Blog | Anthropocene

This blog post is a field report of the author’s trip with the University of California Irvine’s EcoGovLab to the Salton Sea in California. Based on this field trip a few miles from Desert Hot Springs, near the San Andreas Fault, the article focuses on the non-human dimension in the figuration of spaces in the Anthropocene and the challenges posed by harmful entanglements that require alternative research approaches and close university-community relationships.

What happens to scalar thinking when the analytical distinctions between global and local as well as human and non-human spaces no longer make sense, especially given the engagement with climate change and the planetary in the social sciences and humanities? These were the challenging questions that PIs Ignacio Farías and Silke Steets posed to the speakers and audience at the 5th international CRC symposium “Spatial Figures in the Anthropocene” on 5th and 6th October 2023. Scholars across regions and disciplines came together for two days of discussions, panels, coffee conversations, a metaverse animation, and a lecture performance to advance, share, and inspire thinking and activities on spatiality that address the anthropogenic impact on Earth.

Within the framework of the project seminar “Nature, Space and Biopolitics: Understanding the Conservation Regime in Planetary Urbanism,” we spent the last year investigating the refiguration of the modern institutions […]