As defined by countless news agencies, ecological consulting firms, museums, academics, and artists worldwide, the geological epoch termed the “Anthropocene” is based on the premise that humanity has the capacity to alter and form nature. This “forming” takes the shape of grand-scale ecological destruction, and yet simultaneously manifests as global environmental reform. Humanity certainly affects change upon our natural surroundings, yet it remains entrenched within those surroundings, comprising the very “nature” it is too often defined in binary opposition to. Therefore, while the Anthropocene is beginning to appear in classrooms as the ruling concept of our time, it has also historically been the foundation for our every waking action. In short, it appears increasingly such that the Anthropocene has raised more questions and uncertainty about the ways in which we live and know than it has delineated a clear, forward course of action. What does it mean, concretely, to do the kind of comprehensive reformation of knowledge production that the Anthropocene calls for and enables? How do we resist within the Anthropocene, and how do we use the agency the concept bestows upon us to grapple with the harsh realities of a world we have created?

As a category of knowledge—an epistemological lens, so to speak—the Anthropocene has departed radically from traditional methods of knowledge acquisition employed by the humanities and natural sciences. There is more changeability than there is certainty in all things Anthropocene; work that seeks to unravel the intricacies of the Anthropocene cannot rely on discrete academic disciplines for answers, because the logic of delineation that governs the latter is rendered obsolete by the indeterminacies of the former. This work can no longer be purely biological, anthropological, or literary: forays into the Anthropocene are interdisciplinary, span multiple physical and intellectual platforms, and are inextricably bound to the linearity of time and the topography of geographic space.

It is at this particular intersection of theory and practice, environmental precaution and political activism, and art and research that Mississippi. An Anthropocene River resides. This transdisciplinary, transmedial, and transnational project, organized by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), seeks to develop a deeper understanding of the Mississippi as an interwoven corridor of the Anthropocene. The Mississippi River, home to innumerable indigenous and settler communities over the years, has held a long-standing position in shaping the national identity of the United States of America, but has also been the site of highly contested industrial, colonial, and environmental practices that persist the world over. Mississippi: An Anthropocene River seeks to engage with the river as a site of cultural renegotiation and analysis of issues that concern us all in the Anthropocene era. The project is comprised of five “field stations” along the winding path of the Mississippi, each representing the interests and concerns of a different geographical region of the river. The contributing collaborators at each field station—all educators, researchers, artists, and community representatives in their own right—work together to identify the salient issues concerning communities along their section of the river and, consequently, on projects that attempt to reconcile some of the traumas of human interference along its course. These issues are numerous and wide-ranging: the northernmost field station in Minnesota, for example, grapples with the issue of temporality. They note that what enters the river at the headwaters is a gift (or poison, as the case may be in the German word Gift) to the areas of the river further south; a legacy unwittingly passed down by those privileged enough to experience the river at its source. Contrarily, the southernmost field station in the Louisiana delta region struggles with the preservation of infrastructure ecologies, grappling with the sustainability of the coastal mangroves that protect communities residing in the region from environmental catastrophe. Each field station partners, coordinates, and is affiliated with, in turn, the numerous extant community undertakings along the river that are already (and have been for some time) questioning its significance in a multinational web of colonization, indigenous pride, urban infrastructure, and political and environmental (in)justice. However, despite the myriad of hurdles particular to each field station, it became obvious at the first physical session of the planning workshop that the group was considering analogous concerns surrounding the river. Multiple working groups questioned the widely accepted valence of “catastrophe” carried with the concept of the Anthropocene. Even more so were they sobered by the comprehensive disruption of river communities through human activities in mining, industrial production, and nuclear development. Delegates looked in equal parts outwards—into the communities along the river, and the communities overseas that colonized it—as they did inwards, towards their individual identities and positionalities that privilege and make possible their analysis of these communities. Consequently, and perhaps most importantly, there was consensus across the board concerning the need to vernacularize the Anthropocene within the context of the Mississippi. Each field station was concerned not only with attracting the attention of scholars, educators, and artists outside of their specific regions, but was committed to realizing change in the local communities where it would be felt most meaningfully. It is in relation to this last point that I return to the Anthropocene as a tool for the production of knowledge and for the (re)imagining of socio-politico-enviro-cultural spaces such as the Mississippi corridor.

In an attempt to understand the radicalization of knowledge production enacted by Mississippi: An Anthropocene River, it is important to note the specific nature of this project’s renegotiation of knowledge production. The various field stations took upon themselves not simply a theoretical investigation into discrete vernacular existences along the Mississippi, but actively demonstrated, through practice and dialog, the feasibility of knowledge production facilitated by real-life encounters and lived experiences. Delving briefly into the realm of art history, I characterize this epistemological shift as closely comparable to Pablo Picasso’s treatment of Diego Velázquez’s famed Las Meninas. In 1957, Picasso undertook a comprehensive analysis of Las Meninas by recreating and consequently reinterpreting the original artwork in a suite of fifty-eight paintings in his own style. At the risk of compromising his artistic legitimacy and at the cost of sullying Velázquez’s work, Picasso repainted Las Meninas in an attempt to understand Velázquez’s compositional choices, his stylistic selection, and his artistic process. He altered Velázquez’s original considerations of scale, color, and technique, all the while transforming the piece in the image of his own oeuvre. While criticized for his blatant disregard of Velázquez’s eminence and authority within the field, Picasso’s work represented a new kind of art-historical analysis, one that meets artwork on its own terms and deals in its analysis through an adaption of its practice. Picasso’s Las Meninas is a hybrid species of analysis, one that stands alone from ahistorical, ossifying conjecture and is in direct conversation with the original painting’s legacy and historical positioning. Picasso thus actively embedded himself—and by extension, his work—in a larger discourse, supplying himself and his reinterpretation the agency to affect change.

Returning to the renegotiation of knowledge practices facilitated by this project, I hope the aforementioned segue helps illustrate the kind of learning-through-doing to which each field station has been committed. Joe Underhill of the headwaters station brings individuals of varying racial and socioeconomic backgrounds together: in spending one hundred days on the river with sixteen of his students at Augsburg College, Underhill uses the might of the Mississippi to highlight their shared sense of belonging in this world. Brian Holmes, Sarah Lewison, Jeremy Bolen, and Andrew Yang of the Paducah, Kentucky, field station, plan on reintroducing locals to the changing nuclear-industrial topography of the southern Illinois confluence by way of Anthropocene tours and Anthropocene walks. The River School initiative, presented by Scott Knowles, seeks to synthesize the findings of the various field stations, translating them into terms accessible across online platforms, which allow for the development of campus seminars, digital conferences, and supplementary materials for individuals in communities outside of the Mississippi corridor grappling with their own localized qualms. In the same way as Picasso revolutionized the notion of artistic analysis, the field stations—and their affiliated local initiatives—are changing the way in which we have come to perceive academic research. A far cry from the image of a bespectacled scholar ensconced at a heavy wooden desk between tome-laden shelves, researchers contributing to the repository of knowledge produced by Mississippi: An Anthropocene River are exercising the agency bestowed upon them by the concept of an Anthropocene. We are producing knowledge about our current environmental and cultural conditions by living, breathing, and resisting in the topographies it is our task to analyze. While the concept of the Anthropocene has rendered our tried-and-tested methods of knowledge production obsolete, simultaneously it has granted us the consciousness of our agency to address the indeterminacies it raises. Adopting radically novel techniques of ethnography, cultural analysis, ecological study, and geological survey, the collaborators on Mississippi: An Anthropocene River have embraced this mantle, actively reformulating narratives of life along the Mississippi. Equipped with the multiple themes of the Anthropocene as tools of discourse, the field stations seek to express the single-story experience of the Anthropocene along the river as the sum total of countless particular communities, projects, and individuals that live and work on its banks.

Though simply a window into the complex and multifaceted processes yet to come along the development of this project, the time spent by collaborators over the course of the conference made tangible the active (if not immediately visible) efforts on the part of the diverse and transdisciplinary community committed to deciphering the epistemological conditions of this new age. The superimposition of information gathered at the conference is exposing ever more interconnections between previously unlinked areas and issues, and this body of knowledge will continue to grow exponentially over the course of time. The Anthropocene—as geological epoch, scholarly thesis, a category of knowledge production, or simply as a tool or lens of analysis—has upturned the pedagogical conventions of the academy, and paved the way for the changing shape of information acquisition. It has blurred the boundaries of the personal and the political, of the universal and the particular, and of the natural and the manufactured. If we are to understand the new ecosystems of our world, we have to consider our role in pillaging them, as well as in revitalizing them. Knowing the Mississippi—and knowing in the Anthropocene—goes beyond data analysis and literary review: it is even greater than the sum total of empirically scientific, political, social, ethnographical, artistic, environmental, temporal, and emotional work that we have yet to realize we are capable of doing.