The historical research project SPHERE focuses on one of the most comprehensive and complex governance issues in the contemporary world: humanity’s relation to planetary conditions and constraints.

How best can organizations reconcile alliance building, promote public discussions on environmental crises and nurture cultural shifts?

It’s possible that the most suitable golden spike for marking the beginning of the Anthropocene does not yet exist.

Knowledge of the onset of the Anthropocene is intimately connected to nuclear technoscience on the one hand and to the governance of environmental problems, such as atmospheric pollution, on the other.

Air pollution is currently the top environmental killer, but the fleeting nature of atmospheric pollution often keeps it from being observed through a global perspective and being included in the planetary cycles of the Anthropocene.

Venice’s critical environment is a paradigmatic case for comprehending socio-environmental history in dialogue with the Earth sciences.

How are the relationships between state, market, natural environments, and citizens understood? And how does this create or foreclose political and ethical agency?

From the context of the Kuils River near Cape Town, South Africa, Nikiwe Solomon and Adrian Van Wyk reckon with the question—whose knowledge really matters?

How can archival production be a catalyst for urgently needed action? Researchers Jason Ludwig and Tim Schütz reflect on networks of solidarity via the Formosa Plastics Archive.

Exploring the amorphous fabric of technologies, environments, and humans shaping Earth’s critical future.

A multi-scale map of the Mississippi watershed around St. Louis for the “river rats” of the Anthropocene.

Corporate personhood has rearticulated how agricultural giant Monsanto operates legally on the landscape.

The stretch of the Mississippi between Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa is marked both by its “natural” and “anthropogenic” origin.

This seminar will reflect on the challenges that mass migration, resource management, and market dynamics impose on the practitioners of architecture.

Exploring the tensions between the need for “politicizing nature” and the always-impending risk of “naturalizing politics.”

This seminar is devoted to collectively discussing this global and ubiquitous entity of the Anthropocene in its social, gendered, and material contexts.

The year 1948 serves as an aperture through which we can rethink the history of the now; the decisive moment when the heap of fragments left by the fury of two world wars began to reassemble into new forms of technological, scientific, and cultural order that inform our contemporary situation.

Anthropologist Chowra Makaremi works through the strangely technical choreography of “non-lethal” force and its implementation for detaining people at borders.

Political scientist Kim Rygiel investigates the difficult values that underlie the enforcement of who belongs in a political structure and who does not.

In a filmed conversation, activist Isabelle Saint-Saëns and migration scholar Bernd Kasparek discuss the multiform regimes of border-making and the types of social order being implemented in Europe and internationally.

The unleashing of the technosphere is, above all, the result of activating and operating numerous tiny switches. With the unfolding of information theory, cybernetics, and the microscopic power of the point-contact transistor, the year 1948 represents the material and theoretical starting point for a universal language of 0s and 1s. Contributions from theory and art oscillate between diagnostic and speculative accounts of the bit’s role in our present.

What techniques do we use when we navigate between the human voice, governmental law and the concept of justice in the technosphere?

What are future decision-makers learning at college today? And how will it effect the direction the Anthropocene is taking? Making the case for a change in the teaching of economics.

How can we grasp the immense physical and temporal dimensions of the technosphere and why should we isolate the human agency within it? An argument for taking a metropolitan perspective.

What forms of futurity, speculation, and life do algorithmic intermediations produce? To explore this it seems expedient to focus on “smartness,” a term legitimating—as in the “smart home”—the increased introduction of computation in social life.

How is the Technosphere governed? And how could it be governed otherwise? One way to tackle these issues is by looking at cybernetic finance—showing how a complex system can be overtaken by an excess of self-reference.

Data, evidence, truth—these grades of the factual form an intricate reference system in which current social and juridical knowledge is established and maintained. How is factual knowledge constituted within and through the technosphere? The evening examines how the concept of legal truth and truth finding is bound to the technical production of certainty.

The scenario has become a mode of knowledge of the first order. In fact, “running in scenario mode” seems to be the way in which contemporary existence, through the vision of this exploratory practice and tool, exemplifies learning and researching in and on the Anthropocene itself. This evening deals with the trans-methodical arrangement of scenario building and analysis and its specific formatting through institutional and media-based infrastructures.

2009 was the year the United Nations COP15 took place in Copenhagen, infamous for the secret agreement drafted among the G20, the so-called “Danish Text.” In response, the Ambassador and spokesperson for the G77, Lumumba Di-Aping, called a press conference and addressed the plenary accusing the G20 of genocide. With Paul N. Edwards, Adrian Lahoud, and Alejandra Torres Camprubí.