The Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene are visible in the creations of scholars and artists from many different fields. Here you can browse our selection and find links to inspiring and relevant works from across the world.
Website
Climaterra
The webpage in Spanish visibilises new ways of inhabiting ourselves and the Earth. We are in a moment of planetary transition: one world is ending and new possibilities are emerging. The website aims to disseminate new social, personal and ecological manifestations of planetary regeneration and to warn against the old forms that intend to continue with the control, domination, accumulation and destruction of the planet. It includes three major interrelated topics: a) keys to understanding the destruction of the planet: the climate and ecological crises; b) keys to understanding the concentration of wealth and power; and c) keys to understanding the human crisis in health and well-being: depression, loneliness, addictions.
The domestication of plants and animals by the most varied human societies has been well explored by anthropology, but societies produced by plants or animals are invisibilised by humanist or anthropocenic logic. In this short film, Cristiana Bastos shows us how sugar cane turned humans into slaves, through a multi-species dynamic in colonisation processes after the abolition of slavery.
The Covid-19 Humanities MCTI Network produces qualitative research that analyses the impacts of Covid-19. Its aim is to subsidise actions that consider the scientific, technological, social, political, historical and cultural implications of the pandemic in a multiple and situated way. It has been carried out in the south, southeast and north of Brazil and has been divided into two phases: the first dealing with the pandemic and its impact on people getting sick; and the second dealing with the impacts of control actions such as immunisation, isolation, treatments and the environment.
The Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability CAoS
The Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability (CAoS) is a research centre that draws together the wide range of work of international excellence on questions related to the notion of social, cultural and environmental sustainability. Anthropology at UCL, with its four-field approach (social, biological, medical, material), has a unique contribution to make towards research in sustainability, and towards integrating multidisciplinary studies on ways of living that do not damage the ecological systems of which we are part, and on which we depend for survival. Our research focuses on the social and cultural dimensions of sustainability: on local and global understandings of the concept and on lived practices around the world.
From Aristotle's scala naturae, to the vast scales of animal agriculture, to moral scales, determined by cognitive scales: animal lives have and continue to be shaped by different kinds of scales and their positions on them. Scales enact, authorise, and justify possible relations with animals, including deathly scales of comparison. But scales are neither fixed nor unchanging, and in the context of increasingly complex, multi-dimensional and multi-temporal analyses of environmental catastrophe, numerous, often novel, scales are proliferating. How do animal scales come into existence? Are animals themselves 'scale-makers' and, if so, can they disrupt the pre-scaled objects of knowledge that support the division of academic labour? If animals operate at scale (collective migration, collective thinking), how do they also resist it? This seminar series asks after the disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, empirical, political, ethical, and legal implications of thinking animals in and through scale.
The Ethnobotanical Assembly (TEA) is a quarterly online magazine for research, writing, and thinking about people-plant relationships. TEA aims to bring together the growing community of people thinking and working at the interface of people and plants.
UCL Anthropocene works as a virtual school by assembling projects, people, courses, and events from across the social sciences, arts, humanities, life, environmental, and health sciences to articulate and address the problems that the Anthropocene poses for our collective future.
Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies
Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies brings together artists, curators, philosophers, and critics to engage the provocative Anthropocene thesis. With contributions from artists, curators and theorists, we argue that the anthropocene is primarily an aesthetic event, and as such the arts are particularly well suited to making claims on our geologic and environmental present.
The Huaves in the Technocene: Disputes over Nature, the Body, and Language in Contemporary Mexico
After at least a thousand years of transformations in the Oaxacan isthmus, the Huave people are entering the 21st century facing deeper and more vertiginous changes than ever before. Their terrestrial and sea environment, their fishing, their food, their bodies, their festivals and their cosmovision, give a real-time account of a tidal wave driven by both internal and external factors. This tidal wave encompasses the most dissimilar elements, such as the new fishing gear that challenges the cayuco and the atarraya, the advance of the evangelical churches, the local economy around beer consumption, the struggle of midwives against medicalised childbirth, a language that renews itself to continue existing, and the promises of development and destruction of megaprojects such as wind farms or the Interoceanic Corridor. The epoch in which these changes are situated is the Technocene, a stage of life on Earth in which technologies reproduce unequal exchanges, and whose unjust social relations, established since the Conquest, are now hidden under techniques and instruments. What happens to ways of life, identities and subjectivities at a time when the relentless extractivist economy influences most of the Huave existential processes, from the moment of birth to the way they die, increasingly from complications of diabetes? These 13 essays, conscientiously written by researchers who have devoted a good part of their lives to understanding the ikoots/ikojts/konajts, wrapped and macerated in rigorous bibliographic research, offer us a glimpse into this new moment - a defining one - in the lives of these lagoon peoples. The questions they address, in the end, challenge all of us.
The short animated film ‘Ukari Wa’utsika’ is a collaboration between textile artist Susie Vickery, EIA team member Jennie Gamlin and the Indigenous community of Tuapurie, Mexico. It tells the story of how Wixárika women’s lives changed forever as they came into contact with Spanish missionaries, travellers, anthropologists and the Mexican state and is illustrated with yarn paintings, animated embroidery figures, historical documents and photographs. The film is narrated in Wixárika language with soundtracks by Wixárika musicians.
We highlight two videos from the 'Parir Con Dignidad' project to explore perspectives from traditional Indigenous midwifery. The first video is called 'The wise women who heal' (6:47 mins) focusing on the Ikoots community of San Mateo del Mar, Oaxaca, Mexico. The second video is called 'The Indigenous midwifery movement' (5:50 mins) focusing on the Nich Ixim Midwives Movement in Chiapas, Mexico.
These seven audio capsules, designed for children and young people, seek to explain in a simple and concrete way what the term Anthropocene stands for and how diverse but interrelated phenomena such as heat waves, droughts, the decrease of pollinating insects or plastic pollution, impact our everyday lives. The series reflects on how contemporary socio-environmental crises affect emotional health and proposes small individual and collective strategies to live (well) in these complex times. The series, written by Laura Montesi with the collaboration of Iván González (CIESAS South Pacific), was produced and broadcast in Oaxaca in 2024 by CORTV, Corporación Oaxaqueña de Radio y Televisión, a non-profit public media that promotes the socio-cultural richness of the state of Oaxaca.
This exhibition tells the story of how the lives of Indigenous Wixárika communities changed forever when Spanish colonisers invaded their lands in North-western Mexico. Every aspect of this process of colonisation was gendered. Over the course of several centuries, relationships between women and men that were complementary and more equal before colonialism, were gradually replaced with the unequal structure of European patriarchy. Wixárika sexuality that had been more freely expressed and sexual relationships more openly practiced by both women and men, were considered immoral by missionaries and colonial powers. Christian marriage between a man and a woman became the only way of legitimising sexual intercourse and all other encounters became sinful. When Mexico gained independence new laws and moral codes of conduct were imposed upon Indigenous communities, and later enforced with corporal punishment. Although in Mexico today legislation has progressed in terms of gender and racial equality, many customary laws and social arrangements still reflect the values and ideas about marriage, gender and sexuality that were introduced during colonialism.
The Work of Art in the Age of Planetary Destruction
This book is a collection of ideas from creators across the world about their role in imagining the global future. What do they do that politicians and climate scientists can’t or won’t do? There is only one true version of the book. All other versions — printed or online — are mechanical reproductions of it. The printed copies have been perforated so that their pages can be pulled apart, to remind us that the things we take can’t always be put back and the things we lose can’t always be recovered.