Between the frog and the eagle: claiming a ‘Scholarship of Presence’ for the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

Even before officially sanctioned as a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene conquers the imaginary and is reified as awareness-raising, inspiring, universalist, capitalist-technocratic, dangerous. As critical scholarship discerns in this name-nomination an opportunity to rethink the human/more-than-human/environmental nexus, debating the Anthropocene becomes in itself more policy/politically relevant than its actual confirmation as a new geological epoch. However, the Anthropocene debate remains remarkably disembodied, engaging rarely with emerging actors and practices across the world that drive precisely the socio-ecological transformations that critical scholars advocate. Correspondingly, most actors involved in these practices are indifferent to the Anthropocene debate. And here, I argue, lies the task of academic labour: to engage in what I call a scholarship of presence; a scholarship that adds empirical weight to our theoretical musings around the Anthropocene. To do this, we need to be prepared simultaneously to explore the world like a frog and see it like an eagle; to be present locally, splashing (frog-like) into the murky waters of empirics; and to zoom-out broaden the gaze (eagle-like) from localized struggles, make comparisons and develop broader conceptual contributions. Such a scholarship of presence can be instrumental in making the Anthropocene the quilting point for articulating geographically fragmented struggles into a new ethico-aesthetic paradigm.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocene
• decolonizing
• imaginary
• reclaiming
• climate change scholarship

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/.