Masterclass: Anthropocene History – scholarship for a world of elements, acceleration and crisis (Prof. Dr. Sverker Soerlin)

“In this Master Class, PhD students in the program ‘UmWeltdenken: Rethinking Environment’ will do precisely this: rethink the environment.” In recent years, with the rise of the environmental humanities, we have seen a growing engagement among scholars in the humanities and the social sciences with the human-earth relationship and perhaps especially with the anthropogenic processes of change. This reflects the growing range and impact of human intervention in the elemental spheres – atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, geosphere/lithosphere (soils, fossil energy etc.). In other words, what we used to have words such as ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ to denote. With the ongoing rise of concepts such ‘anthropocene’, ‘acceleration’, ‘elements’, and agency’ frontier scholarship is taking on board this dynamic relationship between humans and ‘the planetary’, on scales hitherto rarely heard of from the humanities.

The Master Class is intended to open up avenues into this growing scholarly activity and to provide both a sensitivity to it and a reflexivity on and over it, including both its potentials and its possible pitfalls. How can human agency be understood in light of the agency performed in and through the elements? How can issues of responsibility be reconciled in an Anthropocene world of collective, mass-, and civilizational impact? How does this dynamic play out in different time periods and geographies? And perhaps above all, how do these changes in scholarly content and perspective effect how we write a history – widely construed – of the modern world and of contemporary and future societies? Should humanities scholarship aim to also be agential itself and move human hearts and redirect policies? And will this have implications for how we write and for whom we write, and in the widest sense for how we communicate our scholarship?