IGDC Annual Lecture 2022: The Anthropocene Globe In an Anthropocene age, in which our impact on the earth approaches that of the great geophysical forces, humanist thought should distinguish two interrelated concepts, those of the globe and the planet.

We are delighted to be joined by Dipesh Chakrabarty for this years IGDC Annual Lecture, co-hosted with the Department of History, where Dipesh will share his thoughts on the Anthropocene Globe.

In an Anthropocene age, in which our impact on the earth approaches that of the great geophysical forces, humanist thought should distinguish two interrelated concepts, those of the globe and the planet. The globe, which is the setting for human interaction, human history, and the development of capitalist modernity, is different from the planet of biological, chemical, and geophysical systems that humans now partially shape. Our awareness of the planet and its systems developed within the sciences of modern global capitalism, but the planet that contemporary Earth System Science describes is not merely a human globe, and humans are not the center of its story.

Human politics – the politics of the globe – inevitably focus on the divisions among humans, and political conflicts play out over the decades of a human life. Our newfound planetary awareness challenges us to think politically about the deep, slow time of planetary systems and to find room within our politics for the nonhuman and the nonliving.

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Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including Provincializing Europe (Princeton, 2000) and The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago, 2021). He is a co-founder of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies and a consulting editor of Critical Inquiry. He received the Toynbee Foundation Prize in 2014 and the Tagore Memorial Prize of the Government of West Bengal in 2019.

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The Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre (IGDC), a major interdisciplinary centre for research, teaching and partnership for global development, is based at the University of York. Led by the Departments of Politics, Environment and Geography, and History, the IGDC works across and beyond the University to collaborate with partners worldwide to create new interdisciplinary and innovative approaches to tackle global challenges.

The University of York Department of History is one of the finest institutions in Europe for the advanced study of History, combining groundbreaking research with degree programmes of incredible chronological breadth and geographic and thematic scope. They have more than 45 academic staff and around 900 undergraduate and postgraduate students.