About the presentation
Reflecting on a recent three-decade review of the social-ecological sciences of False Bay in Cape Town that was co-authored by 32 South African-based scientists, this essay draws on current Anthropocene scholarship in the environmental humanities and social sciences to suggest four approaches to strengthening trans-disciplinarity engagement between social and natural sciences.
First, the material flows between the fields categorised as "nature" and "society" is suggested as an alternative empirical base for integrative transdisciplinary research, building on emergent transdisciplinary fields including industrial ecology, biogeochemical sciences, circular economics and critical zone scholarship.
Second, a humanities-informed conversation in South African scholarship invites discussion as to whether and how the conceptual categories of nature and society remain empirically useful, given the evidence in Anthropocene stratigraphy that human living is terra-forming. Third, humanities scholarship is vital for the scholarly assessment of historical and contemporary datasets and scientific publications. Fourth, the theorisation of "social systems", "the human", "society", and "eco-system services" in the social-ecological approaches represented in the review, create a barrier for social scientists to take up invitations to transdisciplinary research partnerships.
The above concerns, taken together, frame an alternative approach to transdisciplinary research that is tentatively suggested as an "anthropocenography": a research paradigm based on material flows in the Anthropocene.
While this critique has focused on the review of research on a single bay offered by a cohort of 32 natural scientists, the invitation to contemporary social scientists in South Africa is implicit, and urgent. Both "calling in" and "calling out" are transformational tools. Our work warrants more than a default to the exposé, if we are to build generative engagements with allies in the natural sciences with whom we dissent.
Simultaneously, the invitation to natural scientists is to engage deeply with emerging environmental social sciences and humanities literatures in pursuit of habitability amid the planetary challenges that are already with us - and those to come.
About the presenter
Lesley Green is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Environmental Humanities South at the University of Cape Town. She was recently a Cheney Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds, working to build stronger social science and humanities engagement with earth and life sciences.
This lecture is supported by the INTPART project Strengthening Environmental Anthropology Research and Education Through Interdisciplinary Methods and Collaborations.