Dr. Sebastian P. Klinger
What does the Anthropocene mean to you?
In my view, the concept of the Anthropocene brings forth extraordinarily productive analyses of the enormous ecological and sociocultural crisis of our present, a crisis that marks a caesura in both earth and human history. Even though the geologists of the International Commission on Stratigraphy have yet to confirm the Anthropocene as an official geological epoch and even though social scientists and philosophers have proposed a plethora of more specialized alternative names, as a cultural concept the Anthropocene is helpful: it goes a long way to throw into sharp relief the myriad interconnected problems stemming from human geological agency. This is most evident in anthropogenic climate change and the sixth mass extinction. Addressing the multidimensionality of these problems requires inventing novel forms of interdisciplinary collaboration at an unprecedented scale.
How does the Anthropocene play a role in your work?
The epistemic challenges spawned by the Anthropocene are about to transform both the humanities and interdisciplinary dialogue. As a scholar whose work connects literary and cultural studies to science studies, I am engaging in a longstanding exchange with disciplines that are crucial to understanding our current predicament but have traditionally rarely been considered important for the humanities, such as Earth System Science. The contribution of literary and cultural studies to the joint endeavor of tackling the Anthropocene, however, differs from that of the natural sciences and engineering: Literary and cultural scholars are experts in nuanced historical and societal contextualization, analysis, and critique. The challenges we face in the Anthropocene are so intricate because they go beyond mere technical problems—they cut to the core of the cultural and political imagination. Foregrounding this fact is one of my major objectives.
What project(s) are you working on during your fellowship at the Forum Basiliense?
I’m working on my current book project which investigates imaginaries of planetary habitability in science and fiction. People all over the world have been thinking about habitability and uninhabitability for many centuries, but the Anthropocene radically unsettles these traditional bodies of knowledge. This leads to the question: In what ways does the Anthropocene alter the understanding of planetary habitability? These changes are interrogated in my book project. Bringing together ideas from the environmental humanities, the history of science, and literary studies, the book project discloses not only a rich cultural and literary history but also offers new insights into the theory of planetary habitability.