Der Mensch nach dem Ende der Natur

In 2013, the HKW is offering new cultural education formats for adults. Anyone interested in the latest questions in art and science will be right at home with the HKW.Wissensclub (HKW Knowledge Club). Discussions with artists and academics will address the topics that emerge from exhibitions, music projects and discourse events.

In HKW.Wissensclub # 1, the natural scientists Reinhold Leinfelder and Christian Schwägerl will give an introduction to the thought model of the Anthropocene. The core of the Anthropocene theory is that our understanding of nature is outdated: it is the human being who forms nature and not vice versa. Why have geologists declared the Holocene over? And where is the scientific evidence to back up their conviction?

A discussion with the literary expert Ursula K. Heise will address the question of what the Anthropocene means for our image of humankind. To what extent must today’s human being reassess himself as a biological species? What does this mean for our understanding of society? What political issues does this reassessment throw up?

In German language

Ursula K. Heise (Los Angeles) is professor of English at uClA and a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature, environmental culture in the Americas, Western Europe and Japan, the environmental humanities, and on theories of modernization and globalization in their cultural dimensions. Her books include Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008), and Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (2010).

Reinhold Leinfelder (Berlin) is a geologist and professor at Freie Universität Berlin (head of the study group Geobiologie und Anthropozänforschung) and at Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. He ia a memberof the Wissenschaftlicher Beirat der Bundesregierung Globale Umweltveränderungen and of the Sachverständigenbeirat für Naturschutz und Landschaftspflege des Landes Berlin.

Christian Schwägerl (Berlin) is a journalist and writer, focusing on transformations in science and ecology and their consequences for60politics and society. The author of Menschenzeit (2010) and 11 drohende Kriege (2012), he has been awarded the Georg von Holtzbrinck Preis für Wissenschaftsjournalismus and the Econsense-Journalistenpreis. He is a project director and curator in the anthropocene Project.

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