From the Anthropocene to the Planetary

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

Roar Høstaker is Professor of sociology at the Department of Organization and Management, University of Inland Norway. Doctorate from the University of Bergen in 1997 and teaching at Lillehammer University College from 1998. Full professor in sociology from 2014. In 2020 he was a resident fellow of the Nantes Institute of Advanced Studies and invited teacher at the University of Nantes. Specialising in sociological theory, his most recent book is 'A Different Society Altogether: What Sociology Can Learn from Deleuze, Guattari, and Latour' (2014).

Presentation of the project

"Since the early 2000s the concept of Anthropocene has to some extent re-focused the debate over the environmental crises in our time. It has to some extent taken over for sustainability as a unifying concept and it was originally proposed as a new geological epoch in which humankind has become a geological force. Although the geological sciences in March 2024 decided not to admit it as a new epoch, it will continue to do function as an important frame of reference. The reason for its continued “life” is the understanding of how society and nature, humankind and the planet, is intertwined. Earth processes are not becoming less affected by the activities of human beings in our time, and we will not be less affected by the planet’s reactions to our exploitation of its resources in the future. From the earliest formulations of the concept of the Anthropocene within the Earth System science there was a vision of political and social agency. This means that ecological problems like climate change, mass extinction of species, and the deterioration of the oceans and the surface of the Earth, cannot be understood as pure technical problems; they are the topics of a wide range different perspectives – including in sociology. The title From the Anthropocene to the Planetary should entail some kind of development, and the Earth System science is based on a planetary perspective. The consequences of this fact were late to taken up by scholars in the human and social sciences, but I think it is pertinent to conceptualise the relationship between the ecological crisis and the geopolitical changes taking place in the 2020s."

Speaker

• Roar Høstaker is Professor of sociology at the Department of Organization and Management, University of Inland Norway.