Reclaiming a Scholarship of Presence: Building Alternative Socio-environmental Imaginaries

This chapter questions the rapid ascent of “the Anthropocene” within critical humanities and social science, arguing that the imaginary of the Anthropocene itself may in fact be the most political thing about it. Even critical engagement adds symbolic power and scholarly weight to an emergent new master narrative that “naturalizes” capitalism. The chapter traces how a renewed intellectual responsibility could be configured through co-researching processes of subjectification, commoning, resistance, and hope—to give symbolic and ontological gravitas to alternative reconfigurations. This “scholarship of presence” can construct an archaeology for a new future, producing alternative master frames and radical imaginaries for socio-environmental change.