Introductory description

This module confronts the urgent and incommensurable crisis of the climate catastrophe through a consideration of contemporary art. ‘Contemporary Art and Climate Change’ will expose students to the most recent theoretical scholarship seeking to conceptualise the planetary scale of the Anthropocene. The module will take a multidisciplinary approach with a critical orientation towards the work of Black, Global South, feminist, queer, indigenous and disability scholars. It is in this sense, then, a decolonial approach to contemporary art which takes account of the majority world in which the most acute experiences of ecological change — sea-level rise, weather irregularity, monsoonal wind disruption, fire, and so on — will lead and is leading to the most extreme forms of mobility, suffering and resilience. The module will examine a range of contemporary art from the 21st century including literary eco-fiction, digital and Internet art, video art, performance, live art and durational art, architecture and urbanism, curatorial and museological practice, and collaborative and participatory processes. Equipping the student to critically engage with the politics and poetics of climate change, this module is geared towards the possibilities of art history scholarship participating in the struggle for environmental justice.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

1. Defining the Anthropocene: Climate, change and crisis

2. Problematising the Anthropocene: Capitalocene, Chthulucene, Plantationocene

3. The Climate of History: Climate and its histories

4. Oceanic Humanities for the Global South: Sounding, monsoonal method and tidalectics

5. Extinctions: Thinking with animals, non-humans and the posthuman

6. Trip or other activity (dependent on available exhibitions)

7. Feminisms: Intersections and assemblages of climate change

8. Decolonising the Anthropocene: Black and indigenous ecologies and weathers

9. Queering climate futures: Futurity, affect and childhood

10. Mobility: Migration, refugees and planetary circulation

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a grasp of the history and theory of relations between visual art and architecture and climate change
• Command a knowledge of key works of art and architecture related to the Anthropocene
• Relate the contemporary art of climate change to wider histories of the environmental
• Show a critical awareness of current debates about the role of visual arts in political and ecological justice

Indicative reading list

Axel, Nick, Daniel A. Barber, Nikolaus Hirsch, and Anton Vidokle, eds. 2022. Accumulation: The Art, Architecture, and Media of Climate Change. E-Flux Architecture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press ; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, and Bruno Latour. 2021. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press.
Clark, Nigel, and Bronislaw Szerszynski. 2021. Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences. Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity Press.
Davis, Heather, and Etienne Turpin, eds. 2015. Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. First ed. Critical Climate Change. London: Open Humanities Press.
Demos, T. J. 2017. Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today. Berlin: Sternberg press.
Haraway, Donna. 2015. ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’. Environmental Humanities 6 (1): 159–65. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615934.
Helmreich, Stefan, Sophia Roosth, and Michele Ilana Friedner. 2017. Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond. https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691164809.001.0001.
Iheka, Cajetan Nwabueze. 2021. African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.
Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press.
Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Forerunners: Ideas First from the University of Minnesota Press 53. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Subject specific skills

Sophisticated visual analysis and understanding of visual culture
Critical analysis of cultural artefacts in their context

Transferable skills

Initiate and sustain group discussion through intelligent questioning and debate at an appropriate level
Ability to undertake research and to write up the results using accurately specific techniques of analysis and enquiry in the form of a well-structured argument at an appropriate level
Familiarity with essential ICT skills
Ability to collaborate effectively with others
Show understanding of diverse viewpoints
Ability to find, select, organize and synthesize evidence
Ability to formulate a sustained argument
Think conceptually and independently at an appropriate level
Ability to conduct independent research and analysis
Bibliographical skills at an appropriate level