Spatial Figures
in the Anthropocene

The symposium and annual conference of the CRC 1265, ‘Spatial Figures in the Anthropocene’, explores how the concept and reality of the Anthropocene disfigure and refigure four key spatial figures of Western modernity: the place, the territory, the network, and the route.

Engagements with climate change and the planetary in the social sciences and humanities have challenged conventional analytical distinctions between global and local as well as human and nonhuman spaces. Tim Morton’s (2013) influential conceptualization of global warming as a hyperobject emphasizes how it transcends human scales of time-space experience and action, thus becoming a viscous, non-local process. At the same time, authors like Bruno Latour (2017) point out the inadequacy of the modern figure of globalization and of understanding the Earth as a globe. In times of climate crisis, he argues, the Earth emerges as Gaia: not a super-organism or system, but rather a rhizome of organism-environment relationships. As these two interventions exemplify, the multiple environmental and planetary crises associated with the Anthropocene fundamentally challenge the scalar logic and figures of modern understandings of space.

Facilitating an interdisciplinary conversation about these transformations seems crucial because of the pervasiveness of spatial categories and imaginaries. The symposium thus brings together leading scholars from anthropology, sociology, architectural theory, science and technology studies, urban studies, and human geography to collectively meet these challenges while reaching a heterogeneous public audience of researchers and practitioners.

Alexandra Arènes
Andrew Baldwin
Jennifer Gabrys
Gastón Gordillo
Susanne Hauser
Christopher Kelty
Marcela Suárez Estrada
Tomás Usón

Ignacio Farías and Silke Steets for the Collaborative Research Center ‘Re-Figuration of Spaces’ (CRC 1265) in collaboration with the ICI Berlin