Theory for the Anthropocene

Roy Scranton, Stephanie Wakefield, and McKenzie Wark participated in a lecture on the Anthropocene.

Our world is changing. Rising seas, spiking temperatures, and extreme weather imperil global infrastructure, crops, and water supplies. Our greatest enemy, it turns out, is ourselves. The warmer, wetter, more chaotic world we now live in — the Anthropocene — demands an intensive rethinking of the project of our species-being.

Might the various traditions of critical theory be a resource for thinking the Anthropocene? This is the topic that Roy Scranton, Stephanie Wakefield, and McKenzie Wark will attempt to explore in this event.

Author, journalist, Iraq war veteran, and Princeton Ph.D candidate Roy Scranton‘s journalism, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Boston Review, Contemporary Literature, and elsewhere. His book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, has just been published by City Lights.

Stephanie Wakefield is co-founder of Woodbine in Ridgewood, Queens, and a geographer at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is currently finishing a book on oysters and the “becoming infrastructure of nature/becoming nature of infrastructure,” and teaching Urban Environmental Studies at Queens College.

McKenzie Wark is the author, most recently, of Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (Verso Books), and teaches in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research.

This event is sponsored by Liberal Studies, The New School for Social Research.