Design for the New School of the Anthropocene

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the planning of the New School of the Anthropocene, an experimental Arts and Humanities college between Cambridge and London. It discusses the ethos of its radical part-time degree curriculum dedicated to the fusion of critical enquiry and creative practice, and posits an alternative non-managerialist model of the student-teacher relationship that might counter the instrumentalism of a neo-liberal “outputs” culture and the market-bureaucratisation of British HE institutions. It goes on to broach the transdisciplinary nature of its curriculum, which addresses the omission of Humanities disciplines in the consideration of climate emergency and mass extinction through fostering an understanding and reexamination of the cultural narratives and metaphors that shape the human location on earth.

Keywords:

• university
• experimental pedagogy
• cooperative movement
• transdisciplinarity
• ecocriticism
• anthropocene

Notes

1. See https://www.co-op.ac.uk/pages/category/co-operative-university.

2. Preamble to the International Workers of the World Constitution, founding conference, Chicago 1905.

3. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 28.

4. See Felix Guattari and Antonio Negri, Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance, trans. M. Ryan (New York: Semiotext[e], 1990), 47–74.

5. William Davies, ”How the humanities became the new enemy within,” The Guardian, 28 February 2020.

6. Haeckel, Ernst, cited in W.C. Allee, Alfred E. Emerson, Orlando Park, Thomas Park, and Karl P. Schmidt, Principles of Animal Ecology (Philadelphia and London: W.B. Saunders & Co., 1949), 5.

7. Katrin Klingan, Ashkan Sepahvand, Christoph Rosol, and Bernd M. Scherer (eds.), Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain, Vapor, Ray (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).

8. See https://www.cctl.cam.ac.uk/tlif/learning-together.

9. See https://www.tacticsandpraxis.org/.

10. Isabelle McNeill, Louise Haywood, and Georgina Evans, ”Tactics and Praxis: A Manifesto,” Feminist Pedagogies: MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, Issue no. 5, January (2020). Available online: https://maifeminism.com/issues/issue-5-feminist-pedagogies

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Hrebeniak

Michael Hrebeniak is the Director of Studies in English, and Lecturer in Literature and Visual Culture at Wolfson College and Magdalene College, University Cambridge. He previously taught Humanities at the Royal Academy of Music and Metropolitan Studies at NYU, and produced poetry documentaries for Channel 4 TV. Recent publications include chapters in edited collections on ecopoetics, cinematic space, photography, BBC Arena and jazz writing. His concern with interdisciplinarity informed his first monograph, Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form, which located Beat writing within the contemporary milieu of painting, music and radical politics. His first film, Stirbitch: An Imaginary, broached the terrains of cultural memory, habitat and the carnivalesque in relation to the medieval Stourbridge Fair. This was premiered at the Hoeng Gallery in 2019. He is currently preparing a cinematic installation for Tate Modern, entitled The Russian Report, in collaboration with the investigative journalist, Carole Cadwalladr. His own journalism has appeared in the Guardian and on BBC radio, and he is Convener of the New School of the Anthropocene.