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Since the 1970s, interdisciplinary groups of scientists have warned about the global direction towards irreversible transgressions of planetary boundaries for climate change, pollution, resource depletion and biodiversity-loss. More recently, the scientific warnings have become stronger, emphasizing the fact that especially insufficient climate action can lead to social and ecological risks at an unprecedented scale in the coming decade. On this backdrop, we probe whether there is a sufficient sense of urgency in the humanities. Specifically, we offer an analysis that takes the sense of time and urgency as central concerns for the humanities in the Anthropocene. We argue that the Environmental Humanities suffer from three epistemic problems in this situation: the idealization of slowness, the pursuit of conceptual thickness, and the embrace of posthumanism. What we frame as three problems contain both academic virtues, promises, prestige and power. We argue, however, that they are also obstacles in the attempt to bring the humanities up to speed with a new world. A world, which is not only undergoing accelerating geophysical changes, but which is also rapidly changing due to new technologies and political polarizations.

Bios:

Gregers Andersen is a postdoctoral researcher in environmental humanities at the Department of English, Stockholm University. He is the author of the monograph Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis (Routledge, 2019) and has published articles in several international journals on how literature, film, and philosophy can shed light upon human and non-human conditions in the Anthropocene.  

Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen is assistant professor in Global History at Roskilde University. He recently completed the project "Sustainable Rationalities" (FKK grant), which examined the economic ideas of radical climate activists and green organizations over the past decades. An edited volume with results, Climate Justice and the Economy: Social Mobilization, Knowledge and the Political was published in 2018. His most recent work addresses problems of temporalization in climate politics.

All are welcome to attend, even without RSVP. However, if you would like a free sandwich, please email ceh@cas.au.dk and indicate any special dietary needs before 12pm on Thursday, February 13.