Museum of the Anthropocene

The Museum of the Anthropocene is a project that geographer Dr Martin Mahony has been running with third-year students on the University of East Anglia’s Geography and Environmental Sciences courses and, as ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe explains, “it clearly has some resonances with our own series A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects. I’m delighted that Martin is curating a selection that brings this Museum of the Anthropocene online within ClimateCultures. The idea came about through exchanges Martin and I had on another ClimateCultures project (with the University of Bristol’s Centre for Environmental Humanities), Environmental Keywords.”

Human Geography in the Anthropocene

The Museum of the Anthropocene forms the centrepiece of Martin’s course ‘Human Geography in the Anthropocene’, which he’s been running since 2018. The Museum is built collaboratively each year, with each student selecting an object or entity that they think is particularly eloquent of the historical, political and cultural processes that have led us into the Anthropocene, or which helps us imagine a world beyond the Anthropocene. The Museum is staged around two-thirds of the way through the 12-week course, before students then complete a longer essay on their chosen entity. Students are given a framework with which to interpret their case studies and their significance, but the project is designed to give them freedom to explore what being a citizen of the Anthropocene means to them. From world-changing technologies to humble consumer goods, and from family heirlooms to priceless works of art, each year the Museum is stocked with objects which tell stories of both personal and planetary significance.

We’ve recently added a new selection of six pieces from the 2025 cohort of students, supplementing the 18 from previous years. And as the work has progressed, students’ enquiries have expanded beyond the direct focus on material objects to include not just other-than-human beings but also fellow humans as well, with a critical examination of the dehumanising ways dominant cultures have sought to represent them — to objectify them.

Together, the short essays here show the range of subjects that students bring to their understanding of the Anthropocene, how this new planetary era is manifested in so many different ways through human disruptions not just of the ‘natural’, the more-than-human and the social but of our ideas of these phenomena and their — our — relationships.

Some speak more to the cultural sphere, others to the natural (or what until the Anthropocene could be thought of as ‘natural’). There are works of art and literature in this museum (the first sketch made by a human floating free above the Earth, a novel from North America’s golden age of science fiction, poetry from Central America that speaks of ancient pre-Western cultures) and technologies both ancient (the mirror) and modern (space junk from generations of near-Earth satellites, and the pesticide Roundup). There are objects that erase the cultural identities they supposedly make available to us (a cheap fancy dress costume to turn you into a Native American), and those that either help us remember something of cultures and world views that are nearly lost to us (a medieval world map) or ignore the deep roots of some of our seemingly modern traditions (the Christmas tree). Whether explicit or implicit, there is a debate within and between these essays on when this ‘Anthropocene’ began, what our objects can reveal — and might conceal — and what are the impacts of this emerging age, on us, and on the planet.

Boundaries and relations

In his inaugural blog post, Object-based Learning in the Anthropocene, Martin talks about the thinking behind creating the Museum with his Human Geography in the Anthropocene students. His second post, Centrifugal Stories in the Anthropocene, introduces a selection of objects with a common interest in what different human relationships with flora and fauna tell us about this new planetary age. In Objects, Ownership and the Politics of the Anthropocene, Martin sees in our third set of contributions a theme of ‘ownership’ that, in one case, expands in a startling view from beyond earthbound perspectives. In his next post, Anthropocene Naturecultures: Where are the Boundaries?, he asks about the politics of drawing boundaries between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and the relations that cut across them. In Our Anthropocene Museum — A Curator Conversation On Our First Four Years, Martin and fellow ClimateCultures member and director of the GroundWork Gallery in Norfolk, Veronica Sekules, discuss the collection so far as seen through a professional curator’s perspective and how it enhances our understanding of our planetary age.

And most recently, introducing our fifth annual collection with The Age of Irony, Martin discusses how objects can shift their shape when seen through lenses that question Anthropocene ironies, contradictions and oversimplifications, and maybe help point to a new ethos of care. 

Inside the Museum of the Anthropocene you will find the 29 objects from our first five years. More will be added each year. Please do leave a comment on any of the objects that particularly interest you — or comment below on any aspect of the Museum project or the relevance of material culture to our understanding of the Anthropocene.

We’ve also added an Anthropocene Glossary, to highlight some of the many terms and concepts that we use to talk about this new age and how our material cultures shed light on its complexities and challenges.