An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene

TLDR

Academic roles have evolved over 40 years, shifting toward experimental research that learns from current events and acknowledges its influence on creating new realities. The essay investigates how humans and hybrid research collectives transform and are transformed by the Anthropocene, aiming to spur academic engagement in such collective change. It frames research as a learning process involving human and more‑than‑human actants, a co‑transformation that reshapes the world. It proposes an economic ethics for the Anthropocene that documents ethical economic practices grounded in the shared existence of humans and the more‑than‑human world.

Abstract

Abstract: Over Antipode's 40 years our role as academics has dramatically changed. We have been pushed to adopt the stance of experimental researchers open to what can be learned from current events and to recognize our role in bringing new realities into being. Faced with the daunting prospect of global warming and the apparent stalemate in the formal political sphere, this essay explores how human beings are transformed by, and transformative of, the world in which we find ourselves. We place the hybrid research collective at the center of transformative change. Drawing on the sociology of science we frame research as a process of learning involving a collective of human and more‐than‐human actants—a process of co‐transformation that re/constitutes the world. From this vision of how things change, the essay begins to develop an “economic ethics for the Anthropocene”, documenting ethical practices of economy that involve the being‐in‐common of humans and the more‐than‐human world. We hope to stimulate academic interest in expanding and multiplying hybrid research collectives that participate in changing worlds.