CFP

Call for Papers:

Unsettling Dystopias in the Anthropocene

(updated on 9 September 2025)

Over the past two decades, the concept of the Anthropocene has sparked debates at the intersection of the natural sciences and the humanities. Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen popularized the term in 2000 to designate our current geological epoch. While the stable climate of the Holocene supported human civilization for the past 12,000 years, collective human activity now threatens to exceed planetary boundaries—a framework introduced by Johan Rockström (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research) in 2009.

In Anthropocene discourse, James Lovelock’s description of the “planetary ecosystem” (or Gaia) as a living entity gained wide acceptance. In Facing Gaia (2017), French philosopher Bruno Latour critiques modern science and economics for “de-animating the world,” arguing that the Earth system possesses “agency” and reacts to human activity. Latour defines the Anthropocene as “the multiform reaction of the Earth to human enterprises.”

Postcolonial author Amitav Ghosh explores the implications of this reanimated agency in his poetics of the Anthropocene. In The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021), he suggests that restoring “agency” to nonhuman forces through imaginative writing can help humans recognize their shared influence with the planet.

The Anthropocene debate highlights humanity’s responsibility for climate change, ocean acidification, rising sea levels, and the Sixth Mass Extinction—in short, the planetary environmental crisis. Humanity now acts as a geological force, comparable to volcanoes, meteorites, and plate tectonics. The destructive potential of this agency is evident in the capacity to annihilate the planet’s thin habitable zone with nuclear weapons.

Environmental historian Jason W. Moore and philosopher Kohei Saito have reframed the Anthropocene as the Capitalocene, attributing the ecological crisis to capitalism’s logic of infinite accumulation. Saito argues that this dynamic creates a metabolic rift with the Earth system, leading to catastrophic climate change. As a countermeasure, he calls for degrowth as a strategy to combat overconsumption.

The negative connotations of the Anthropocene—industrialization, population growth, and biodiversity loss—have inspired a range of dystopian narratives. The myth of Godzilla is one of the most enduring: as an allegory of the Earth system, Godzilla responds with rage to human contamination through nuclear testing, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and the Fukushima reactor disaster. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) portrays a dystopian scenario where a deadly heatwave in India kills 20 million people, highlighting the human cost of climate change. Echoing Jared Diamond’s Collapse (2005), dystopian narratives often reflect suicidal tendencies of human-caused ecocide.

From a dystopian perspective, the Anthropocene represents the peak of humanity’s destructive impact on the environment, leading to climate change, ecological collapse, and social destabilization. Fictional works such as Octavia Butler’s Parable (1993–1998) series and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006, film adaptation 2009) envision post-apocalyptic worlds where nature overwhelms humanity, highlighting the consequences of technological overreach. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) explores environmental decay alongside social and economic inequality, underscoring the Anthropocene’s intersection with global justice issues.

Key Questions for Discussion:

Human agency: Is it appropriate to attribute to humanity an agency comparable to that of volcanoes or tectonic activity?
Earth’s agency: Can the biosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere be regarded as having agency? Does seemingly inert matter (e.g., limestone, coral calcium) possess the capacity to retroact against human impact?
Dating the Anthropocene: Should the “bomb spike”—the global radioactive layer from nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s—serve as a formal geological marker between the Holocene and the Anthropocene?
Mass extinction: Can the current wave of biodiversity loss (e.g., overfishing, pesticide-driven insect extinction) justify defining a new geological epoch?
Geoengineering vs. degrowth: Should humanity attempt to counteract climate change through geoengineering, as suggested by Crutzen and Lovelock, or adopt a degrowth strategy to reduce human pressure on the planet?
Narrative strategies: Should dystopian crisis narratives serve as a shock therapy to prevent humanity from crossing planetary boundaries? Or would more optimistic appeals to human responsibility and environmental stewardship be more effective?

The Anthropocene presents a challenge for a wide range of disciplines. This symposium aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue between the sciences and the humanities—bridging fields such as biology, geology, and physics with economy, history, philosophy, and literary studies. We welcome contributions from scholars engaged with questions raised by both the environmental sciences and the environmental humanities. In addition to papers, we invite proposals for roundtable discussions addressing the key questions outlined above. We are particularly interested in contributions that explore dystopian narratives in popular science, literature, and film, examining the philosophical and historical implications of the Anthropocene and strategies for addressing the planetary crisis.

Unfortunately, travel and accommodation expenses cannot be covered by the event team. Therefore, we kindly ask you to seek funding in advance. Speakers who teach at a German university can apply for support from the DAAD.

Abstract submission deadline: September 30, 2025
Length: Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words. Please attach a short academic biography (3-4 lines)
Contacts: Thomas Schwarz (schwarz_9_17-anthropocene2026@yahoo.com); Lay Sion NG (laysionng@sophia.ac.jp)