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.