Abstract
As temperatures soar, glaciers melt, sea levels rise, cities sink, and biodiversity continues its steep decline, it is becoming ever harder to ignore the symptoms of our self-inflicted planetary polycrisis. The talk will suggest a potentially productive way for historians and other students of the past to respond to this grim predicament. The proposed alternative practice is aligned with influential currents in a growing range of fields, from anthropology and environmental humanities to science and technology studies. Simply stated, it encourages us to see that humans have always lived in a pluriverse of many different worlds, not in a universe of just one. It follows that each past way of life should be studied on its own terms, in its own local world of experience, according to its own laws of being, not ours. If we are prepared to embrace this paradigm shift, new patterns become visible in history, regularities that transform the way we think about what sustainable living might actually involve in practice. The talk will be illustrated with slides. To introduce the alternative paradigm, classical Athens will be used as a case study.
Bio
A native of the UK, Greg Anderson is Professor of History and Courtesy Professor of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University, where he has taught since 2005. In his most recent book, The Realness of Things Past (Oxford University Press, 2018), he outlined an alternative paradigm of historical practice, whereby peoples of the past are studied on their own ontological terms, in their own particular worlds of experience. Since then, he has been exploring the wider implications of this pluriversal perspective, questioning conventional modern thinking about life in the past, present, and future. He has won eight teaching awards and his TED talk on the pluriverse has been seen by several million people across multiple platforms.
