Geologists and Earth System scientists have argued that the planet has entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene names the age in which humanity took control over the planet and pushed the Earth System into a new stage of disequilibrium, with significant effects on global human - and non-human - mobility. The proposed workshop draws on this new perspective on planetary change provided by the Anthropocene debate to further the debate on environmental or climate-induced migration and its policy implications. The Anthropocene's implications for the study of environmental migration as well as for international security have so far seldom been considered in academic literature, even though it forces us to re-evaluate and re-think our fundamental ontological and epistemological concepts. The workshop seeks to fundamentally rethink the prevailing ontological categories of environmental migration research and to work towards an analytical framework which studies processes of human mobility within their specific, hybrid socio-natural contexts. It seeks to initiate a fruitful dialogue between scholars working on climate change and human mobility, on the one hand, and scholars engaging with the Anthropocene concept and its theoretical and normative implications on the other.

Anthropocene Mobilities. International Workshop University of Hamburg 1-2 June 2017