Adaptation

1. Why did you choose this topic?

The pandemic made adaptation a personal baseline experience: everyday life suddenly became a matter of adjusting to shifting risks, rules, and vulnerabilities. It also felt like a signal crisis of our late-modern relationship to nature in the Anthropocene. And since adaptation is a deeply suspect term in classic critical theory, I wanted to reformulate it for an era of destabilization, climate change, and new questions of self-preservation without making peace with domination.

2. What new perspectives does your book offer?

The book recovers adaptation as a critical concept for analyzing society under ecological conditions in the Anthropocene. Until now, adaptation usually meant the opposite of emancipation, freedom, and progress, and it often served as a keyword of neoliberal governance. I trace its dark sides, but also show why the classic, purely negative notion has become untenable. In the next society, adaptation can even become a distinct source of social freedom.

3. What makes your topic relevant for current research debates?

Critical theory is searching for a convincing stance in the context of polycrisis, above all climate change. My book opens such a perspective by taking seriously the practices through which societies cope with planetary problems practices too often dismissed as defeatism. It also offers Earth-system science and applied climate research a space for reflection: to situate their own interventions politically, and to see what kinds of agency and freedom they enable or foreclose.

4. Choose one person you would like to discuss your book with!

I would love to discuss the book with Dipesh Chakrabarty. His work on how the Anthropocene disrupts modern historical consciousness is a key reference point for my attempt to rethink freedom and hope after modernity. A conversation could probe the political stakes: does adaptation name only a politics of necessity and self-preservation, or can it also ground new forms of collective agency, responsibility, and legitimacy under ecological limits.

5. Your book summary in one sentence:

Adaptation is a roadmap for critical thinking in the Anthropocene.

Alex Fenton is a research fellow at the German Centre for Higher Education and Science Research (DZHW) and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Originally from the UK, he worked at the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics before moving to Germany to do his doctorate at the Leibniz University of Hannover. His research focus lies in historical and political sociology, specifically the social uses of social scientific research.