What does it mean to develop a curriculum in or for the Anthropocene? The term “curriculum,” in its original Latin, refers to “the course of a race.” Competitive element aside, any preparation for plotting a course to be traveled should entail a thorough examination of the field one intends to traverse, as well as a reflection on the inherited values determining one’s judgment of what constitutes a “good” course to follow. One challenge of this particular approach is that any such curriculum for our current time requires bridging the methods of the past into configurations that are yet to be articulated. So, in preparing a course—or courses—to respond to the complexities of the Anthropocene, where to start?

At the heart of the Anthropocene issue is the task of coming to terms with disruptive and planetary-scale changes. The Anthropocene is a discontinuity, not just in the geological strata but in the way we perceive, negotiate, and act. Applying the reflexive process outlined above means not only considering the metabolic complexity of the Earth system but also re-examining our understanding of and orientation in that planetary field—reflecting on motives, instruments, biases, and inherited senses of direction. For curricula in the Anthropocene to be robust enough to respond to a planet contoured by the striations and fissures of dynamic biogeochemical processes, exhaustive industrial capitalism, derelict colonial exploitation, and the endless collisions of cultural values that is our present-day Earth, they need to mirror the multidimensional largesse of these radical transformations. The precise measurements, calculations, and modeling of the natural sciences undoubtedly provide an essential foundation to this understanding. The practices of scientific calculation and exact modelling undoubtedly provide the essential foundations understanding planetary systems, but it is also crucial to critically examine how this data has often been used to justify dubious political or territorial claims that cause harm, and which are inevitably entangled in the origins of asymmetrical power relations. The challenge facing contemporary knowledge production, therefore, is to reconcile and integrate different modes of knowledge production and dissemination with critique and multiperspective conversations, and to do this without losing rigor in demonstrating verifiable and causal explanations about the world.

The 2020 Anthropocene Curriculum (AC) project The Shape of a Practice endeavored to drive such a shift by focusing on a topological rather than topographic approach to the global and the local—a view that sees conditional planetary relationships and not only particularized local disasters. Following this line of thinking, we launch the new editorial format of the AC Courses, outlined in more detail below, by thinking dialogically “on curricula.” In keeping with the aforementioned notion of gauging the field, this essay attempts to introduce and orient the Courses component on anthropocene-curriculum.org within a global conversation on the Anthropocene. It does this both by reflecting on some of the ideas on (and pitfalls of) curriculum-making that the Anthropocene Curriculum project has encountered over the last decade and by surveying other projects of knowledge-gathering and curation that, first, involve an interest in the art-science interface and, second, are also situated in the digital realm.

Recontextualizing, cross-relating, remaining diligent

The AC Courses materialize our humble proposal for co-creating online curricula in and for the Anthropocene. Both the decision to start with a survey of adjacent projects and the very structure of the Courses format itself, as a cross-reading of existing material, are attempts at articulating relational and processual knowledge-making. In a time when university models around the world are being confronted by political, social, and ecological issues that challenge their very structures and foundations, the ambitious reframing of what collaborative and multiperspective curricula could be becomes a necessity. This means experimenting with a dynamic process that levels the careful attempts to agree on what constitutes knowledge, or even to interconnect knowledge with its respective counternarratives and new irritations by fragile consensus.

It is crucial to note that the Anthropocene remains a contested terrain. While the scientific evidence for determining this new geological epoch—in which the impact of human activities on the Earth system as a whole has become distinctly perceivable—is increasingly delivering an unambiguous message, the accompanying cultural and political debates must be adaptive and exploratory to be of value in a public forum shaped by contested values and ethics. How can research stay connected to contemporary geo-social and epistemic confrontations on this unequally shared planet? How could knowledge be gathered and communicated in order to reach different audiences?

This is the most vexing problem: the scale and scope of such a task is nearly insurmountable if one has even the slightest commitment to not repeating the myopic, or and even malicious, exclusions of past attempts at generating knowledge that engages with the planet holistically. Such approaches have led to so many knowledge pathways to be too narrow to deal with the world as it actually is. The problem becomes all the more apparent when one considers the violent chauvinism that fueled many “universal” curricula of European liberalism’s past—a particularized approach to understanding the world where nature and culture were perceived as separate, generating cultural values that emerged disproportionately from one peninsula of the world and that could not account for the complexity of approaches anchored by numerous other preconceptions and epistemologies. To fall back on this system when attempting to construct curricula that can justly and accurately respond to a truly “planetary” ecological collapse would be to miss the point. An Anthropocene curriculum able to respond to the current era needs to return to the methods of experimentation that provided many knowledge traditions their explanatory power—tinkering, engaging, learning. A core question for the current experiment seems clear: How to understand and live on the planet while respecting the mutual interdependencies that make knowledge itself possible?

Since its initiation in 2013, the Anthropocene Curriculum has aimed to incubate and test practice-based, cross-disciplinary explorations in this new terrain: creating an experimental space of co-learning and co-producing in line with the pressing demands of the Anthropocene, and modeling approaches to knowledge and its production that address planetary complexities in an exploratory manner. As an institutional project by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), both located in Berlin, Germany, the Curriculum gives rise to the complex political question of how large, relatively well-funded institutions from the Global North can support the type of process-oriented and globally accessible curricula needed in such dire times without slipping into the biases and habits that typically accompany institutional credibility. There is no straightforward answer to this. Choosing the concept of “curriculum” within the multi-scalar context of the Anthropocene, however, means acknowledging this question, with the stated claim that institutions can and should facilitate this bridging by creating a space for the forging of knowledge practices that enable the formulation of collaborative and multiperspective approaches to the issues of our time.

AC Courses

So, what are we doing in the AC Courses? We are looking to bridge the material accumulated through the Anthropocene Curriculum project in a pluralistic manner, using new editorial formats that enable a recontextualizing of ideas—creating space for documentation, ongoing research, and new editorial contributions. The Case Studies published earlier this year, which grew out of the Shape of a Practice event, is one such format we have developed. The AC Courses format, meanwhile, acts as an orientation tool, offering literal pathways through material from the AC research pool and beyond. These pathways are designed by members of the AC network, who apply their unique cultural, disciplinary, and political prisms to the materials, drawing connections between emerging constellations of ideas and knowledge practices. We encourage contributors to also include their own materials, as well as written and multimedia content from outside the AC archive, to broaden the conversation. The pathways also attempt to sketch actual curricula that, after further development, may be repeatable and valuable in various pedagogical contexts.

The AC Courses project also further activates the AC digital platform as an evolving site of co-producing and communicating knowledge about the Anthropocene. While the field of online research often mirrors the uneven interrelations that exist in the physical realm, many other new and innovative structures attempt to counter this situation. Bolstered by social media and accelerated by the dystopian reality of the COVID-19 pandemic, communities, projects, and institutional initiatives all over the world have developed new or adapted existing online platforms and research tools in a myriad of formats to extend or reinvent their practices of navigating the Anthropocene and its socio-environmental conditions. The survey that follows attempts to map and string together some of these digital projects, spanning many different contexts and many different reasons for developing. Every project included below demonstrates a resonance with one or several of the core facets that the AC holds as imperative to curricular endeavors: an emphasis on topological connections, a consideration of values, an accounting for different scales, and the mapping of concepts.

Collaborative platforms and mapping

It is not only since the pandemic that groups and organizations dedicated to education and collaboration have been increasingly moving online. Doing so allows initiatives to open up new ways of thinking through and with the Anthropocene by, for instance, using cartographic and multimedia forms of engagement. In recent years, collaborative tools like the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas) have taken up the work of gathering information and showing patterns and links between socio-environmental conflicts worldwide. The EJAtlas maps more than 3,000 legal cases, providing dossiers in multiple languages that explain and highlight different types of environmental justice scenarios. Other mapping projects provide multiple levels of participation and community building and serve as tools to make connections between the local and the planetary effects of the Anthropocene. In the past couple of years, several projects in this vein have emerged—such as Territorios De Colaboración, with a focus on South America; Learning from Cascadia, about the metropolitan area of Portland, Oregon, as an Anthropocene city; the MISSISSIPPI: An Anthropocene River map project, deriving from HKW’s own project of the same name; and Charting the American Bottom, focused on the East St. Louis region. This way of promoting freely available data by making it more easily accessible works against the primacy of peer-reviewed journals, creating links between scholars and activists. Similarly, the interdisciplinary Disaster-STS Network hosts research with a focus on adaptation and geohazards. Disaster-STS is built around the open-access digital infrastructure the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, which allows researchers to collaboratively archive, analyze, and present empirical data from the humanities and social sciences, thereby enabling more immediate ways of approaching current political issues.

Rebuilding epistemologies, preserving communities

Initiatives such as the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal demonstrate how online forms of archiving and collaboration can aid self-representation and community education amid a fierce political climate. The Plateau Peoples’ website operates as a “collaboratively curated and reciprocally managed archive of cultural materials, tribal paths and a curriculum,” adapting to the purposes of Native American Peoples of the Northwest Plateau. The site hosts a digital heritage collection that pools photographs, historical written accounts, material artifacts from various tribal-, privately, university-, and state-owned museum collections. Alongside the “tribal paths” that link these archival materials to the community-run websites of the participating peoples, a core element of the portal is the curricula created by tribal representatives.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the shift toward teaching and co-learning across geographies or under conditions of social distancing has also seen established schools and self-organized groups move online. The nonprofit teaching and research initiative Associação de Pesquisas e Práticas em Humanidades (Association for Humanities Research and Practice), based in Porto Alegre, Brazil, for example, has been hosting its courses online. This includes the meetings and discussions held within the Grupo de Pesquisa em Ecologia das Práticas (Research Group in Ecology of Practices), who also contributed to The Shape of a Practice. Operating since 2016, the group has continued to act as an independent space for discussions on coming to terms with socio-environmental crises from philosophical and social theory perspectives. While already active online prior to the pandemic, this initiative is one example among many that have been able to increase their reach as a result of more projects moving online.

Expanding research and media

The dominance of classical publishing models and outlets for academic research is increasingly being challenged by online magazines. For instance, Pages magazine explores climate issues through artistic research, while the Singapore-based Foodscapes Pages focuses on food systems and ecology. Emergence Magazine, meanwhile, publishes stories in audio and print that center Indigenous voices and languages. Low-tech Magazine, a solar-run website, uses its sustainable format itself to highlight the environmental consequences of high-tech society. Platforms like Uneven Earth have expanded their publishing programs to include educational tools such as glossaries and monthly reading lists, illustrating how communicating and educating on environmental issues through a “slow media” approach that counters the high speed and hyper-availability of information online can be particularly effective.

As universities and research centers have taken on studying the conditions of the Anthropocene, so too have they developed curricula that sit partly within disciplinary boundaries and partly across them. Such examples include the programs of Environmental Humanities South at the University of Cape Town and the more technologically engaged Center for Anthropocene Studies at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon. The fact that disciplinary approaches often fall short of addressing the contemporary challenges of knowledge production has also resulted in Anthropocene-related discussions proliferating within less rigid and more experimental formats, which, in turn, are being adapted by established research institutions and academic bodies. For example, Fieldsights, the digital sister publication of the journal Cultural Anthropology, routinely uses its essay series Theorizing the Contemporary (2011–) to focus on themes such as multispecies care, geological anthropology, and the more-than-human in anthropology, underlining the still considerable relevance of anthropocenic questions for theoretical debate in that discipline.

Experimental and boundary practices by institutions

Within the arts, some very ambitious approaches using digital storytelling and narration have emerged that sustain critical interlinkages with scholarship and theoretical debates. Feral Atlas, which went online in 2020, stands out by mapping narratives on situated ecologies and entanglements of human and nonhuman actors through following the “feral”—that is to say, the unwanted ecological and globalizing effects of various infrastructures. This “Anthropocene ferality” guides the atlas’s tightly curated content. Users of the platform click and tumble through an unfolding online environment as they explore “ecologies that have been encouraged by human-built infrastructures, but which have developed and spread beyond human control.”

As a digital publication from a major university press (Stanford), Feral Atlas is rooted in ongoing theoretical discussions in the environmental humanities. However, through interdisciplinary collaboration—with artists and designers in particular—it aspires to go beyond academia’s fixation on research. Partly conceived as a tool for teaching in higher education, the platform folds essay-length texts into collaged maps, dynamic effects, and morphing tables, thereby “bringing visual, auditory, and kinesthetic elements of learning into relationship with text-based theory.” Another intention behind Feral Atlas is to generate teaching material that could have a meaningful impact on the younger generation of politicized climate justice activists. The idea that universities consist of cross-generational learning groups—and therefore bring together entirely different ways of relating to text, visual material, and online communication, as well as varying propensities to make content (as opposed to just consuming it)—suggests that online spaces could serve a greater diversity of learning styles than the average standard textbook currently accounts for.

In terms of its form and theoretical ambitions, a related project is the digital exhibition Critical Zones, which opened in 2020 and was initiated by the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM) in Germany. The platform was devised in response to the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions suddenly placed on what meant to be a major physical exhibition schedule to open in May 2020. The center reprioritized the production of the online platform over the physical exhibition, including hosting a multiday streaming event for the exhibition opening, offering guided tours through the new virtual space, and running an extensive workshop program into 2021. As for many other institutions, for ZKM the conditions of the pandemic greatly accelerated its turn toward the online dimension of a new dual mode of cultural programming, and the Critical Zones project seemingly met with an widespread audience enthusiastic to engage with the exploratory and pedagogical curation undertaken by theorists and artists Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel, Martin Guinard, and Bettina Korintenberg.

Critical Zones’s digital exhibition space bears some similarity to Feral Atlas, in that it enables nonlinear navigation, inviting visitors to explore the geo-social complexities of Earth’s near-surface layer, the so-called critical zone. In a digital space that mimics a physical exhibition environment, visitors can take different paths with titles like “contaminations” and “alternative cartography,” which lead through digital presentations of dozens of artworks. At the same time, the design tries to address different ways of interacting with the site, by offering prompts to reflect on one’s current bodily state and sensations. An interactive interface lets users leave traces and also displays the number of “other entities” currently visiting the site. The online exhibition space was complemented by a connected Telegram messenger group of over 1,000 users from around the globe, where exchanges about the program were shared. This group also included information on numerous Karlsruhe-based environmental and social initiatives. The user’s navigation of the digital exhibition and the expanded online experience echoes the attempted reorientation of Latour’s notion of becoming “terrestrial,” a collectively shared pedagogical challenge: learning to look beneath, around, and at one another differently.

New digital archiving practices

In addition to initiatives that use digital platforms to share narrative elements of their exhibitions and publications online, many others have opted for a more archive-like structure. Ocean Archive, launched in 2019, presents the work and network activities of TBA21–Academy that focuses on marine ecosystems. It also aims to act as a collaborative research tool and an archive for artistic, scientific, and policy-related content on ocean ecosystems worldwide. In contrast to the Feral Atlas and Critical Zones projects, Ocean Archive’s content is accumulating over time. As a combined pedagogical, research, and storytelling tool, the archive’s structure promotes a serendipitous mode of navigation that highlights the interlinkages between artistic, scientific, and (in a broad sense) political topics as users scroll through lists of nonhierarchical content collections. Ocean Archive is developing a separate curriculum approach under its community section, where, alongside several forums, semester-length online courses are held on topics at the intersection of artistic debate, ecological research, and environmental campaigning. The initiative’s promotion of “ocean literacy” constitutes another educational approach to the planetary situation of the Anthropocene.

Another project centered on providing open access to a vast depository of archival and library material is the Environment & Society Portal. It demonstrates how new institutional alliances can enable refined online portals, in this case as the result of a broad collaboration between Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the international Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, the Deutsches Museum in Munich, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Through different exploration tools, such as an interactive timeline and a keyword explorer to trace new connections between topics, the portal gives visitors various ways to delve into its broad, open-access materials and formats, including virtual exhibitions, a peer-reviewed journal, and a multimedia library.

Going part of the way together

This cursory overview of digital platforms seeking to navigate the Anthropocene offers a sense of the many existing groups and institutions that have expanded their practices, modes of communication, and methods of collaboration in the face of planetary environmental and societal challenges. Reviewing one’s modes of operation and trying out different functions to become more permeable (or even stretching the purposes of an organization’s spaces) is perhaps the main point where kinship exists between the Anthropocene Curriculum and other projects. Needless to say, within this panorama there still exist discursive gaps—parallel conversations between which no direct exchange occurs. This silo effect does not disappear by projects simply moving online. For example, many other actors who could have been mentioned in this survey, and who through their practices push forward agendas of redefining nature-culture boundaries and dismantling modernist extractivisms, do not take note of cultural initiatives, and vice versa. On the other hand, both cultural and academic institutions are also—and for good reason—becoming more and more wary that their hunger for activist and other marginalized content can be patronizing and of little use to their sometimes unequal partners. The challenges involved in building equitable partnerships despite different positioning require constant revisiting. A sense of political urgency is another aspect all the above-listed projects have in common. In parallel with the mainstreaming of some of the insights from the Anthropocene debate, growing attempts are being made to foreground how feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial movements are an essential part of this. Increasingly, traditional institutional mission statements are coming to terms with this reality.

Strengthening the curriculum aspect of the work presented on anthropocene-curriculum.org is a modest attempt at reviewing the dynamic trajectory that MPIWG and HKW have been tracing for the last ten years. Curriculum-making, as mentioned at the outset of this text, cannot be about offering a fixed learning program. The AC Courses therefore trace interconnections between existing in-process arguments, highlight overlaps in research, and offer recontextualization. Contributors often choose to speak against the background of current political questions and the differently perceived needs required to begin transforming pedagogical programs and spaces as well as modes of living and working. In doing so, many of the suggested pathways cover a lot of ground, revisiting previous debates while also looking ahead. A “curriculum” as we speak of it here—as a process and a pathway—is not made to teach and to be taught, but rather to enable us to go part of the way together.

This essay was co-authored by Andreas Doepke, Nick Houde, Katrin Klingan, Lorna McDowell, Christoph Rosol, Carlina Rossée, Georg N. Schäfer, and Fiona Shipwright.