Earth Humanities engages with urgent issues of climatic and environmental change. We are particularly interested in the challenges posed to Arts and Humanities researchers by the concept of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene recognises the power of humankind as an agent of geological transformation. Our past, present and future relationship to the subterraneous realm is therefore a matter of urgent enquiry. Mining earth and rock has unprecedented impacts for human and other-than-human life-worlds underground, on land, in water and the air. Working in conversation with artists, historians, poets, writers, geologists, miners, archaeologists, metallurgists, environmental scientists, activists and practitioners we explore together the complex and unequal processes of extraction in the world today. We consider the work of mining and industry on landscapes and ecologies across multiple, interacting spatial and temporal scales. We also trace the narrative and representational frameworks that have given shape and justification to extractivist thought. Originating in the European Enlightenment and now merged with modernity’s belief in continued progress and economic growth, many societies of the West and Global North have become distracted, disconnected if not ignorant of their roles in perpetuating colonial modalities of extraction.

Earth Humanities sets out to ask questions of human relationships with the underground in order that we can imagine a different future that is more caring, less violent and more engaged with subterranean ecologies.