EP #141 - 10.5.2020 - The Pandemic in the Anthropocene

Today we will discuss COVID-19 in the Anthropocene with Christoph Rosol and Bernd Scherer.

Christoph Rosol is group leader of the umbrella project “Knowledge in and of the Anthropocene” and a researcher and curator at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (HKW). He studied the history of science and media studies in Berlin and Toronto. In 2012, he became a Predoctoral Fellow at the MPIWG and, later that year, a Research Associate in HKW’s The Anthropocene Project. As a member of the curatorial team ever since, he has been principally involved in devising and developing the follow-up projects Technosphere and the long-term initiative Anthropocene Curriculum, a global platform for experimental research and education that I co-head together with Katrin Klingan.

In his doctoral research, he deals with the (pre)history and epistemic foundations of General Circulation Models (GCMs), which are derived from numerical weather prediction techniques but have now evolved into a core component of so-called Earth system models.

Dr. Bernd Scherer has been Director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, since 2006 and has held an honorary professorship at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University of Berlin since 2011. His central areas of work lie in philosophy, semiotics, aesthetics and intercultural questions.

Since 2012, Scherer has headed “The Anthropocene Project” and, since 2014, the project “100 Years of Now,” both at HKW. He is curating the Dictionary of Now as part of the latter project. Parallel to this, he is overseeing the conceptual development of HKW’s third large-scale project, “The New Alphabet.” In his tenure at HKW, Scherer has guided its conceptual development from an institution that presented non-European cultures into one dedicated to the “curating of ideas in the making,” in a world that is changing not only globally, but also in planetary terms.