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 will be a multidisciplinary research “playgroup”—to borrow from Anna Tsing. The lab will be 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. We will host 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, our lab will build 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 will thus work 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 Humanity
One of the environmental humanities’s main concerns is to simultaneously challenge and expand our understanding of humanity. As has been made patently clear by research from theorists such as Marisol de la Cadena, Mario Bláser, and Arturo Escobar, among others, the idea of humans as separate from nature was violently introduced in the Western hemisphere—though never completely imposed—by the Christian conquest of the New World. Against this cleaving of humanity from ecology, EH concepts such as more-thanhuman, transcorporeality, onto-epistemology, onto-toxicity, and naturecultures, among others, offer frameworks for considering how our humanness is porous, always crossed by other beings, both biotic and abiotic. In a similar vein, the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has studied how in Amazonian cosmovisions, “humanity” is a common culture shared by all beings. Turning human exceptionalism on its head, Amazonian perspectivism suggests that all beings see themselves as humans and live experiences typically relegated to the human world: war, sex, hunger, and more. Building on such work, some of the questions the lab will explore include: How can we think about forms of nonhuman personhood and what do they say about human personhood? In a context in which activists are increasingly gaining legal rights for nature, how does a river’s juridical personhood, for example, differ from that of a human’s? What are the implications for other forms of juridical personhood such as that associated with conservative politics toward fetuses? What are our human responsibilities during a geological epoch sometimes called the Anthropocene that is defined by human transformation of the Earth? What does it mean for our classrooms and our research programs that humanity is always already more-than-human? How can we access nonhuman perspectives, bring them into our classrooms, think with them, and write with them? In other words, what does it look like practically to engage in more-than-human scholarship? How does it challenge the established norms of research production? What does it mean to do the humanities if environmental research requires thinking with multiple disciplines and multiple species?

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

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Upcoming Events

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: 2-4pm Meet-and-Greet

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Banner Image: Banana slug in the UC Santa Cruz redwoods.