PhD Courses in Denmark

Dates and time: 18 June 2024 from 10:00 to 17:00

This graduate seminar explores recent critical challenges to the Anthropocene paradigm. Thinking relationally across scales and systems, we will consider the epistemic stakes of naming and shaming causal agents of intensifying ecological urgency. With a particular focus on vulnerability, rather than culpability, as a gathering concern, we will read across feminist and Indigenous science studies and decolonial anthropology to propose multispecies, multimodal, multi-situated alternatives to the semantic stop sign of the Anthropocene. Ultimately, the Anthropocene’s category trouble – flattening culpability for climate harms across the human species – requires thinking with and against it, recognizing that periodization matters to the project of narrativizing ecocide.

Upon finalizing the course, it is possible to enjoy a dinner together at a restaurant in walking distance from CSS, UCPH (self-pay).

The Department of Anthropology at UCPH will host an informal Friday seminar with Dr. Rebecca Journey on Friday 21 June as well as she will give a talk at the Center for Applied Ecological Thinking at UCPH on Monday 24 June building on topics related to the workshop. Students are encouraged to participate in one or both events.

Academic Aim

The course introduces students to the disciplinary debate within sociocultural anthropology about geologic periodization, drawing from current literature in the environmental humanities and science studies, as well as classic and contemporary works of social theory.

In order to pass the course, in discussions, students should be able to:

• Articulate the key claims and affordances of the Anthropocene concept and identify some of its limits and potentials.

• Articulate the key claims and affordances of conceptual challenges to the Anthropocene and identify some of their limits and potentials.

• Argue persuasively either for or against the Anthropocene as a canonical anthropological framework, engaging the critiques of at least two alternatives.

Target group: PhD-students from different faculties including the social sciences, law, and the humanities.

Course lecturer: Rebecca Journey, Lecturer, Global Studies, University of Chicago

Course organizers
Anna Kirstine Schirrer, Postdoc, Center for Applied Ecological Thinking, University of Copenhagen (anks@hum.ku.dk).
Line Kvartborg Vestergaard, PhD student, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen (linek@anthro.ku.dk).

Programme: TBA.

Language: English

ECTS: 1

Max. numbers of participants: 10

Course fee: PhD students from CBS are charged DKK 1,200 per ECTS.

Preparation: Preparatory readings TBA.

Registration: Please register via the link in the box no later than 4 June 2024.

Further information: For more information about the PhD course, please contact the PhD Administration (phd@hrsc.ku.dk).

Literature: Approx. 150 pages preparatory readings, TBA