Existential Risk in the Anthropocene
A Collaborative Syllabus for An Upper-Level Undergraduate Class
Thanks to a 2025 Una Europa KIEM Grant and building on earlier conversations about existential risk, Leiden researchers Rob Cullum and Maud Rijks organized a workshop that brought together scholars from history, law, international relations, mathematics, geography, philosophy, sociology, veterinary studies, and public-facing institutions to move toward the creation of a flexible, bachelor-level syllabus. The goal is to help students understand, analyze, and respond to existential risk in an age of climate disruption, technological acceleration, democratic strain, and widening environmental inequality.
The workshop started from a simple but pressing observation: students are increasingly aware that the threats shaping their futures are not isolated incidents but overlapping, accelerating processes. Climate change, water stress, pandemics, biodiversity loss, nuclear insecurity, and AI-related disruption are often experienced as existential because they challenge not only infrastructure and institutions, but the material conditions of life itself. Participants agreed that universities have a responsibility to equip students with intellectual frameworks, comparative vocabularies, and practical pedagogies to study these risks critically rather than experience them only as diffuse anxiety.
The workshop repeatedly challenged the idea that existential risk only refers to rare, sudden, world-ending catastrophe. Participants stressed that risk also emerges through cumulative processes such as chemical exposure, environmental degradation, water scarcity, and governance failure. This broader framing makes room for environmental justice, local vulnerability, and the uneven distribution of harm, while still connecting local cases to larger systems and planetary dynamics. Then, participants emphasized the need to build a genuinely interdisciplinary syllabus without necessarily leaning toward a loose bundle of disconnected mini courses. The emerging preference was for a modular but coherent blueprint: students would receive shared conceptual grounding in risk, uncertainty, power, governance, justice, vulnerability, and responsibility, and then move into case-based work on themes such as climate change, pandemics, AI, nuclear threats, and cascading socio-economic disruption. Historic disasters, contemporary examples, and comparative case studies would help translate abstract theory into concrete teaching. Finally, the workshop highlighted the importance of pedagogy. Participants discussed roleplay, simulations, interviews, debates, reflective writing, artistic methods, horizon-scanning exercises, and immersive tools such as VR/XR. The common aim behind these approaches was not spectacle, but engagement: students should be able to encounter risk as lived experience, reflect on their own positionality, and test how different governance responses work, fail, or reproduce injustice. The group also noted that courses on existential risk must be taught with care. Students need intellectual seriousness, but also room for imagination, dialogue, and forms of empowerment that do not collapse into false optimism.
The group implemented such recommendations and gave shape to an open-ended course program, a collaborative syllabus that can be downloaded here, with prospect of its partial or total implementation at several university partners both within and beyond the Una Europa alliance.