The Anthropocenic Turn: The Interplay Between Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Responses to a New Age

This interdisciplinary volume discusses whether the increasing salience of the Anthropocene concept in the humanities and the social sciences constitutes an ＂Anthropocenic turn.＂ The Anthropocene discourse creates novel conceptual configurations and enables scholars to re-negotiate and re-contextualize long-established paradigms, premises, theories and methodologies. These innovative constellations stimulate fresh research in many areas of thought and practice. The contributors to this volume respond to the proposition of an ＂Anthropocene turn＂ from the perspective of diverse research fields, including history of science, philosophy, environmental humanities and political science as well as literary, art and media studies. Altogether, the collection reveals to which extent the Anthropocene concept challenges deep-seated assumptions across disciplines. It invites readers to explore the wealth of scholarly perspectives on the Anthropocene as well as unexpected inter- and transdisciplinary connections.

Gabriele Dürbeck is professor of literature and culture studies at the University of Vechta. Her research includes German literature from the 18th-21th century, postdramatic theater, travel literature, postcolonialism, ecocriticism and narratives of the Anthropocene. She has authored Ambivalent characters and fragmented poetics in Anthropocenic literature (Max Frisch, Iliya Trojanow) (The Minnesota Review, 2014) and co-authored Human and Non-human Agencies in the Anthropocene (Ecozona, 2015). She is co-editor of Ecocriticism. Eine Einführung (Böhlau, 2015); Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture (Lexington, 2017); Handbuch Postkolonialismus und Literatur (Metzler, 2017); Ökologischer Wandel in der deutschen Literatur des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts--neue Perspektiven und Ansätze (Peter Lang, 2018); Repräsentationsweisen des Anthropozän in Literatur und Medien/Representing the Anthropocene in Literature and Media (Peter Lang, 2019).

Philip Hüpkes is research assistant at the Institute for Media and Cultural Studies at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, and a PhD-candidate (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Gabriele Dürbeck) at the University of Vechta. From 2017 until 2019, he was employed as research assistant in the DFG-funded research project Narratives of the Anthropocene in Science and Literature. Themes, Structures, Poetics at the University of Vechta. His research interest lies in issues of scale and (media-)aesthetics in the context of the Anthropocene, as well as in philosophies of perception, process ontology, and, most recently, in artificial intelligence. Recent publications include: Der Anthropos als Skalenproblem (Der Anthropos im Anthropozän: Die Wiederkehr des Menschen im Moment seiner vermeintlich endgültigen Verabschiedung, de Gruyter, 2020); Anthropocenic Earth Mediality: On Scaling and Deep Time in the Anthropocene (Literature and Culture in the Anthropocene, Cambridge Scholars, 2019); ’A New Political Body Yet to Emerge’ Zur Darstellbarkeit des anthropos in Bruno Latours ’Kosmokoloss. Eine Tragikomödie über das Klima und den Erdball’ (Repräsentationsweisen des Anthropozän in Literatur und Medien/Representations of the Anthropocene in Literature and Media, Peter Lang, 2019).