Introduction:

Knowledge infrastructure and research agendas for quotidian Anthropocenes: Critical localism with planetary scope

“…A different kind of challenge is in putting the Anthropocene in context in different settings, attentive to what social theorists Elinoff and Vaughan (2020) have called the “Quotidian Anthropocene.” In Disastrous Times: Beyond Environmental Crisis in Urbanizing Asia , Elinoff, Vaughan and collaborators describe how differently positioned people in a wide diversity of settings (Beijing, where elite households use an array of technologies to monitor and filter dramatic air pollution; Bến Tre Province in the Mekong Delta of Southern Vietnam, known for progressive co-management of its fisheries; Bangkok in the aftermath of the 2011 Thai floods; the eastern coast coat of Sri Lanka in the long wake of a civil war and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami) have developed ways of understanding and responding to intensifying environmental volatility and vulnerability. 1 Importantly, “the Anthropocene” is considered emically—from the perspective of the people in varied local contexts, working through diverse cultural frames (Jardine, 2004); in many of the settings explicated in Disastrous Times , “the Anthropocene” is not referred to as such but in more locally situated terms.…”

“… 2 Elinoff and Vaughan work within an important line of work that considers “Asia as Method” (Chen, 2010, 2012; Takeuchi, 2005a), which in turn contributes to a more general body of work on the epistemic value of situated, peripheral and heterodox knowledges (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012; Haraway,1988; Law, 2011; Kirsch, 2006). Elinoff and Vaughan’s (2020) edited volume also extends a rich body of work on environmental knowledge, environmentalisms and the Anthropocene in Asia (see, e.g. Haddad, 2021; Jobin, 2021; Hudson, 2014).…”