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The metamorphic multiple earth: Bruno Latour’s Anthropocene science
Book chapter

The metamorphic multiple earth: Bruno Latour’s Anthropocene science

Elizabeth de Freitas, Matthew X. Curinga, Maggie MacLure, David Rousell, Laura Trafí-Prats and Sarah E. Truman
Posthuman Social Science and Computational Culture: Essays on Methodology, Theory and Practice, pp.25-38
Routledge, 1st
2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003538769-2
Appears in  Recent Faculty of Education Publications

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Abstract

Bruno Latour was hugely instrumental in Science Studies, shaping the field in the early 1980s (Latour, 1987, 1988). Long before the “ontological turn” and the “new materialisms” (Coole & Frost, 2010), Science Study scholars in the 1980s showed how scientific practice was always engaged with the more-than-human, troubling the subject/object divide in any experiment with “consequential meaning,” by engaging nonhuman “actants” with varying degrees of agency. The 2017 book Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime offers a fascinating synthesis of Latour’s efforts over the last decades to find the experience at the heart of Modernity, develop an alternative to that misguided mode of being, and map a new way of worlding in the midst of our ecological crisis. 1 In focusing on the metamorphic zone of terrestrial life, he demands that there be a reckoning with our current climate crisis and environmental “cosmocolossus.” The book dwells on the many facets of this task, distinguishing the globe from the earth, Gaia from religion, climatology and geostory from geology, and the Anthropocene from Modernity.

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