Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene speaks to the global and transnational legacies of exploitation, extraction and genocide and how racism, coloniality and gender are central to the embodiment of Anthropocene inequities.
Our project addresses 5 key themes:
Indigenous experiences of the Anthropocene highlight the ongoing destructive impact of the colonisation of the Americas on human and nonhuman lives and ecologies, related to experiences of racism, genocide and epistemicide. Engaging with Indigenous experiences of the Anthropocene is vital to demonstrate and denounce today’s Anthropocenic violence and to imagine alternative futures.
The Anthropocene requires a rethinking of human and non-human bodily boundaries, interrelationships, mutuality, symbiosis, coexistence, and companionship in specific local ecologies. This involves challenging human exceptionalism, considering and re-visioning human and nonhuman biosocialities, conviviality and care as essential planetary health and flourishing.
Colonialism changed the relationship between gender, reproduction and the environment. A biopolitics of the Anthropocene reflects the entanglement of environmental justice with reproductive rights, demanding new consideration of how some bodies, lives and health become more valued than others.
The COVID-19 pandemic is paradigmatic of the Anthropocene and has become part of the faultlines of our unequal planet, reflecting the complex interrelationships between increasing ecological pressures, zoonosis, globalisation, and social inequalities.
Chemical toxicities from plastics and other pollutants are largely invisible yet persistent, long lasting and widespread bioaccumulating in organisms over time and in specific locales. They are both products of, impact on, and continue to sustain the embodied inequalities of the Anthropocene.
