Connectedness – An Incomplete Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene

Associate Professor Anders Blok and PhD Fellow Nikolaj Schultz have contributed to the anthology ‘Connectedness - An Incomplete Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene’, published by Strandberg Publishing.

The anthology, edited by Marianne Krogh, considers the totality of issues surrounding the ‘Anthropocene’, the geologic era characterised by humanity’s vast impact on the Earth.

The anthology is a so-called incomplete encyclopaedia, which does not claim to draw an accurate, complete picture of a changing planet, but instead views the anthropocene from several positions and based on different disciplines. The book attempts to capture the most important positions in the debate by asking the over-arching questions: How do we live together? And who are we when we are not only human but also nature?

In the book, Anders Blok writes about ’climate risk communities’, a concept coined by sociologist Ulrich Beck to diagnose the major, transnational, and unequal rewriting of senses of collectivity and belonging in the Anthropocene era. Blok was part of researching urban- and civic-based climate risk communities together with Beck prior to the latter’s premature death in 2015.

Nikolaj Schultz has contributed with two chapters:

The first chapter, 'Geo-Social Classes', argues that to define social classes in the Anthropocene, it no longer suffices to focus on ownership over the means of production. Instead, we need to direct our attention to a wider array of material conditions that allows social collectives to subsist.

The second capter, 'Moving Earths', is an interview with Nikolaj Schultz' collaborator Bruno Latour and it also features a discussion on geo-social classes, as well as an investigation of the cosmological changes that makes such class redefinitions necessary.

In addition to these chapters, the anthology contains contributions from almost 100 Danish and international authors, researchers, philosophers, artists and architects, including Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Peter Weibel, Greta Thunberg, Björk, Connie Hedegaard, Minik Rosing, Carsten Jensen , Josefine Klougart, SUPERFLEX and Tomás Saraceno.

The book can be purchased directly from Strandberg Publishing.