Past Annual Themes

2020/2021:

After Pollution

In 2020-2021 EnviroLab members explore the annual theme of pollution, toxicity, and waste paying special attention to the kinds of socio-natural worlds produced in a permanently polluted world (Liboiron et al., 2018). We explore the ways in which pollution disrupts and sustains ways of life, creating new forms of politics and ethics to reckon with social and environmental change. In doing so, we follow the lead of scholars who have explored the emerging chemical relations in the face of pollution (Agard-Jones, 2013; Kirksey and Shapiro, 2017). We embark on this collective exploration of toxicity reimagining bodies—human and otherwise— (Neimanis, 2017; Murphy, 2017), matter, and relations. Overall, the work of the group seeks to re-examine the paths, movements, and entanglements of waste, impurities, and geography and their mutual transformation through time. Living in the aftermath of pollution, we strive to find alternative ways of narrating the legacies of pollution, toxicity, and waste that continue to make our everyday lives. We invite scholars to share their work at our monthly workshops and to join our monthly reading groups as part of our ongoing conversations on living after pollution.

2021/2022:

Beyond Human

In recent decades, many rich areas of scholarship have emerged out of an attention to socio-ecological relations. Through work theorizing Relational Ontologies, Multispecies Ethnography, and Biosemiotics, for example, scholars continue to pose new questions about socio-ecological communities and socio-natural worlds, many responding directly to the critical environmental challenges of our times. These multiple lines of flight include reconfigurations of temporal and geographical scales, and often exceed the boundaries of both humanist and natural science methodologies.

To move beyond-human also calls for critical attention to the boundary making projects involved in locating “the human” and “the environment.” As beyond-human work proliferates so do critiques of these approaches. Such lines of critique informed by multiple intellectual traditions offer generative interventions, pose important theoretical problems, and add critical historical context and correctives. This year, at Envirolab, we will be looking back over the last decade of scholarship on more than human worlds, to reflect on its promises and perils, and to imagine future directions for this work.

2022/2023:

The study of landscapes, in a multiplicity of forms and with a multiplicity of meanings within human lives, has a long and contested history. Anthropology, amongst other disciplines, continues to play an important role in the critical study of landscapes as a terrain of struggle. Recent approaches problematize the idea and ontology of land, call into question ideas of the passivity of "nature" and separation between humans and "environment" on which a European tradition of landscape representation has been premised, and require a nuanced look at the variety of actors that produce the same. By critically engaging with landscapes, practitioners in various disciplines ranging from planning to the arts have developed several conceptual frameworks that can be deployed to understand the concept through a decolonial lens. This has broader implications for both ecology and community action.

This year at EnviroLab, we focus on efforts to grapple with and apply such multidisciplinary frameworks within and beyond ecologies of inhabitation. We will both trouble the notion and history of the landscape concept, and also take it as an entry point into a wide variety of academic literatures and multimodal traditions of representation. We will examine questions of how to move beyond the human, how anthropology can engage the un/planned, and the problematics of representing landscapes, which not only present disciplinary challenges but also play a role in broader discussions of decolonization and climate change, requiring critical introspection and action.

2023/2024:

The approach to study environmental systems and change through the classical elements – fire, earth, water, and air – has been formative to the composition of environmental studies and its disciplinary configurations of expertise. Recent scholarship has called for the more-than-natural recognition of the elements through their relational qualities (Alaimo and Starosielski 2016, Myers, Papadopoulos, and Puig Bellacasa 2021), acknowledging that elements are constituted through phase shifts in which their states of matter are momentarily materialized through ongoing encounter, mixture, and transformation (Peters and Steinbergs 2019). After all, water is also vapor, oxygen composes a flame, fire falls to ash, and runoff trickles through porous bedrock. Accelerated by environmental injustice, chemical contamination, displacement, disease, disaster, and climate change, the reverberating stakes of our current socio-ecological crises further demand we rethink engagements with the elements as more than distinct states of matter. Drought, wildfire, particulate pollution, and acid deposition do not operate independent of anthropogenic activity and its colonial/racialized logics; they epitomize and compound each other.

Yet thinking through admixture is only the first step in attending to elemental ecologies that are already and always in relation. The modes and intensities of these processes come to (re)make and be (re)made by their metamorphing relations, not just their particular material forms. Thresholds of evaporation and combustion; speeds of decomposition and regrowth; the suspension, accumulation, and dispersal of particles and sediments are not just mediating mechanisms between states of matter, but ongoing and contingent processes through which situated materialities and meanings travel, are held, and also congeal.

Following Stengers’ provocation that “there is no identity of a practice independent of its environment” (2005:187), we revisit the theoretical and methodological work of troubling the elements as inseparable from the conditions of and our obligations to troubled ecologies. We ask: What are the political and ethical implications of thinking elementally? How might ethnographic conceptualization retool elemental thinking as a mode of inquiry grounded in the processes critical to the survival of human and more-than-human worlds? How do reconfigurations of the elemental help us think through the Anthropocene and the anthropos-not-seen (de la Cadena 2015)?