Financialization as a Parody
In this short lecture, sociologist Anna Echterhölter investigates the wider trust implications of voucher programs for food rationing in refugee camps run by intergovernmental institutions such as the World Food Programme. (...)
Pharmocracy: Access and Care
Anthropologist Kaushik Sunder Rajan unfolds how international frameworks and economics have embroiled the care of the human body in a geopolitical drama with wide-reaching implications. (...)
Deportation and the Technification of Force: Violence in Democracy
Anthropologist Chowra Makaremi works through the strangely technical choreography of “non-lethal” force and its implementation for detaining people at borders. (...)
Geotrauma
Borders not only define political law, they also constitute geographic realities built of infrastructure, forging politics into the landscape. (...)
On the Operation of Border Regimes
In a filmed conversation, activist Isabelle Saint-Saëns and migration scholar Bernd Kasparek discuss the multiform regimes of border-making and the types of social order being implemented in Europe and internationally. (...)
Anthropocene Campus Philadelphia 2017
A collaborative campus hosted by Drexel University, Philadelphia, from Oct 22–26, 2017. (...)
1333AD, Port of Aden, Yemen
Following the gravestone of a young Jewish woman used as the ballast for a ship, Laleh Khalili maps the infrastructure of imperialism and its relation to logistics to create an image of the technosphere as it expands geographically along its many ports. (...)
Biometric Capitalism
Keith Breckenridge recognizes a particular mode of capitalism currently developing on the African continent: population registries based on biometric identification technologies that serve as a credit risk scoring tool for financial firms. (...)
The Free Sea
Four artists and scholars confront the catastrophe of global warming as the rising sea literally dissolves the Maldives, and the lives that are lived upon them. (...)
Trauma of Machines That We Make Love to Machines?
Writer Rana Dasgupta follows the data paths of the technosphere from the rural crafts cultures of India into new cultures of global desire, with stops at Facebook and in Hollywood, formulating two universal machines—technology and commerce—which he sees as a global technomarket. (...)
Urban Porn
With new urban spatial products proliferating globally, subsequent forms of advertising these products have emerged to lure in global investment. But what are the selling points? (...)
Axiomatic Earth
Digitization seizes every realm of what today constitutes the contested idea of the “human”. A concise synopsis of the Axiomatic Earth seminar. (...)
Frontier Moods
It is a chemical element already being used to regulate the mood of bipolar patients, what role will it play in balancing the volatile moods of sun and wind? A tour de force through the wonderland of Lithium. (...)
A Brief History of Geoengineering
Global warming is looming and a shift to a low or zero-carbon economy will thus be vital. This however collides against established industrial monopolies. A video essay. (...)
Agricultural Revolution vs. the Industrial Revolution
c. 10,000 BC marks the agreed date of the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution. In a seminar room during Anthropocene Campus 2014, a group debated where to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene. (...)
Biosphere 2: The Mars Project
2027 once was the year when the first manned space-travel mission to Mars were planned. This film recalls the past of this mission: Biosphere 2, a closed self-sustaining environment experiment held in 1991 in the Arizona desert. (...)
Sharing Surveillance Data
1964 is the year the first geostationary satellite was launched into Earth’s orbit. A conversation about the life, history, and politics of geostationary satellites and the sharing of surveillance data, with Anna Åberg and Johan Gärdebo. (...)
Taking Nature into Account—Historical Perspectives and Paradoxes
The history of forestry management in Germany shows how economic and scientific practices merged to represent the perfect order of nature and state. (...)
The Danish Text
2009 was the year the United Nations COP15 took place in Copenhagen, infamous for the secret agreement drafted among the G20, the so-called “Danish Text.” In response, the Ambassador and spokesperson for the G77, Lumumba Di-Aping, called a press conference and addressed the plenary accusing the G20 of genocide. With Paul N. Edwards, Adrian Lahoud, and Alejandra Torres Camprubí. (...)
The Rights of Nature
2008 is the year the Rights of Nature were ratified in the Ecuadorian Constitution. In a seminar room at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, a group debates about resource extraction, activism, and the role of indigenous systems of knowledge in the Anthropocene. (...)