UC Santa Cruz More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory
“In the United States, scholars are asked to become entrepreneurs, producing ourselves as brands and seeking stardom from the very first days of our studies, when we know nothing…. By privatizing what is necessarily collaborative work, these projects aim to strangle the life out of scholarship. Anyone who cares about ideas is forced, then, to create scenes that exceed or escape ‘professionalization,’ that is, the surveillance techniques of privatization. This means designing research that requires playgroups and collaborative clusters: not congeries of individuals calculating costs and benefits, but rather scholarship that emerges through its collaborations.” – Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
About the Cluster
The UC Santa Cruz More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory is a multidisciplinary research “playgroup”—to borrow from Anna Tsing. The lab is dedicated to sharing resources in support of collaborative environmental humanities (EH) research that engages scientists, social scientists, artists, and humanists on our campus to think through some of the most pressing problems related to climate change, extractive capitalism, and megainfrastructural projects. The lab hosts a set of projects that foster high-impact learning communities on these topics in order to create a strong foundation for cross-disciplinary exchange. Unlike other EH centers at universities across the country, the lab builds on co-principal investigator partnerships with researchers, activists, artists, authors, and filmmakers from the Global South to foreground environmental thought rooted in histories of conquest and colonization as well as decolonial thought. The lab thus works to challenge the hierarchies of intellectual production that exclude certain people—not to mention nonhumans—as sources of knowledge. One of the lab’s main goals is to provide a venue for reimagining research collaboration by helping faculty and graduate students build meaningful relationships with potential research collaborators and sites across the globe, including thinking of ways to engage in participatory research.
Connection to the Theme of Nourishment: “Composting,” write Jennifer Mae Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis, “is a material labor whereby old scraps are transformed —through practices of care and attention—into nutrient-rich new soil.” Inspired by the work of Donna Haraway, these and other scholars, including our regular lab participant María Puig de la Bellacasa, have explored the regenerative potential of “recirculating purportedly ‘dead’ materials into lively material processes” (Puig de la Bellacasa). Composting, in environmental thinking, has become both material and metaphorical. Nourishing academic fields can be akin to other processes of ground nourishment: mixing dying soils with organic detritus, carefully selecting which nutrients to bring together, and attentively and laboriously turning them. The nutrient-rich humus created through care-full (Van Dooren) composting practices enriches the soil that grows in and nourishes communities. The second iteration of the More-than-human(ities) lab is inspired by the potential of the non-hierarchical disordered recycling of the compost bin to mulch the humanities, arts, sciences, and social sciences together. Nourishment will be both the ethos and the thematic focus of the lab in 2025-2026. How does work on plants, agriculture, food systems, waste, and composting address some of the most pressing questions of the environmental humanities? How can deliberate cross-disciplinary thinking on these topics nourish us as more-than-humans while also nourishing our thinking and our scholarship? What unexpected volunteers will grow from the depths of our living earth? What new thinking can repurposed dirt, trash, and other material excesses offer to the more-than-human approach?
Co-Principal Investigators
Amanda M. Smith, Associate Professor, Literature
Kat Gutierrez, Assistant Professor, History
Lily Balloffet, Associate Professor, Latin American and Latino Studies
Hannah Cole, Assistant Professor, Literature
Flora Lu, Professor, Environmental Studies
Sign up for our mailing list here. Folks with UCSC email accounts can join the Google Group directly.
Non-UCSC community members can use the link to request to be added.
Upcoming Events
December 4, 2025: Christine Padoch and Nancy Peluso – Return to Nanga Jela
November 18, 2025: Dr. Lyla June Johnston – Indigenous Relationships with the Land: The Roots of Regenerative Agriculture
September 30, 2025: 12:00-1:30pm Meet-and-Greet
May 30, 2025: Celebratory Collabo & Share Fest with Clara Bergamini, Yagmur Kizilay, and Mary Jirmanus
April 28, 2025: Carolyn Fornoff – Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change
March 4, 2025: More-Than-Human(ities) Lab Early Career Scholars Share Session
February 19, 2025: Valentin Lopez – Amah Mutsun Tribal History & Importance of Traditional Land Stewardship
January 24, 2025: We Are the Middle of Forever: A More-than-human(ities) Book Club Discussion with Stan Rushworth
November 2, 2024: “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”: A Spooky Reading Group Potluck
October 15, 2024: Mapping Hydrocommons Cultures in the Americas with Lisa Blackmore and Alejandro Ponce de León
October 9, 2024: 2:00-4:00pm Meet-and-Greet
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Banner Image: Banana slug in the UC Santa Cruz redwoods.