Finding common ground: The global Anthropocene Curriculum experiment

Abstract

The daunting crisis of the Anthropocene cannot be adequately addressed without re-envisioning our conceptual approach to knowledge formation. This background essay to the double special issue on the Mississippi River provides an account on the Anthropocene Curriculum (AC) initiative, the general framework in which the Mississippi. An Anthropocene River project was devised and implemented. The AC is an ambitious, long-term attempt to model and test experimental forms of post-disciplinary collaboration in order to come up with sensible and experiential strategies of co-learning and co-producing critical knowledge in a rapidly changing planetary situation. The AC essentially explores the novel epistemic, aesthetic, and educational challenges presented by the transition into the new geo-human epoch, foregrounding collective, constructive and transformative practices of research, and education across the sciences, arts, and humanities that help to interlink and integrate the existing pluralities of earth-bound knowledge forms. Developed by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science since 2013, the undertaking has grown today into a global network of partner projects, one of which was the two-year project on the Mississippi River Basin. The AC experiment is thus directly tied to the research and teaching contexts of other geographic, cultural, and institutional settings that together map the larger terrain of altered human-Earth relations.