Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research on the Anthropocene has emerged fast and furiously across academic disciplines in recent years. While some have suggested that this concept signifies a rupture with the philosophical foundations of Western modernity, this paper stresses the continuities between the Anthropocene and its antecedents. I trace the development of the concept from the late 18th century through to the mid-20th century, identifying several colonial and Eurocentric features of these earlier accounts of the Anthropocene. I then proceed to question whether contemporary debates about the Anthropocene and its periodization evoke similar problematic narratives about progress, modernity, and civilization. In the closing section of this article, I discuss whether or not the Anthropocene can be salvaged as an analytical category without reproducing these colonial logics. Here, I conclude that regardless of whether the term is discarded or redeemed, critical scholars can help to problematize and destabilize the concept’s investment in the dominant onto-epistemological categories of Western modernity, thereby opening up possibilities for the plurality of ways of thinking and knowing to shape this conversation about the social and ecological predicaments of the colonial present.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.058 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".