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Anthropology and Environment Society
Oral Presentation Session
Alder Keleman Saxena
Postdoctoral Researcher
Yale-NUS College
Anna Tsing (CE - Aarhus University)
Jennifer Deger (james cook university)
Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene is a tool for teaching about the forms of rapid, human-induced environmental change that constitute the Anthropocene. Positioned at the intersection of the environmental and the digital humanities, the project makes the argument that to understand the Anthropocene requires examining the role that human-built infrastructures have played in sparking new forms of agency in more-than-human creatures, and in turn considering the world-ripping (as opposed to world-making) effects that these "feral" entities have had for other creatures and ecologies. Designed as an online, multimedia project, Feral Atlas aims to make an intervention not just in content, but in form. The user interface is an interactive arrangement of purpose-drawn images and carefully curated video and audio, which aim to draw students into the project's argument visually and experientially, before asking them to engage with text. As users navigate the site, they are encouraged to encounter theory through experiential learning and cumulative experience, comparing similarities and differences across cases. This presentation gives an overview of the Feral Atlas project, and demonstrates trajectories of user experience, with the purpose of considering how creative and improvisational forms of representation may help instructors encourage students to think differently about the Anthropocene.