At the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne (ACM18), participants engaged in a range of lectures, field trips, and workshops in Melbourne and the wider area exploring the theme of “the Elemental”.

Debates over the past decade about the existence and start-date of “the Anthropocene”—or, the age of the human—have provided an important prompt for academics, artists, and others to reconsider critically how knowledge is produced and reproduced. What forms of critique, knowledge making, and collaboration are needed to meet the challenges we now face? Anthropocene Campus Melbourne was a four-day campus from September 3-6, 2018, built around four “elemental” seminar streams, keynotes, a plenary panel, off-site events, and a fieldwork day exploring sites inside and outside Melbourne. EARTH, WATER, FIRE, and AIR/FLESH were all explored through seminar meetings, involving guest facilitators and participants in the co-creation of a curriculum.