What does it mean to do cultural studies in the age of climate change, biodiversity loss, and global pandemics? Florian Cord argues that what is needed is a discipline that is less anthropocentric and more attuned to the nonhuman, be it animals, plants, rocks, ecosystems, or technologies. He ›diffractively‹ reads cultural studies and the nonhuman turn through each other, putting the former in dialogue with recent approaches such as actor-network theory, new materialism, speculative realism, affect theory, and object-oriented ontology. The result is a thoroughly revised discipline, one capable of making a significant contribution to the contemporary struggles for more livable and just futures – a cultural studies for the Capitalocene.

What does it mean to do cultural studies in the age of climate change, biodiversity loss, and global pandemics? Florian Cord argues that what is needed is a discipline that is less anthropocentric and more attuned to the nonhuman, be it animals, plants, rocks, ecosystems, or technologies. He ›diffractively‹ reads cultural studies and the nonhuman turn through each other, putting the former in dialogue with recent approaches such as actor-network theory, new materialism, speculative realism, affect theory, and object-oriented ontology. The result is a thoroughly revised discipline, one capable of making a significant contribution to the contemporary struggles for more livable and just futures – a cultural studies for the Capitalocene.