Culture, Environment and Science

Rapid environmental, technological and political change poses new threats and raises new questions about human life and human relationships with the environment, non-humans, and each other. The Culture, Environment, Science stream brings the conceptual tools, methods and approaches of the humanities and social sciences to bear on the challenging questions facing today’s interconnected world.

Our research

New articulations of biopower and coloniality, shifting patterns of capitalism and political economy, technological change, and environmental threat raise new questions about what it means to human, and at home in the world. Within the context of these transforming landscapes, our research explores the assembling and disassembling of people and histories, in conversation with ecological communities and both built and natural environments. The ‘Anthropocene’, an era in which human agency has been scaled up to embrace and endanger the entire planet, demands renewed attention to the intersections of nature/culture, as well as to other practices and understandings of the ecologies that bind diverse peoples to each other, and to the non-human world. New findings in microbiomics and epigenetics, meanwhile, encourage us to understand human bodies as open and porous environments. In responding to new intellectual and ethical challenges, and to their long-running histories, we seek to trace the lines of connection, harm, responsibility and care between human and non-human life, environments, and technologies.


The Culture, Environment and Science stream was recently re-articulated, more details about the stream’s research questions and projects will be added shortly. In the meantime, learn more about some of our current research projects below.