Who is the Anthropocene Commons?

The Anthropocene Commons (AC) is a network of researchers, educators, activists, artists, scientists, and partner groups (“hubs”) from all over the world working on the Anthropocene, the current time period in which human activities have fundamentally changed the planet. By commoning our skills, knowledge, and resources, the community imagines and explores practices of transformative pedagogies and collective action.

To illustrate that the AC exists as a network, this website aggregates content from hub websites. Please see the FAQ for more information on how to get involved.

The Anthropocene Commons grew out of the Anthropocene Curriculum initiative, which since 2013 has reflected on the ways communities around the world understand and respond to the Anthropocene.

What is the Anthropocene Commons striving towards?

The AC collaboratively imagines and practices transformative modes of teaching for the planetary emergency. Commoning here not only means creating shared spaces, but also turning institutions inside-out to make research available to frontline communities and collaboratively creating pedagogies with and for diverse perspectives.

The AC follows three interrelated approaches:

Shared Spaces
Creating and maintaining open spaces of exchange, mutual trust, and collaborative development.

Pedagogies of Action
Forging pedagogical pathways that bridge activism and academia, fostering relational thinking and collective action, and facilitating vital forms of more-than-human interconnectedness and justice.

Research
Identifying, analyzing, and sharing resources to facilitate ways of inhabiting our planet more attentively and collectively.

SHARED SPACES

The AC creates and hosts spaces for sharing experimental pedagogical and collaborative research approaches. These commons include:

Anthropocene Campuses
Anthropocene Campuses are multi-day programs for co-creating and sharing knowledge and methods, particularly focusing on connecting local struggles to global strategies of action.

Interventions
The AC develops experimental public formats, including events, exhibitions, workshops, research groups, media-based productions, and other works that build on and disrupt scholarly ways of knowing.

Online Platforms
The AC creates and maintains online platforms that contribute resources for Anthropocene-related pedagogy, research, and practice. These platforms showcase the AC’s work and support asynchronous network activities, thereby sustaining the community and allowing it to grow.

PEDAGOGIES OF ACTION
The AC develops radical pedagogical practices that can begin to address the complexities and pressing challenges of the Anthropocene.

Sites of Action
AC pedagogies are sites of action: we strive to learn how to see and act in the face of anthropogenic devastations. The AC supports practical strategies for collective living that are attuned to local social and ecological challenges, such as histories of dispossession and climate disorder.

Collaborative Commoning
Learning emerges from complex entanglements. The AC emphasizes transdisciplinary collaboration between diverse actors, including artists, scholars, scientists, and activists.

Place-Based Learning
The AC creates education encounters through place-based and situated practices. With a focus on case studies that take into account the lived experience of communities and more-than-human agencies, the AC aims to be both locally-grounded and globally-networked.

RESEARCH
The AC collectively explores embodied forms of resourcefulness that are publicly accessible and actionable.

Resources of Resourcefulness
With an awareness of how academic research has historically supported extractivist industries, the AC identifies and shares forms of resourcefulness that enable more sensitive and collective modes of inhabiting the planet.

Everting the University
The AC creates “extra-curricular” spaces while also turning universities and institutions of knowledge inside-out, or everting them, by making their resources and knowledge publicly accessible and actionable, particularly for and with front-line communities and local activism.

Publications
The AC, as a living archive, is a diverse ecology of platforms, publications and interventions intended to be accessible to everybody interested in the present and future of our planet.

What are the values of the Anthropocene Commons?

Connecting local concerns with planetary crises across scales, beings, temporalities, disciplines, and communities

Generosity in the sharing of intellectual and material resources

Engaging in open and diverse collaboration

Honesty and transparency in inquiry

Openness to experimentation

Facilitating an ecology of care

How to get involved?

The AC is open to anyone who would like to bring their research, pedagogy, and/or lived experience closer to the values represented in this charter.

Please see the FAQ for more information on how to get involved.

Version 1: 9.12.2022