Fear of a Dead White Planet asks: how does one study when the planet is on fire? The More Worlds Collective challenges the contemporary rush to planetary technofixes for environmental emergency. Instead they track how such planetary science frames are enmeshed in the longstanding projects of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and epistemological violence. Calling for unlearning and joined-up study, the collective reclaims terraforming from off-earth engineering schemes to instead think through how our more modest efforts to study differently are also world-making and world-breaking. In orienting toward terra and formation, the collective commits to a place-based, non-universal study scaled at levels both intimate and massive. Through its serious but unruly methods, Fear of a Dead White Planet invites readers to recognize and conjure alternate worlds in and around the university.
Contending that contemporary study of the environment can often reproduce the violence it means to address, Fear of a Dead White Planet proposes a methodological shift that is place-based and allows for the conjuring of alternate worlds.
