If there were a section
for climate catastrophe in the greeting card aisle,
what would it look like?
Greeting Cards for the Anthropocene is a an ongoing research project. We make greeting cards for the occasions the card aisle leaves out: wildfire, flood, extinction, forced migration, and the everyday feeling of not knowing what to say about any of it. Since 2019 we have designed and printed more than a dozen cards by hand on the letterpress, many of them set in historic wood type from the Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection at the University of Texas at Austin.
The greeting card is easy to roll your eyes at.
We think that is exactly why it is worth taking seriously.
When commercial cards took off in the nineteenth century, their promoters argued that people needed help expressing complicated feelings. It is hard to think of a more complicated feeling than the one so many of us carry about the climate.
The greeting card is an overlooked cultural form that can help us connect and communicate at a time of increasingly dire environmental crises. This project is designed to meet the urgent need to foster an equitable and more-than-just-human convivium.
The greeting card is a technology that is familiar to us; we give cards and share sentiments at important life events as well as everyday occasions. Our greeting cards are designed to create openings that lead you in exploring your own climate feelings, not as lone expressions but thoughts in relation. They are shared as messages that recognize this extraordinary moment we’ve inherited. This project, like so many others constitute modest gestures of concern that are crucial for building the affective communities needed for larger social and political change. (Inspirations)
In 2019 with support from the Planet Texas 2050 project, we began working to create a set of greeting cards as a way of thinking critically about the constitution of community and the rhetoric of greeting in a time of crisis.
Over the years participants have joined us for lectures, reading groups, design workshops, and letter writing events. Hundreds of messages have been composed. Most of these have been addressed, stamped and sent through the postal system. How many more people have read those messages and shared them with others?
Happenings
Our happenings (aka events) include design and composition workshops, lectures, exhibitions, and a reading group. We’ve organized happenings in the USA and Canada, though our cards have been mailed around the globe.
Greeting Cards
Our official greeting card collection has been growing since we began the project in 2019. They are often designed in collaboration with others. We prioritize the use of wood type and letterpress printing. The project was originally planned around the Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection. We also occasionally make use of metal and plastic type, and polymer plates.
Writing Kits
Writing kits are still in the prototype stage our first iteration was workshopped in at McMaster University.
the people
Project Lead
Craig Campbell is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. Along with Marina Peterson and Casey Boyle he runs the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography. He also teaches on occasion at the School of Design and Creative Technologies.
As project lead, Craig designs and prints cards, leads workshops, develops programming and directions for the project, maintains the website, and is currently working on a book tentatively called Greeting the Anthropocene.
Collaborator
Casey Boyle is Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas in Austin and Director of the Digital Writing & Research Lab where he researches and teaches digital rhetoric, media studies, accessibility, techno-poetics/ethics, and/as rhetorical history. He earned a BA at the University of Texas, an MA at the University of North Texas, and a PhD in the Rhetoric/Composition program at the University of South Carolina.
Acknowledgements
Most of the presses we use are on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, not far from Waller Creek. Following the lead of the Native American and Indigenous Studies program, we acknowledge that our presses and studios are on the Indigenous lands of Turtle Island, the ancestral name for what is now called North America. We also acknowledge the Alabama-Coushatta, Caddo, Carrizo/Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Comanche, Kickapoo, Lipan Apache, Tonkawa and Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo, and all the American Indian and Indigenous Peoples and communities who have been or have become a part of these lands and territories in Texas.
Inspirations
Ingraham, Chris. 2020. Gestures of Concern. Duke University Press Books.
Jaffe, Alexandra. 1999. “Packaged Sentiments: The Social Meanings of Greeting Cards.” Journal of Material Culture 4 (2): 115–41.
Loveless, Natalie. 2019. How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation. Duke University Press.
our affiliations
- Planet Texas 2050
- Department of Anthropology, UT Austin
- Bureau for Experimental Ethnography
- The Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection
Proudly powered by WordPress
Greeting Cards for the Anthropocene · Bureau for Experimental Ethnography · University of Texas at Austin
Text and images © 2019–2026 Greeting Cards for the Anthropocene, shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.