Roar Hostaker

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).

The project

Title: From the Anthropocene to the Planetary

"Since the early 2000s the concept of Anthropocene has to some extent re-focused the debate over the environmental crises in our time. This concept, originally formulated as a new geological epoch in which humankind has become a geological force, spread early from the geo-sciences to other intellectual fields (Davison 2019). The project wants to pose the following questions: To what extent have the perspectives on the ecological crises changed with this concept? How can we develop these perspectives further? Even from the earliest formulations of this concept within the confines of geo-chemistry (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Crutzen 2002) there was a vision of political and social agency, which 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 topics for a wide range different perspectives – including social theory which is the field of this project. Within social theory there is already a flourishing amount of literature discussing the concept of the Anthropocene (See e.g., Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016; Malm 2016; Moore 2015; Charbonnier 2021; Neyrat 2019; Hamilton 2017; Chakrabarty 2009; Haraway 2016). The aim of this project is to critically discuss the perspectives in some of this literature and it shall concentrate on the following topics:

1. the tendency in this literature to tells different stories about the Anthropocene that are only partially compatible with each other;
2. how some contributions to the debate over the contemporary and future situation of humankind de facto function as a counternarrative to the ecological discourse;
3. how the literature on the Anthropocene promotes certain understandings of life indicating the principles for a new regime of biopolitical regulation.

The final goal of the project is to write a manuscript for a book."

Hosting institution: Centre de Recherches Historiques (CRH) - École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

Selective Bibliography

• Under ein evig synsvinken (In an eternal perspective) in Agora, no.1-2, 2024, pp.532-542.
• Zur Ökologie des Computers, (About the ecology of computers) in Lettre International, Herbst 2022, pp.128-130
• Mythos Immaterialitât (The myth of immateriality) in Lettre International 2021 (134) Herbst pp. 36-42
• L’immaterialité de l’information, in Revue Esprit, 2021, no.476, juillet-août, pp. 147-159.
• Un choc dans les chaînes d'approvisionnnement (A shock in the supply chains) in S.Kuriyama, O. de Leonardis, C. Sonnenschein and I. Thioub (eds.) Covid-19: Tour du monde (2020), Paris: Éditions Manucius, pp. 106-107.