I’ve just been reading The Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene by Anna Tsing and her colleagues. I think it has lots of good examples of concepts that can act as boundary objects for interdisciplinary thinking. Boundary objects help to coordinate thinking across boundaries by being flexible enough to make sense for multiple communities but coherent enough to coordinate dialogue between communities even when there is no consensus. I’ve written about these in other blog posts.

Tsing and her colleagues introduce the idea of hotspots. These are place-time knots where something has become broken in our social-ecological systems. They suggest these are particular good settings to understand the implications of the Anthropocene. One example they give of a hotspot is the drilling of boreholes to feed cattle in Botswana. Cattle gather around the boreholes and graze so heavily in one place that wildlife struggles to survive. The boreholes and related laws also change the social system so that the indigenous San foragers end up having to take up cattle farming or go hungry. This then leads to more and more cattle and increasingly fragmented wildlife habitats. So the whole social-ecological system goes through a rupture with shifts in practices, form and temporality. I think the idea of hotspots creates a valuable boundary concept that policy makers, communities, social scientists and scientists could use to coordinate their thinking about how to reverse some of the damage of the Anthropocene.

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