A critical ‘Anthropocene’

The effects of the rampant burning of fossil fuels and development of land are just starting to build momentum. If left unchecked, by the end of the century average global temperatures may warm by as much as four degrees Celsius, leading to food and water shortages, multispecies migrations, and pandemics the likes of which cannot be compared to any human-recorded time. While this widely heralded dystopian future has not formally ended the Holocene, the Anthropocene idea has already been widely embraced across the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts, with scholars and practitioners leveraging its potential to stimulate theory and challenge many of modernity’s most tenacious frameworks. Yet the term ‘Anthropocene’ is highly contested, and not just by geologists.

The first critique arises from how the genesis of the Anthropocene is located in all of humanity, with the Greek word anthropos—a human ‘we’ whose actions have unleashed this crisis. Such prescriptive universalism, argue Heather Davis & Zoe Todd (Reference Davis and Todd2017:771), is an ‘extension of [the] colonial logic’ that is the real origin story of the Anthropocene. Extractivist economies, burnt fossil fuels, and detonated nuclear weapons are not ‘human’ inventions so much as mechanisms of power developed by the most elite classes of the Global North, an extraordinary minority of the world’s people. The colonial adventures launched by this class—whose leading actors have been mostly white men—marked the first occasion in which human exploits attained the level of a planet-altering force. Failing to account for the implicit and erroneous universalism of anthropos further legitimates the racialization of inequality through which modernity was built (Yusoff Reference Yusoff2018; cf. Quijano Reference Quijano2007), allotting undue responsibility to those who have contributed least to planetary crisis.

What is more, the ‘apocalyptic’ future presaged by the Anthropocene signals that, for some people, the status quo is largely functional—entirely ignoring how, for Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the apocalypse struck centuries ago (Whyte Reference Whyte, Heise, Christensen and Niemann2017). Beginning in the late fifteenth century, European colonization decimated up to ninety percent of the Indigenous American population through genocidal warfare, slavery, and pandemic diseases (Koch, Brierley, Maslin, & Lewis Reference Koch, Brierley, Mark and Simon2019). If the Anthropocene describes when humans became a planet-altering force, then its start-date is better located not with industrialization or nuclear weaponry but with the ‘Orbis Spike’ of 1610, when a sharp decrease in global levels of carbon dioxide stratigraphically registered the collapse of Indigenous American civilizations (Lewis & Maslin Reference Lewis and Maslin2015).

In view of this history, some argue that the term ‘Anthropocene’ should be abandoned altogether. Given the causative linkage between planetary crisis and the early modern revolution in the modes of resource accumulation, the current era may better be described as the ‘Capitalocene’—when capitalism came to organize and produce nature and global relations of production (Moore Reference Moore2017). Yet others who engage the Anthropocene idea seek a terminology that captures not the causes of planetary crisis, but an orientation to new paradigms that undercuts the supremacy which modernity accords to humans. Following what has become known as the ontological turn, Donna Haraway (Reference Haraway2015:160) offers the name ‘Chthulucene’ to describe ‘rich multispecies assemblages that include people’. Dipesh Chakrabarty (Reference Chakrabarty2021:67) likewise eschews anthropocentrism and instead follows geological perspectives on deep time and interplanetary science to develop a framework for ‘the planetary’, emphasizing that humans ‘come late in the planet’s life and dwell more in the position of passing guests than possessive hosts’.

The proliferation of names and the intensity of debates is indicative of a broader shift across the humanities and social sciences, in which the most staid frameworks of modernity are being challenged from within the Global North. ‘The Anthropocene’, write Penelope Anthias & Kiran Asher (Reference Anthias and Asher2024:4), as well as ‘post-humanism, the ontological turn, actor network theory, and object-oriented and speculative thinking are all symptomatic of this unravelling of Western knowledge traditions’. While this ‘unravelling’ has spurred a new interest in Indigenous thought, Anthias & Asher argue that considering Indigenous onto-epistemologies as ‘alternative’ ways of being is meaningless without accounting for the political-economic structures which caused the Anthropocene, and that continue to exploit Indigenous peoples. Todd (Reference Todd2016:16) made this point some time ago, chiding the ontological turn’s ‘breathless “realisations” that animals, the climate, water, “atmospheres” and non-human presences like ancestors and spirits are sentient and possess agency, that “nature” and “culture”, “human” and “animal” may not be so separate after all’. This ‘alternative’ conceptualization of the world, she observes, is only so much Indigenous knowledge repurposed by Western scholars, which does nothing to redress Indigenous peoples’ marginalization within the academy and society more broadly. In other words, the development of theory must not re-inscribe the colonial hierarchies of theories past.

This special issue keeps the coloniality which gave rise to planetary crisis in sharp focus. As Sender Dovchin, Ulemj Dovchin, & Graeme Gower (Reference Dovchin, Dovchin and Gower2024:529) argue, the ‘discourse’ of the Anthropocene obscures the political-economic and indeed genocidal origins of planetary crisis, yet this can be countered by taking seriously that ‘Land, non-human beings, and the natural world… are living and sentient entities with identity, agency and intentionality’; this is not a recent scholarly innovation, but a way of knowing and being that has existed since time immemorial. While a reflexive awareness of the real risks of epistemic extractivism in forging new sociolinguistic directions is vital (Deumert & Makoni Reference Deumert and Makoni2023), a further and most worthy risk would allow other ways of being in the world to not only represent interesting objects of study, but to actually transform dominant scholarly and Western paradigms (Graeber Reference Graeber2015). A critical framing of the Anthropocene’s colonial underpinnings, not unlike a recognition of the colonial underpinnings of (socio)linguistics (Heller & McElhinny Reference Heller and McElhinny2017), contributes to the necessity for re-examining our field’s epistemological and ontological footing (Singh Reference Singh2021) and for developing solidarity amidst crisis (Carneiro & Silva Reference Carneiro and Silva2023). This special issue joins other efforts to destabilize modernity’s ground, and in the following sections describes how the study of Anthropocenic landscapes offers three directions forward.

Entangled and expanded space

The sociolinguistic study of space is today largely focused through the field of linguistic and semiotic landscapes, which emerged from early studies examining the relationship between visible language and power relations (Landry & Bourhis Reference Landry and Bourhis1997) and the interaction of discourse with the emplacement of signs in space (Scollon & Scollon Reference Scollon2003). Responding to the work of cultural geographers showing that space and place are discursively constituted (e.g. Massey Reference Massey2005), Adam Jaworski & Crispin Thurlow (Reference Jaworski and Thurlow2010:2) defined ‘semiotic landscapes’ as ‘any (public) space with visible inscription made through deliberate human intervention and meaning making’. Subsequent advances in the field showed how urban space is shaped by human meaning making (e.g. Blackwood & Tufi Reference Blackwood2015), or is rather ‘produced’, as Jackie Lou (Reference Lou2016) describes the linguistic landscape’s contribution to social, mental, and physical space (cf. Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre1991). Yet scholars began to step outside the city, so familiar to variationist and critical sociolinguistics (Karlander Reference Karlander2021; Britain Reference Britain, Busse and Warnke2022), to examine rural landscapes (Banda & Jimaima Reference Banda and Jimaima2015), the human body (Peck & Stroud Reference Peck and Stroud2015), and digital spaces (Blommaert & Maly Reference Blommaert and Maly2019). While the field’s parameters remain a matter of debate, recent theoretical interventions have provoked new definitions of just what encompasses a linguistic/semiotic landscape.

Most prominently, the turn to posthuman theories has led a shift that continues to gather momentum. Following provocations to de-center the human and indeed language in linguistic research (Pennycook Reference Pennycook2017; Schneider & Heyd Reference Schneider and Heyd2024), recent studies have grappled with the ontologies of language, and how an ‘assemblage’ perspective supports the inherent multiplicities of languaging (Demuro & Gurney Reference Demuro and Gurney2021). Studies of assemblage point to how semiosis enjoins humans with complex and shifting networks that include other-than-human beings, material phenomena, and seemingly distant times and places (Pennycook Reference Pennycook2024; Pietikäinen Reference Pietikäinen2024; Wu, Hiramoto, & Theng Reference Wu, Hiramoto and Theng2024). Others have shown that many of the frameworks developed in linguistics can help humans understand animal communication and reshape human-animal relations (Sharma Reference Sharma, Goulah and Katunich2020; Cornips Reference Cornips2022; Forte Reference Forte, Kosatica and Smith2025), leading to a call for a multispecies discourse analysis (Lamb Reference Lamb2024a). Ostensibly non-living materials, too, are shown to actively shape human communication, as viruses (Lou, Malinowski, & Peck Reference Lou, Malinowski and Peck2022), digital algorithms (Gonçalves Reference Gonçalves2024), artificial intelligence (Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2024), and matter itself (Brunotti & Krause-Alzaidi Reference Brunotti, Krause-Alzaidi, Godlewicz-Adamiec and Piszczatowski2024) participate in meaning-making. Studies of linguistic/semiotic landscapes have now stretched far beyond the city, examining how human signs produce the ‘natural’ environment (Soica & Metro-Roland Reference Soica and Metro-Roland2024; Baiqi Reference Baiqi2025)—and, how animal-made signs produce the landscape, too (Lamb Reference Lamb2024b).

Máiréad Moriarty (Reference Moriarty2025) takes up this shift by analyzing the ‘seascape’, the posthuman nexus of human and more-than-human space where water meets shoreline. Through a study of Ireland’s western coast, she describes how the sea itself emerges as a meaning-making actor along the ‘Wild Atlantic Way’, where government-led tourism promotion has transformed semiotic landscapes, economic geographies, and lively ecologies. Her MARA framework, or ‘mapping the rhizomatic assemblage’ of the seascape, develops a multisensory methodological approach to semiotic landscapes that attunes to the ‘fluid’ dynamics of human-ocean relations by incorporating smell, feel, and sound alongside vision. Examining images of the coast and digital pushback against tourism, together with interviews and her own long-term embodied immersion in the sea, Moriarty examines the clash between imaginaries of ‘untouched’ nature and the realities of climate change, which are becoming ever more apparent through warming waters and the proliferation of jellyfish that are now constant co-inhabitants of the seascape. Sensing the meaning-making resources of other-than-human agents calls attention to the ‘uneven vulnerabilities and resilience’ of all who call the seascape home in the Anthropocene and further offers grounds for expanding sociolinguistics into the spaces of climate change.

Gavin Lamb (Reference Lamb2025) thereafter takes sociolinguistics into animal worlds, examining the new regimes of human-animal interaction and care produced through digital surveillance technologies. Following multispecies studies of the ‘digital Anthropocene’ (Von Essen, Turnbull, Searle, Jørgensen, Hofmeester, & van der Wal Reference Von Essen, Turnbull, Searle, Jørgensen, Hofmeester and van der Wal2023), he considers how monitoring technologies developed for wildlife conservation and tourism generate semiotic resources that foster digital intimacies with animals. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Hawaiʻi, Lamb investigates how digital infrastructures bring humans into contact with endangered Hawaiian monk seals, cultivating interspecies intimacy and care in a landscape under threat by overtourism and climate change. Yet these technologies also initiate structures of commodification and control, as an enmeshment of on- and offline practices support unprecedented jurisdiction over other-than-humans. This biopolitical governmentality made possible in the digital Anthropocene represents an assemblage of digital infrastructures, humans, and more-than-human beings, ‘magnetically’ drawn together into shared landscapes through discourse ‘attractors’. With a nexus-analytic approach, he considers how discourse attractors and the surveillance of monk seals by scientists and tourists reshape approaches to conservation, challenging traditional hierarchies of value and laying the groundwork for emergent multispecies communities. Much as Moriarty analyzes the seascape, Lamb shows how discourse is shared by animals, digital infrastructures, and humans alike, urging recognition of an entangled and posthuman space that unsettles ideological anthropocentrism.

Attunement as method and praxis

The Anthropocene’s disruption of the paradigmatic separation of humans from ‘nature’ in modernity demands a shift in how landscapes are perceived, towards a recognition of relationality and a lively confluence of agential actors. Attunement offers a way to conceptualize the work of identifying relations and forms of semiosis that have been ignored or dismissed in modernity, which can be understood as ways of paying attention to ‘more-than-human voices, temporalities, and material processes’ (Brigstocke & Noorani Reference Brigstocke and Noorani2016:2). This framework dovetails with the emphasis in multispecies anthropology upon the ‘arts of noticing’ (Tsing Reference Tsing2015:128), or attending to forms of non-charismatic and unspectacular life and other signs of relational entanglement in the environment (Kirksey & Chao Reference Kirksey2022). Attuning to other forms of life—as Indigenous peoples have always done—can unveil entirely different landscapes (Du Plessis Reference Du Plessis2022), populated by signs and lively agents that were previously illegible to modern or positivistic modes of perception.

In many ways, sociolinguistics has long been grappling with attunement to what is not readily perceivable for modern frameworks. Early studies of silence showed that absence is also a meaning-making resource (Jaworski Reference Jaworski1992), and examination of the visually nonexistent or erased in linguistic/semiotic landscapes shows that the apparently invisible can powerfully shape space (Karlander Reference Karlander2019), even as regimes of visibility marginalize society’s most vulnerable (Moriarty Reference Moriarty2019). Recent scholarship further points to how the unseen, the unspoken, and the ‘past’ is an ineluctable component of what is normatively sensed in the landscape (Borba, Falabella Fabrício, & Lima Reference Borba, Fabrício and Lima2022; Lazar Reference Lazar2022), as the past haunts the present in ‘zombie landscapes’ (Bock & Stroud Reference Bock, Stroud, Peck, Stroud and Williams2019) through traces of traumatic memory (Kosatica Reference Kosatica2022) and the ‘absent presence’ of ghosts (Deumert Reference Deumert2022). The task of sensing these ever-present landscapes has called the researcher’s physical and ontological orientation to space into question (Volvach Reference Volvach2024), as the body itself becomes a tool for sensing and interpreting the meaning-filled space around it (Moriarty Reference Moriarty2025). As Leonie Cornips, Ana Deumert, & Alastair Pennycook (Reference Pennycook2024:168) suggest, the concept of attunement can ‘give us a way of grasping how different species and entities [act] as an assemblage of more-than-human relations, as embodied historical accretions engage with each other’.

Sean Smith (Reference Smith2025a) develops attunement through what he proposes as a sociolinguistics of attention. Asking why the perception of a landscape can dramatically differ from its ecological reality, he enjoins attunement with the concepts of semiotic ideology and orientation to investigate a case of declining biodiversity in the Sultanate of Oman. In keeping with the first direction of entangled and expanded space, he argues for a ‘planetary’ perspective in which all landscapes are brought under the jurisdiction of semiotic analysis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and digital data at the popular tourism site of the ‘Grand Canyon of Arabia’, he finds that despite the recent drop in avian fauna experienced by local residents, the canyon is widely perceived by visitors as a ‘pristine’ natural landscape. This results, he shows, from an orientation around the ideological separation of ‘nature’ from human society, as discourse focuses attention on signs that confirm the canyon as a ‘pristine’ landscape. Yet the Anthropocene disrupts discursively produced landscapes. In the revelation of such signs of planetary crisis as biodiversity loss, ideologies of nature/society dualism crumble in a process of disorientation. Instead of resisting this disturbance in space, Smith urges an attunement to signs of planetary crisis, which reveals relational landscapes that entangle humans with more-than-human life and ecologies.

Political economy as planetary actor

As critical studies of the Anthropocene and proponents of the ‘Capitalocene’ attest, the climate crisis and the global decline in biodiversity is a result not of ‘humanity’ at large but of the economic system which undergirds modernity. The burning of fossil fuels that is capitalism’s byproduct has become enmeshed in the long-term cycles distinctive to our planet, such that Earth system processes are now ‘co-actors in the drama of global warming’ (Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty2021:66). The enmeshment of capital and the planet has created a condition that Farhana Sultana (Reference Sultana2022) names ‘climate coloniality’, in which extractivism and racialized hierarchies of power are replayed in the devastating impacts of climate change. The strength of sociolinguistics is in showing how this process is mobilized at the level of semiosis, and that everyday meaning-making can advance or disrupt political-economic orthodoxies.

The long-running sociolinguistic interest in political economy (e.g. Irvine Reference Irvine1989; Heller Reference Heller2003) has crystallized an understanding that language and semiosis are essential to the construction of value and social hierarchy (Del Percio, Flubacher, & Duchêne Reference Del Percio, Flubacher, Duchêne, García, Flores and Spotti2017; Smith, Järlehed, & Jaworski Reference Smith, Järlehed and Jaworski2025). The linguistic and semiotic landscape is produced through the transfer and accumulation of capital (Järlehed, Milani, & Rosendal Reference Järlehed, Milani and Rosendal2023), with language fostering geographies of economic exclusion (Trinch & Snajdr Reference Trinch and Snajdr2020) and even developing new frontiers for extractivism (Smith Reference Smith2025b). A ‘discourse-centered’ focus on such filaments of political economy as commodity chains (Thurlow Reference Thurlow2020), together with recent studies of sustainability (Kosatica & Smith Reference Kosatica and Sean2025) and waste (Thurlow Reference Thurlow2022), have urged further investigation of how the discursive elements of political economy are linked to the environmental and social impacts recognized as Anthropocenic.

With this in view, Ed Snajdr & Shonna Trinch (Reference Snajdr and Trinch2025) take us to the streets of Brooklyn, where the transformation of urban space is shown to be linked to the same systems that have produced planetary crisis. Drawing upon years of ethnographic research, they show how the multi-billion-dollar Atlantic Yards project is a case for understanding how discourse mobilizes extractivism. Backed by New York state powers of eminent domain, the project developers deployed moral geographies in a discursive weaponization of the concept of ‘blight’, or urban space that is supposedly degraded and unfit for human habitation. By declaring local apartment blocks and historic buildings to be ‘blighted’ despite ongoing human occupancy, language became a predatory tool for accumulation by dispossession in Brooklyn’s urban frontier. As Snajdr & Trinch show, residents organized against this development project through a practice likened to samizdat, or self-published texts of resistance, which semiotically envisaged the dystopian ruptures the project would wreak on the local landscape. In contrast to imagined ‘utopias’, however, they find that even grassroots struggles for space are framed through ‘my-topic’ narratives, or human-centered perspectives which are too often individualized. Recognizing that the expropriation of urban space and the extraction of value in New York is yet another symptom of the same structures razing rainforests on other continents, they thus propose a study of ‘Anthropocenic consciousness’, or everyday confrontations with the coloniality of dispossession.

Bal Sharma (Reference Sharma2025) thereafter brings us to Nepal, where human handlers and tourists interact with elephants at Chitwan National Park and the adjacent town of Sauraha. With deep cultural significance, elephants also have a high economic value as tourists come to encounter the charismatic mammal. The exchange value of tourist interactions with elephants, Sharma explains, is rationalized through the logic of neoliberal conservation, in which ‘saving’ animals and the environment is a profit-driven venture. Through his ethnographic analysis of this ‘site of engagement’, he shows that neoliberal logics commodify the cultural meaning of elephants and displace localized practices in favour of interactions that generate capital, such as in the allegedly humane Elephant Beauty Pageant. The traditional emblems painted on elephants in efforts toward beautification reflect their recontextualization into a commodified skinscape, as engagements with elephants are governed through neoliberal logics and reproduce the ideological bifurcation of ‘nature’ from culture. Sharma observes that even as the Anthropocene spurs new perceptions of multispecies landscapes, the political-economic roots of crisis interpolate the fabric of human-animal relations and re-signify anthropocentric space. With sociolinguistics offering key tools for elucidating the consequential entanglement of capitalism and interspecies interaction, he urges an interspecies ethics that locates humans ‘with’ animals rather than hierarchically ‘above’ them.

In the final contribution, Maida Kosatica (Reference Kosatica2025) guides us through the fluorescent-lit aisles of organic supermarkets in Germany, where ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ discourses advertise beef. Through her investigation of the semiotic landscapes of organic foodstores and online marketing, she shows how language and semiosis are constitutive forces in the enmeshment of global food production and planetary crisis, leading to the overuse of land, the growth of carbon-fueled logistics, and ballooning levels of greenhouse gasses. Focusing on cows as the livestock animal with the highest climate footprint, Kosatica bridges discourse-centered commodity chain analysis with the Social Life Cycle Assessment used in environmental science to illuminate the entanglement of discourse with the climate impact of beef. The highly curated spaces of supermarkets, she shows, obscure this impact through a branding that associates a ‘green’ semiotics with healthy eating and care for nature. The globalized discourse of ‘good food’ is instrumentalized to not only sell meat, but to mask the deeply impactful and inequitable impacts of raising cows for slaughter; the organic food store, she argues, emerges as ‘a cleaning station where messy “histories” of a product are removed from view’. The Anthropocene is thus masked by the very discourses that urge environmental conscientiousness, as capitalism pivots amidst planetary crisis to embrace the language of its own critique.

Forward into the Anthropocene

This special issue concludes with a commentary by Kellie Gonçalves (Reference Gonçalves2025), who evaluates the methodological and analytical tools at the disposal of a sociolinguistics still in the early stages of grappling with planetary crisis. The directions forward offered by the six papers in this collection provide a lens on the developed discussions of political economy, posthumanism, and mediatization while renewing focus on power and inequality, and space and place, that are fundamental to the thriving field of linguistic and semiotic landscape studies. As Gonçalves observes, these fundamental and expanding domains of sociolinguistic scholarship have been invigorated by recent work that seeks to account for how ‘assemblaic relations’ of humans and more-than-humans shape language and semiosis, urging a research agenda motivated by what she terms ‘planetary repertoires’: semiotics and meaning-making that indexes the Anthropocene. In joining the ‘epistemic party’ that has long been going on in other disciplines, however, she underscores the importance of maintaining focus on language and semiosis—a not insignificant challenge, when everything ‘matters’ and matter itself has agency. Such posthuman thinking further urges deep reflexivity, as algorithms and (increasingly) AI shape our perceptions and mediate our work. Yet in a world increasingly marked by acceleration and disappearance, Gonçalves urges that it is time for sociolinguistics to take an ontological leap.