It began as a disagreement about nouns, adjectives, and articles. In the fall of 2014, I had proposed a new class at the University of Texas at Austin meant to be entitled The Anthropocene. The appropriate paperwork was submitted, and came back rejected, with an explanation that courses could not have “The” at the start of the course title because that would hinder sorting alphabetically. In addition, the word “Epoch” was preemptively added to my proposed course title, making it a plan to teach on the “Anthropocene Epoch.” It took several iterations with the respective staff to compromise on Anthropocene, which struck me as somewhat stark as a course title. However, this rewording would not expose me to possible backlash from geologists who might be concerned about a course discussing a geological epoch not (yet) approved by the appropriate committees and membership of the International Union of Geological Sciences and their International Commission on Stratigraphy (Mahli 2017). On the first day of class, I recounted this history to the students as a means of communicating to them the preliminary nature both of the course itself (first time taught, without a permanent number for the course catalog) and of the topic, which is and was an active area of inquiry but also a source of debate. I facetiously suggested that I would in fact like to teach it as Anthropocene! with the exclamatory punctuation added in order to highlight the controversies that surround the concept. For teaching purposes, I think controversial topics are useful devices for discussion; this essay also makes the point that such topics may also be helpful for constructing research agendas across interdisciplinary spaces. In the last two decades, a growing awareness of Earth System science approaches (Stanley and Luczaj 2014) has engendered a convergence of parts of Geography (NRC 2010) with other disciplines that are attempting to evaluate and predict future consequences of anthropogenic changes in atmospheric gases, land cover, and the various feedback processes. For example, species distributions, ecological and climatic conditions, and disturbance regimes are all shifting, both in relation to global change processes and with regard to various human-caused alterations (e.g., Hannah 2012; Bowman 2014). In this essay, I suggest that these concerns can be interrogated utilizing the concept of the Anthropocene both for teaching and for research.
ABSTRACT
PUBLICATION RECORD
- Publication year
2019
- Venue
Geografická revue
- Publication date
2019-04-01
- Fields of study
Education, Environmental Science, History
- Identifiers
- External record
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Semantic Scholar
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