Southern Anthropocenes

Casper Bruun Jensen editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd

Publishing:24th Sep '25

£39.99

This title is due to be published on 24th September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Southern Anthropocenes cover

This wide ranging volume addresses the changing landscape of problems, challenges, and possibilities that emerge once the macroscopic notion of the Anthropocene is replaced with Southern Anthropocenes. It envisions Southern Anthropocenes as an opening towards forms and ends of life that exceeds—while remaining in partial relation with—modern socio-economic horizons and the determinations of the geo-, eco-, and climate sciences.

What happens if Southern Anthroposcenes are allowed to multiply, and room is made for practices of worlding and life that are impossible from within the singular Anthropocene?

Key issues include emergent interfaces between beings, ways of living, and worlds; problems of co-existence in and across pluriversal contact zones; explorations of livability under rapidly changing circumstances; speculations about other futures and how to invent them; investigations of more-than human itineraries and entangled territories; and explorations how to collectively invent the portals between ways of thinking and acting on a planet in a critical state. It will be essential reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in Sociology, Anthropology, Critical Education, Environmental Humanities, Science and Technology Studies, Geography and Urban Studies.

"Since the Anthropocene was proposed, we have known that while the causes are ‘human’ we must be freed from the ‘Human’ to allow for making plural, ways of living and thinking. Southern Anthropocenes does so by creating a plane of consistency for multiplicities. It is an urgently needed collective undertaking."

Déborah Danowski, Professor Emeritus at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

"Written from the archives and territories of a diverse array of ecological situations and struggles, Southern Anthropocenes rekindles our hope in social theory’s ability to attune to the stream of life. This acutely present, yet anticipatory volume functions as a collective composition that explicitly seeks out divergence, showing why and how social theory must recommence the active search for portals and contact zones to worlds beyond the modern.

The 'anthropocene variations' within illuminate portals into regenerative ways of worlding emerging from the multiple souths that inhabit the planet."

Arturo Escobar, author of Designs for the Pluriverse (2018), Pluriversal Politics (2020) and Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human (2024, with Michal Osterweil and Kriti Sharma)

"Southern Anthropocenes is the collection of conceptual revisions, perspectival realignments, and theoretical openings that we have all been waiting for! Its authors dismantle the idea of a unitary Anthropocene by taking readers on a rhizomatic journey through strategies of world making and problem solving across the globe, showcasing the myriad modes through which people have exceeded imperial pathways to modernity and humanity, and the innumerable lessons to be absorbed about coping with planetary transformation. By eschewing easy reversals and embracing the idea of pluriversal contact zones, Southern Anthropocenes asks us to reorient both our empirical and analytic gazes to attune ourselves to radical forms of co-existing and relational repair – it is a must read!"

Deborah A. Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, Director, Center for Experimental Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania, USA

ISBN: 9781041102625

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

400 pages