Dr. Nandita Biswas Mellamphy and Jacob Vangeest
Continental Philosophy, Critical Political Theory, and Environmental Posthumanities
The Anthropocene is a name for new geological epoch that is meant to conceptualize the impact of humans as a geological force. The name Anthropocene was first suggested in 2000 by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul J. Crutzen and his collaborator, a marine science specialist Eugene F. Stoermer. The purpose of the term was to bring attention to the fact that climate change is not part of ‘nature’ but rather is anthropogenic, that is, created by human actions. For lobbyists, activists and international problem solvers, the Anthropocene is more than just a new problem or threat to fix; it is a crisis of global and even planetary proportions. Academics, scientists, and policymakers have attempted to deal with the Anthropocene as a materialization of humans’ impacts on the environment in various ways, ranging from human-centred approaches which envision humans using their social, economic, and technical capabilities to protect the ‘natural’ world through geoengineering, to more radical orientations that focus on adaptation and mitigation through resilience.
The “Anthropocene” has served as the basis for competing narratives regarding environmental and humanitarian crises argue Dr. Nandita Biswas Mellamphy and Ph.D candidate Jacob Vangeest. The two recently published the research article “Human, all too human? Anthropocene Narratives, Posthumanisms, and the Problem of ‘Post-anthropocentrism” in The Anthropocene Review, an international trans-disciplinary journal.
In this research, Dr. Biswas Mellamphy and Jacob Vangeest offer a critical intervention into several prominent scholarly conversations in feminist and decolonial political theory, critical posthumanism, and environmental studies. They argue that contemporary Anthropocene narratives and counter-narratives both retain the ‘human’ (anthropos in ancient Greek) as the integral component for dealing with the Anthropocene. While standard narratives align with ‘strong anthropocentrism’ and give priority to humans over non-humans as a way out of the Anthropocene crisis, new positions such as ‘alterhumanism’ and ‘posthumanism’ promote counter-narratives that attempt to ‘de-centre’ the human in order to provide more egalitarian responses to the Anthropocene. Dr. Biswas Mellamphy and Jacob suggest that these attempts at ‘de-centering’ remain a form of ‘weak anthropocentrism,’ given that they still rely on the capacity of human reason to determine a way out of the Anthropocene crisis. They suggest that an alternative to both dominant and counter-narratives—a narrative that is truly ‘post-anthropocentric’ or even ‘non-anthropocentric’—would require not only de-centring the human, but perhaps also involve speculating about ‘disconnecting’ from human/non-human dualisms altogether.
Trans-disciplinarity—as an approach that cuts across disciplines—allows for a cross-pollination of ideas which is a necessary part of any intellectual process. Trans-disciplinarity helps legitimize humanist and social scientific approaches, while also showing their relevance to a greater study of work pertaining to the Anthropocene. Trans-disciplinarity emphasizes the potentials and capacities of seemingly non-related disciplines to learn from one another. For both researchers, openness to trans-disciplinarity is a key strength of the graduate programs in Theory and Criticism at Western.
