Fiona McDonald

Preliminary abstract: Anthropology of the Anthropocene: Structures, Theories, Practices’ is a four-day interdisciplinary workshop hosted by the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute that addresses the need for an Anthropology of the Anthropocene. Responding to Bruno Latour’s call for anthropologists to recognize the centrality of their discipline to addressing the key problems of the Anthropocene (Latour 2014), 20 participants will be invited to develop recommendations on how the discipline can lead new multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary scholarly endeavors. This workshop will mobilize current collaborative research actions and critical inquiries in order to move beyond the siloed disciplinary debates that have dominated scholarship on the Anthropocene. It will engage with the Anthropocene as both a conceptual system, central to new ways of imagining the humanity’s relationship with the planet, as well as a lived reality, in which sociocultural systems and biophysical systems are entangled in feedback loops which manifest unequally across the globe. The primary outcome of this workshop will be an edited volume that 1) explores new modes of anthropological theory and practice to address the urgent demands of the Anthropocene and 2) proposes new modes of multidisciplinary collaborative work on the Anthropocene that more deeply integrates the insights of anthropology into research practices.