Edited version, originally published in May 2019 as part of the Anthropocene Curriculum
Field campuses are experiments in collaborative field research, a method in which local people partner with “outsiders” to characterize the local dimensions of the Anthropocene in a particular site. By organizing the St. Louis Anthropocene Field Campus (March 7–10, 2019) we aimed to create situated, place-based perspectives of the Anthropocene, while also building new modes of collective knowledge-production and action.
Over a total of four days (see the field campus agenda here), participants learned from representatives in energy governance, environmental protection, policy, media, culture and arts of the St. Louis region about local tactics for drawing out the many scales (nano to macro) of the Anthropocene. In addition, participants learned of the types of systems (including ecological, social, cultural, political, economic, technological, and atmospheric) that together produce what the social theorists Eli Elinoff and Tyson Vaughan have termed “Quotidian Anthropocenes.”
As the field campus was part of the collaborative Mississippi. An Anthropocene River project (organized by Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), participants were also encouraged to develop and work on themes–such as energy transition or civic data infrastructure–that cut across sites along the entire Mississippi River basin and beyond. We organized this work around a set of twelve questions, which we engage with through multiple field campuses, as well as in ongoing online meetings called the Open Seminar, and digital archiving and comparative research projects, all hosted on The Disaster-STS Network platform.
Our field school experience speaks to the potential for locally grounded, place-based undertakings to generate new modes of engagement with the Anthropocene. As the following videos and text detail, the campus offered an opportunity to experiment with collaborative field notes, for both locals and “outsiders” to participate in collective knowledge production and exchange, to facilitate grounded engagements with anthropocenic landscapes, and to generate new modes to archive different quotidian Anthropocenes and compare across sites.
We imagined the Open Seminar and Field School in the tradition of popular education and participatory research projects, such as those run by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Highlander Research and Education Center, and Paulo Freire. In the weeks leading up to the field campus, participants became more familiar with the work of their peers through online meetings. For one of our sessions, we encouraged participants to watch the documentary The Safe Side of The Fence and to take part in an online group discussion with the film’s director, Tony West.
During the field campus, we spoke with locals in St. Louis about their own methods of documenting and analyzing environmental issues in the region. In a discussion moderated by Tony West, we met with Brian Zink, an attorney at Atomic Weapons Employee Consultants; Wendy Verhoff, a historian of radioactive waste in St. Louis; and Denise Brock, Ombudsman to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).
The discussion centered on the legacy of uranium refining in the city, and the more than 500,000 nuclear workers who developed exposure-related illnesses. Much of the talk focused on Ms. Brock’s key role in the passage of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA), which ensures that compensation and payment of medical expenses are available to former Department of Energy employees who developed illnesses due to workplace exposure to nuclear material.
The St. Louis Field Campus also offered the opportunity for on-the-ground engagement with sites associated with the nuclear and petrochemical industries in St. Louis. Visiting these sites, we saw how a range of public and private actors manage them, how locals interact with them, and how they function as civic infrastructures that shape public discourse around issues such as radioactive exposure and environmental health.
On the first day of the campus, we visited the Weldon Spring Containment Cell at St. Charles, Missouri. At the height of the nuclear arms race, this site was a uranium refinery operated by the Mallinckrodt Chemical Company. Following the facility’s closure, the refinery was converted into a 42-acre containment cell designed to hold 1.5 million cubic yards of radioactive material for up to 1,000 years. During our visit to the site, museum guides at the Weldon Springs Interpretive Center taught us about their methods for informing the public about the legacy of the uranium industry and nuclear waste in the St. Louis region.
A key aim of the St. Louis Field Campus was to experiment with different modes of scholarly and artistic expression, and to develop a set of tactics to encourage comparative work once participants returned to their own field sites. We also envisioned the field campus as a tactic in and of itself, as a way to engage in rogue archiving, a method attuned to the demands of the Anthropocene. To this end, we created Anthropocene Maps, charting “hot spots” and other places of interest in St. Louis.
Next Steps: New Orleans and Beyond
The work that began in St. Louis continued in the ensuing month through a series of bi-monthly meetings on the Disaster STS platform called the Open Seminar, where participants continued to discuss the themes we encountered during the field campus.
The platform has also served as a space for planning for the New Orleans Anthropocene Field Campus (September 1-6, 2019), which will take place concurrently with the annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). This campus will continue in the collaborative ethos of St. Louis but will be framed around specific questions regarding the history of labor in New Orleans within the context of the Anthropocene: How was the environmental violence wrought on the land and riverscapes of the region by plantation agriculture and the petrochemical industry also registered in the bodies of slaves and workers? How do we record, measure, and archive these effects? And what can we learn from this history to contribute to broader strategies for recovery and healing, surviving and growing in the Anthropocene?
The deadline for applications is August 1 and accepted participants will be notified by August 5. See the project page on how to apply and send your application to Jason Ludwig (jasondludwig at gmail dot com).
Jason Ludwig is a PhD student in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. His work focuses on environmental health and justice in American cities.
Tim Schütz is a graduate student and Fulbright Fellow in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California Irvine (PhD). His work focuses on civic data infrastructures and crisis management advocacy in response to “the Anthropocene” broadly conceived.
Scott G. Knowles is Professor and Head of the History Department at Drexel University. His work focuses on risk and disaster, with particular interests in modern cities, technology, and public policy.
Kim Fortun is a Professor and Department Chair in the University of California Irvine’s Department of Anthropology. Her research and teaching focus on environmental risk and disaster, data practices and politics, and experimental ethnographic methods and research design. Fortun has played a lead role in the design of the Platform for Experimental and Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), which provides digital workspace for an array of collaborative projects, including the Quotidian Anthropocene Project.