Each year, EnviroLab focuses on a theme, explore past themes in our archive.

The Anthropocene makes imminent the proximity of social and natural catastrophe, rendering life uncertain. In other words it signals an era  in which human activities—industrialization, petrochemicals, nuclear war, overconsumption, waste—have 'folded into' earth systems to such an extent, that it is now impossible to undo their imprint (Davis & Todd, 2016). However, framing the Anthropocene as catastrophe flattens time, history and the imagination. In other words, the “end of the world” narrative that has become a common place in the Anthropocene overlooks both the violences and also the multiplicity of experiences and practices through which Black, Indigenous, and other subaltern groups have lived in, with, and after catastrophe (Davis and Todd  2017; Krenak 2020; Yusoff 2018).

What does the framing of Anthropocene as catastrophe do? Why is ‘catastrophe talk’ back after all the work that Enlightenment epistemologies and institutions did to render natures and societies into calculable and governable forms? We acknowledge catastrophe as one of the outcomes of such a longstanding process of Social/ Natural Othering. (Un)doing Catastrophe attempts to examine and unsettle the script of modernity that has produced a permanent state of calamity (Alagraa 2021), rendering certain forms of (more-than-human) life as an undesired, nonexistent, Other (Wynter 2003; Ferreira da Silva 2017). 

This is especially pressing in the present context, where ‘catastrophe’ has again become a ‘global’ concern. Capitalist exploitation has made catastrophe in the Anthropocene thinkable and fearful not just for marginalized communities, but also for those very powerful groups who invested in the Enlightenment project in the first place (Ghosh 2021). Moreover, the tools created by enlightenment epistemologies are becoming irrelevant in being able to contain the catastrophes it has created (Beck 1995) and in finding alternatives before getting to a point of no return (Petryna 2021). 

In this sense, if catastrophe is both material and epistemic, then so must be the questions. How do we rethink the idea of ‘catastrophe’ so as to find new ways of being and acting in the world(s) we inhabit? Will this rethinking involve untying ‘catastrophe’ from notions of calculability, prediction, and control that organize ‘modern’ institutions (state, scientific knowledge, climate change discourses)? How are communities, individuals, social movements, places and histories un(doing) life after catastrophe?