Vladimir Vernadsky and the Co-evolution of the Biosphere, the Noosphere, and the Technosphere
How does the current notion of “spheres” infiltrate thinking about the bio-techno-sphere, which today seems the best descriptive model for our own habitat? (...)
Explosives: Prime Movers of the Anthropocene
Combustion engines, dynamite fishing, and the violent reshaping of terrestrial and marine landscapes: philosopher and chemist Jens Soentgen considers explosions a key principle of modernity. (...)
Anthropocene Campus Philadelphia 2017
A collaborative campus hosted by Drexel University, Philadelphia, from Oct 22–26, 2017. (...)
Environing Technology
Untangling processes of environmental change and extreme environments mediated by and through technology. (...)
Slow Disaster
What is revealed through the politics of pace during disasters? What are the dynamics and political illegibility of slow disaster? (...)
Voice and Representation
How have ideas of equity, security and inclusion become central to scholarship of the Anthropocene? (...)
Molecular Colonialism
Life cannot be coded. With unexpected genetic deviations, matter bites back at the colonizing hand of man. (...)
A Caribbean Taste of Technology: Creolization and the Ways-of-Making of the Dancehall Sound System
Julian Henriques looks at the Jamaican reggae dancehall sound system to explore how this street technology has found creolizing ways to prevail in the neocolonial power struggle between popular culture and Jamaica’s ruling elite. (...)
China's “Blue Territory” and the Technosphere in Maritime East Asia
Andrew Chubb maps the complex space of maritime East Asia, tying together land rights, historical geopolitics, and the creation of artificial islands that construct it. (...)
Creole Technologies
In this essay David Edgerton introduces the concept of creole technology by foregrounding the varied transformations of technologies that attend to locally specific situations and thereby putting actual and derivative use over invention. (...)
Creolized Technologies of Demoralization
Creolized technologies can be understood as reasserting the “human” in the technosphere, but theorist and urbanist Elisa T. Bertuzzo argues that this is not necessarily humane. (...)
Grinders
Photographer Hannes Wiedemann depicts the bodyhacking subculture in California, capturing its adherents in their garages and makeshift laboratories. (...)
Redeeming Urban Spaces: The Ambivalence of Building a Pentecostal City in Lagos, Nigeria
Using ethnographic material from the largest prayer camp in Nigeria, sociologist and historian of religion Asonzeh Ukah describes the interdependence between religious faith in redemption, prosperity theology, and the (sub)urban infrastructure managed by the camp. (...)
Risk As Immaterial Raw Material
In this artistic formulation, Florian Goldmann makes popular risk indexes fungible, specifically their conflation of natural disaster with financial disaster. (...)
The Risk Equipment Deserves More Credit: Modeling, Epistemic Opacity, and Immersion
Through examining the way hydraulic engineers employ and tinker with computational models for managing water-related risks, science and technology scholar Matthijs Kouw argues for a more reflected stand against such modeling practice. (...)
The Shipworm and the Telegraph
How did a confluence of telegraphy, shipworms, colonialism, and imported Malay rubber transform the Arabic language into its modern form? (...)
Deep Time Chicago 2016–
Deep Time Chicago explores the idea of humanity as a geological agency, capable of disrupting the Earth system and inscribing present modes of existence into deep time. (...)
A Legacy of the Technosphere
Geologist Jan Zalasiewicz considers the technofossils that far-future archaeologists will find when digging up the landfills of the global experiment called Anthropocene. (...)