Research

Knowing and Growing. Anthropology of and in late capitalist environments

Environmental crises, along with the questions how we can understand, regulate and tackle them, have undoubtedly moved to the center of socioeconomic, political and technoscientific controversies. Too often responses to contemporary environmental predicaments resort to technoscientific fixes without addressing systemic issues, such as the intimate interweaving of our environments in capitalist production. Our research explores how knowledge about the environment emerges and interacts with knowledge about the economy, how such knowledges are circulated, contradict themselves, are invalidated, politicized and thus shape the futures of health and well-being for humans and other-than-human beings alike. Next to dominant forms of knowing, such as the modern sciences, institutions, technologies and infrastructures, we attend to lingering asymmetries and hierarchies in knowledge production and foreground unrecognized forms of knowledge and expertise. We treat questions of knowledge production - whose knowledge has value and authority, what and who is heard - as deeply political questions, and address them in dialog with the work of indigenous thinkers and de-, post- and anti-colonial knowledge-creators. By investigating marginalized forms of knowing and growing, we explore alternatives beyond the capitalist growth register that has colonized our societal imagination for too long and examine the difficult possibilities that are being incubated in the present in the midst of loss and capitalist destruction. Can we condense ways of living that resist the ideology of limitless growth? And what difficulties does such an endeavor encounter when we think it from the perspective of mundane everyday practices, humble more-than-human relationalities and in view of lives and worlds beyond Western Europe?

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