Between the frog and the eagle: claiming a ‘Scholarship of Presence’ for the Anthropocene

Even before officially sanctioned as a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene conquers the imaginary and is reified as awareness-raising, inspiring, universalist, capitalist-technocratic, dangerous. As critical scholarship discerns in this name-nomination an opportunity to rethink the human/more-than-human/environmental nexus, debating the Anthropocene becomes in itself more policy/politically relevant than its actual confirmation as a new geological epoch. However, the Anthropocene debate remains remarkably disembodied, engaging rarely with emerging actors and practices across the world that drive precisely the socio-ecological transformations that critical scholars advocate. Correspondingly, most actors involved in these practices are indifferent to the Anthropocene debate. And here, I argue, lies the task of academic labour: to engage in what I call a scholarship of presence; a scholarship that adds empirical weight to our theoretical musings around the Anthropocene. To do this, we need to be prepared simultaneously to explore the world like a frog and see it like an eagle; to be present locally, splashing (frog-like) into the murky waters of empirics; and to zoom-out broaden the gaze (eagle-like) from localized struggles, make comparisons and develop broader conceptual contributions. Such a scholarship of presence can be instrumental in making the Anthropocene the quilting point for articulating geographically fragmented struggles into a new ethico-aesthetic paradigm.