Curriculum, caring for the Earth, and planetary responsibility

This text is a simultaneously personal and political commentary on those who inhabit the border between worlds, such as those now at war in a viral assemblage. Starting from a general intention of shifting curricular responses away from instrumental and technical solutions toward cultivating the ability to act and think in times of uncertainty, the argument developed here is that the need to respond to the Covid-19 crisis involves repositioning curriculum and responsibility as caring for the Earth. The article creates a dialogue between cosmoecological alliances of different onto-epistemological practices and formulations that expand the ethics of care for other-than-humans. The central issue is to defend reimagining the relationship between curriculum and subjectivity within interdependent stories on the planet. We do this in order to develop a sort of vaccine to prevent curricular imagination from becoming captive to the geometric coordinates of the economization of life.

Anthropology and the Anthropocene: Criticisms, Experiments, and Collaborations

The Anthropocene, a proposed name for a geological epoch marked by human impacts on global ecosystems, has inspired anthropologists to critique, to engage in theoretical and methodological experimentation, and to develop new forms of collaboration. Critics are concerned that the term Anthropocene overemphasizes human mastery or erases differential human responsibilities, including imperialism, capitalism, and racism, and new forms of technocratic governance. Others find the term helpful in drawing attention to disastrous environmental change, inspiring a reinvigorated attention to the ontological unruliness of the world, to multiple temporal scales, and to intertwined social and natural histories. New forms of noticing can be linked to systems analytics, including capitalist world systems, structural comparisons of patchy landscapes, infrastructures and ecological models, emerging sociotechnical assemblages, and spirits. Rather than a historical epoch defined by geologists, the Anthropocene is a problem that is pulling anthropologists into new forms of noticing and analysis, and into experiments and collaborations beyond anthropology.