An Anthropocene Abécédaire
With Art Education professor and artist Jessie Beier, University of Alberta MA student Dylan Hall, and University of Alberta PhD student Danika Jorgensen Skakum, I am working on an Anthropocene Abécédaire. Like a children's ABC book, but instead of A is for Antelope, B is for Bear, C is for Cat... A is for Anthropocene, B is for a Billion Black Anthropocenes, and C is for Capitalocene, we will provide an accessible introduction to the naming debates around our current geological era and time of eco-castastrophe. We have received a Research Development grant as seed funds for this project from the University of Alberta Intersections of Gender Signature Area.
Fabulating an Abécédaire
Our idea for fabulating an Abécédaire for these End Times came about through the work we have been exploring together and individually over the last several years. In a course I taught on Feminism at the End of the World, Dylan (left) pitched the idea of writing an accessible book on the names for this epoch that would serve as a bridge between academia and the general public. As Dylan imagined it, the book would not aim to join the current academic trend of arguing for the best name, but would layer these different ideas like compost, generating heat through (de)composing different disciplines to think the unthinkable as both and more, rather than either/or. Meanwhile, and inspired by the pedagogical force of texts such as L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, Jessie (middle) was collecting names from the Anthropocene naming debates in alphabetical order, and had incorporated the collaborative writing of an Abécédaire into her environmental feminisms course, with undergraduate students writing on different names to create a class book. As Jessie has observed, a Deleuzian approach to an Abécédaire urges us to ask, not what do these different concepts mean, but what do they do? Combining our interests and commitments, we decided to write Epocholyptic Scenes: An Anthropocene Abécédaire, an illustrated ABC book on catastrophic environmental times. We could not imagine writing this book without Danika (right), a doctoral student in Political Science who is also at work on what Jessie describes as “Unthinking the End.”
