Anthropocene Consciousness

In my research I use the term Anthropocene Consciousness to refer to the joint historical trajectory of the growing awareness of anthropogenic environmental impacts. I suggest that this term should encompass the interactive and cumulative knowledge voiced both in the natural sciences and via other modes of depiction and reflection like narrative fiction; the latter forms thus constitute the collective environmental imagination as distinct from scientific discourse. The fact that climate change and other Earth-system impacts are not simply scientific truths but also involve emotional-cognitive experiences, is one key reason for the proposal of a joint historical trajectory. Anthropocene consciousness as articulated in human cultural outputs like narrative fiction, moreover, has a range of voices and modes of articulation, some tending towards the dispassionately rational depiction by extrapolating the risks and dangers of human action and others engaging a range of emotional responses intensified by the historically accumulated awareness of environmental dangers. 

Publications: 

Hilary Duffield, "Anthropocene Consciousness, Time Loops and Anticipatory Collective Trauma in Narratives of Anthropogenic Environmental Disaster." Poetics Today 46.1 (2025): Special Edition on Time Loops, Temporal Uncertainty, and Problem-Solving in Narrative. Eds. Wibke Schniedermann, Steven Willemsen and Sean A. Yeager. 171-195.

Hilary Duffield, "Reconfigured Reality in Scenarios of Transformed Identity, Invasion and Environmental Threat: the Diachronic Exploration of Recognition Scenes in Anglophone Print and Film Narratives." Language and Literature 34.2 (2025): 187–206.