This wide‑ranging volume addresses the changing landscape of problems, challenges, and possibilities that emerge once the macroscopic notion of the Anthropocene is replaced with Southern Anthropocenes. It envisions Southern Anthropocenes as an opening towards forms and ends of life that exceed—while remaining in partial relation with—modern socio‑economic horizons and the determinations of the geo‑, eco‑, and climate sciences.
What happens if Southern Anthropocenes are allowed to multiply, and room is made for practices of worlding and life that are impossible from within the singular Anthropocene?
Key issues include emergent interfaces between beings, ways of living, and worlds; problems of co‑existence in and across pluriversal contact zones; explorations of liveability under rapidly changing circumstances; speculations about other futures and how to invent them; investigations of more‑than‑human itineraries and entangled territories; and explorations of how to collectively invent the portals between ways of thinking and acting on a planet in a critical state. It will be essential reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in Sociology, Anthropology, Critical Education, Environmental Humanities, Science and Technology Studies, Geography, and Urban Studies.
Edited by:
Casper Bruun Jensen
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 254mm,
Width: 178mm,
ISBN: 9781041102625
ISBN 10: 1041102623
Series: CRESC
Pages: 370
Publication Date: 24 September 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
Introduction: Southern Anthropocenes Part 1. Emergent Interfaces Introduction: Emergent Interfaces 1. Welcome to the End of the World: Thinking beyond the Separation of Human and Geological Temporalities 2. Tropical Cargoscapes: Sojourning Putridities in the Afterlives of Medical Necrowaste in Colombo 3. Diving into the Underwater Anthropocene: Vital Materiality and the Becoming of a Shipwreck 4. Gardens at the Edge of the Sky: Toward an Entropological Pact Part 2. Problems of Co-existence Introduction: Problems of Co-existence 5. Wounded Lands, Resentful Mountains, and Mourning Maize: The Ecological Violence of War and Peace in Latin America 6. Anthropocene Relations and the ‘Human activity’ in Zimbabwe’s Forest Reserves 7. Difference and Disobedience: Inhabiting the Southern Anthropocene 8. The Plasticene and the Global South Part 3. Livable Worlds Introduction: Liveable Worlds 9. To Forego: An Ethics for the Urban Anthropocene 10. Kinship in the Technosphere: From Ishimure Michiko’s Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow to Miyazaki Hayao’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind 11. For a World where Mutual Worlds Fit: Political Ontology in the Anthropocene Part 4. Speculations Introduction: Speculations (or, how to inhabit the pluriverse?) 12. Decolonial Portals as Pedagogical Practice 13. Anthropocenes Off-Earth 14. How to Construct a Time Machine: The Anthropocene in an Indigo Vat 15. Speculation as Method: World-Building and Collective (Un-)Learning for the Anthropocene Part 5. More-than-Human Itineraries Introduction: More-than-Human Itineraries 16. Street Feeding Stray Cats: A Multi-Species Cosmopolitics in Urban Indonesia 17. Migratory Birds, Migratory Lives: A Brackish Contact Zone in Bang Pu, Thailand 18. Artisans of the Plasticene: Polytanks and Plasticities in Urban Ghana 19. Reclaiming Country: Australian Aboriginal Walking Trails as Method Part 6. Entangled Territories Introduction: Entangled Territories 20. Under the Plastic Tarp: Memory and a Southern Anthropocene in California’s Pajaro Valley 21. Arctic Worlds in Southern Anthropocenes 22. How to Survive Medicine in the Anthropocene? 23. After the End of the World: Another Season of War in South Lebanon Postscript. What Tales will We Leave the Children of Tomorrow? Story-Trading across Southern Anthropocenes
Casper Bruun Jensen is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He is the author of Ontologies for Developing Things (2010) and Monitoring Movements in Development Aid with Brit Ross Winthereik (2013) and the editor of Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology with Kjetil Rödje (2009) and Infrastructures and Social Complexity with Penny Harvey and Atsuro Morita (2016). His work focuses on climate, environments, infrastructures, and speculative and practical ontologies.
Reviews for Southern Anthropocenes
""Since the Anthropocene was proposed, we have known that while the causes are ‘human’ we must be freed from the ‘Human’ to allow for making plural, ways of living and thinking. Southern Anthropocenes does so by creating a plane of consistency for multiplicities. It is an urgently needed collective undertaking."" Déborah Danowski, Professor Emeritus at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ""Written from the archives and territories of a diverse array of ecological situations and struggles, Southern Anthropocenes rekindles our hope in social theory’s ability to attune to the stream of life. This acutely present, yet anticipatory volume functions as a collective composition that explicitly seeks out divergence, showing why and how social theory must recommence the active search for portals and contact zones to worlds beyond the modern. The “anthropocene variations” within illuminate portals into regenerative ways of worlding emerging from the multiple souths that inhabit the planet."" Arturo Escobar, author of Designs for the Pluriverse (2018), Pluriversal Politics (2020) and Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human (2024, with Michal Osterweil and Kriti Sharma). ""Southern Anthropocenes is the collection of conceptual revisions, perspectival realignments, and theoretical openings that we have all been waiting for! Its authors dismantle the idea of a unitary Anthropocene by taking readers on a rhizomatic journey through strategies of world making and problem solving across the globe, showcasing the myriad modes through which people have exceeded imperial pathways to modernity and humanity, and the innumerable lessons to be absorbed about coping with planetary transformation. By eschewing easy reversals and embracing the idea of pluriversal contact zones, Southern Anthropocenes asks us to reorient both our empirical and analytic gazes to attune ourselves to radical forms of co-existing and relational repair – it is a must read!"" Deborah A. Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, Director, Center for Experimental Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania, USA
