taught science communication classes that are project-based, and generally focus on 21st century environmental issues. In 2012 he created the Generation Anthropocene podcast with Miles Traer and Tom Hayden. The show is a science-based exploration centered on the theme of the Anthropocene– a new geologic age marked by the global footprint of human kind. Miles Traer works as a science communicator and multimedia producer in the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford University.

John Tresch and Jan Zalasiewicz

The Anthropocene Project: An Opening Dialogue (source)

John Tresch is a professor of History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Trained in anthropology and philosophy, his work explores the diversity of the sciences, especially in their interactions with other cultural formations. Jan Zalasiewicz is a senior lecturer in Palaeobiology in the Geology department at the University of Leicester. His research interests include mudrock processes, early Palaeozoic and Quarternary stratigraphy and sedimentology, and stratigraphic analysis of the Anthropocene concept.

John Tresch

The Anthropocene Project: An Opening (source)

John Tresch is a professor of History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Trained in anthropology and philosophy, his work explores the diversity of the sciences, especially in their interactions with other cultural formations. His work focuses on connections between cosmology, experience, social order, and ritual; changing methods, instruments, and disciplinary arrangements in the sciences, arts, and media; and shifting definitions of the rational and real.

Bernd M. Scherer

The Anthropocene Project: An Opening (source)

Bernd M. Scherer has been the Director of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) since 2006. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Saarland University. Philosopher and author of several publications focusing on aesthetics and international cultural exchange, Scherer came to the HKW from the Goethe-Institut. He curated and directed major art and cultural projects such as “Das weiße Meer”, “Rethinking Europe”, “Water-agua” (in Mexico), and “Über-Lebenkunst”. He wrote numerous articles on cultural philosophy and aesthetics.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli

The Anthropocene Project: An Opening (source)

Elizabeth Povinelli is the Franz Boaz Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her writing focuses on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. Her first two books examine the governance of the otherwise in late liberal settler colonies from the perspective of the politics of recognition. Her last two books examine the same from the perspective of intimacy, embodiment, and narrative form. Her ethnographic analysis is animated by a critical engagement with the traditions of American pragmatism and continental immanent theory.

Philippe Descola and Bruno Latour

Approaches to the Anthropocene (source)

Bruno Latour has been professor at the Centre de sociologie de l’Innovation at the Ecole nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and, for various periods, visiting professor at UCSD, at the London School of Economics and in the history of science department of Harvard University. He is the author of Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Philippe Descola holds the chair of anthropology and heads the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale at the Collège de France. He also teaches at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Among his previous books to appear in English are In the Society of Nature and The Spears of Twilight.

Clive Hamilton

Political Utopianism in the Anthropocene (source)

Clive Hamilton is a Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, a joint centre of Charles Sturt University and the University of Melbourne. For 14 years he was the Executive Director of The Australia Institute, a progressive think tank he founded. He has published on a wide range of subjects but is best known for his books, a number of which have been best-sellers. They include Growth Fetish (2003), Affluenza (with Richard Denniss, 2005), What’s Left: The death of social democracy (2006), Silencing Dissent (edited with Sarah Maddison, 2007) and Scorcher: The dirty politics of climate change (2007).

Peter Singer, Clive Hamilton, Sara Phillips

Playing God with the Planet: The Ethics and Politics of Geoengineering (source)

Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and a Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. Clive Hamilton is a Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, a joint centre of Charles Sturt University and the University of Melbourne. Sara Phillips is the Editor of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s environmental portal.

Will Steffen

The Anthropocene (source)

Will Steffen was the executive director of the Australian National University (ANU) Climate Change Institute. He was a member of the Australian Climate Commission until it was abolished in September 2013. From 1998 to 2004, he was the executive director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, a co-ordinating body of national environmental change organizations based in Stockholm. Currently, Steffen is on the Science Advisory Committee of the APEC Climate Centre in Korea.

Emma Marris and Erle Ellis

The Anthropocene Project: An Opening Dialogue (source)

Emma Marris is a writer based in Klamath Falls, Oregon. She writes about conservation, ecology, energy, agriculture, food, language, books and film. Her stories have appeared in Conservation, Slate, Discover, the New York Times and Nature. Her most first book, Rambunctious Garden explores why and how our strategies for preserving nature must change. Erle Ellis is an Associate Professor of Geography & Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and Visiting Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.