Description
We are now living in what many describe as the Anthropocene, a new epoch that defines humans as a geological force (Cruzen & Stoermer, 2000). Unmonitored carbon emissions, non-sustainable business practices and a host of other human activities are contributing to permanent changes to the earth’s surface, biodiversity, climate and ecosystem. These and other changes to the planet has formed profound environmental risks including sea level rises, coastal erosion, severe weather systems and the extinction of species (Lewis & Maslin, 2018). Against this background, it is becoming increasingly clear that concepts of both ‘security’ and ‘life’ are undergoing radical transformations. In this panel we seek to address questions related to the task of grasping what these transformations involve and how they might contribute to a new understanding of what it means to speak of the security of life in the Anthropocene. We are especially interested in critically interrogating public as well as academic discourses on the Anthropocene, and how those discourses ‘perform’ certain ways of thinking about the security of life. The method is ‘performative’ in this sense, as it looks at how certain literatures produce conceptions of life that we need to question, problematize and articulate alternatives to.
