PACAs vision is to foster dynamic knowledge ecologies and establish an open space for dialogue, experimentation, co-creation, and learning that engages researchers, citizens, and communities while creating echoes in civil society. We strive to provide conceptual tools that disrupt prevailing anthropocentric worldviews and nurture emerging post-anthropocentric narratives to address the ecological devastations that arise from current production and consumption patterns.
Mitigating the current crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation is a matter of political rather than private (consumer and corporate) agency. At the same time, private agency is also necessary for successful climate practices. For the necessary constraining and regulatory political measures to be legitimate and enduring in democratic societies, these measures cannot be in contradiction with the dominant anthropocentric ontology of the human-nature relationship.
PACA's fundamental assumption is that to bring about meaningful change, we must replace the dominant narrative that places humanity outside of nature and treats economic growth as an endless pursuit with a new positive narrative that decenters human exceptionality and acknowledges the intrinsic value of nature. The pursuit of a post-anthropocentrism is a fundamental social change, but the good news is that traces of this narrative is already detectable in various parts of society.
The aim of the SCC Elite Center PACA is to map post-anthropocentric social theory and investigate selected traces of such post-anthropocentrism in the population. Our objectives are to assess the extent to which such practices and beliefs can provide a positive narrative for a new social organization of production and consumption processes and, finally, the role of universities as mediators of the emergent post-anthropocentrism and its challenges to the nature-culture divide.