Southern Anthropocenes

Casper Bruun Jensen is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He is the author of Ontologies for Developing Things (2010) and Monitoring Movements in Development Aid with Brit Ross Winthereik (2013) and the editor of Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology with Kjetil Rödje (2009) and Infrastructures and Social Complexity with Penny Harvey and Atsuro Morita (2016). His work focuses on climate, environments, infrastructures, and speculative and practical ontologies.

"Since the Anthropocene was proposed, we have known that while the causes are ‘human’ we must be freed from the ‘Human’ to allow for making plural, ways of living and thinking. Southern Anthropocenes does so by creating a plane of consistency for multiplicities. It is an urgently needed collective undertaking."Déborah Danowski, Professor Emeritus at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil"Written from the archives and territories of a diverse array of ecological situations and struggles, Southern Anthropocenes rekindles our hope in social theory’s ability to attune to the stream of life. This acutely present, yet anticipatory volume functions as a collective composition that explicitly seeks out divergence, showing why and how social theory must recommence the active search for portals and contact zones to worlds beyond the modern.The 'anthropocene variations' within illuminate portals into regenerative ways of worlding emerging from the multiple souths that inhabit the planet."Arturo Escobar, author of Designs for the Pluriverse (2018), Pluriversal Politics (2020) and Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human (2024, with Michal Osterweil and Kriti Sharma)"Southern Anthropocenes is the collection of conceptual revisions, perspectival realignments, and theoretical openings that we have all been waiting for! Its authors dismantle the idea of a unitary Anthropocene by taking readers on a rhizomatic journey through strategies of world making and problem solving across the globe, showcasing the myriad modes through which people have exceeded imperial pathways to modernity and humanity, and the innumerable lessons to be absorbed about coping with planetary transformation. By eschewing easy reversals and embracing the idea of pluriversal contact zones, Southern Anthropocenes asks us to reorient both our empirical and analytic gazes to attune ourselves to radical forms of co-existing and relational repair – it is a must read!"Deborah A. Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, Director, Center for Experimental Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania, USA

• Introduction: Southern AnthropocenesPart 1. Emergent InterfacesIntroduction: Emergent Interfaces1. Welcome to the End of the World: Thinking beyond the Separation of Human and Geological Temporalities2. Tropical Cargoscapes: Sojourning Putridities in the Afterlives of Medical Necrowaste in Colombo3. Diving into the Underwater Anthropocene: Vital Materiality and the Becoming of a Shipwreck 4. Gardens at the Edge of the Sky: Toward an Entropological PactPart 2. Problems of Co-existenceIntroduction: Problems of Co-existence5. Wounded Lands, Resentful Mountains, and Mourning Maize: The Ecological Violence of War and Peace in Latin America6. Anthropocene Relations and the ‘Human activity’ in Zimbabwe’s Forest Reserves7. Difference and Disobedience: Inhabiting the Southern Anthropocene8. The Plasticene and the Global SouthPart 3. Livable WorldsIntroduction: Liveable Worlds9. To Forego: An Ethics for the Urban Anthropocene10. Kinship in the Technosphere: From Ishimure Michiko’s Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow to Miyazaki Hayao’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind11. For a World where Mutual Worlds Fit: Political Ontology in the AnthropocenePart 4. Speculations Introduction: Speculations (or, how to inhabit the pluriverse?)12. Decolonial Portals as Pedagogical Practice13. Anthropocenes Off-Earth14. How to Construct a Time Machine: The Anthropocene in an Indigo Vat15. Speculation as Method: World-Building and Collective (Un-)Learning for the AnthropocenePart 5. More-than-Human Itineraries Introduction: More-than-Human Itineraries16. Street Feeding Stray Cats: A Multi-Species Cosmopolitics in Urban Indonesia17. Migratory Birds, Migratory Lives: A Brackish Contact Zone in Bang Pu, Thailand18. Artisans of the Plasticene: Polytanks and Plasticities in Urban Ghana19. Reclaiming Country: Australian Aboriginal Walking Trails as MethodPart 6. Entangled Territories Introduction: Entangled Territories20. Under the Plastic Tarp: Memory and a Southern Anthropocene in California’s Pajaro Valley21. Arctic Worlds in Southern Anthropocenes22. How to Survive Medicine in the Anthropocene?23. After the End of the World: Another Season of War in South LebanonPostscript. What Tales will We Leave the Children of Tomorrow? Story-Trading across Southern Anthropocenes