Welcome!

 

This humanities lab sits at the productive contact-zone between the Environmental and Digital Humanities. The primary questions that guide our activities are:

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How has the global digital media revolution transformed our relationships with lives, bodies and ecocultural systems?

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Given these profound transformations how can we imagine, create and restore harmonious and thriving multispecies "naturalcultural" communities regionally, nationally and globally? 

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We firmly believe that major ecological and socio-cultural crises of our times (such as climate change, identity-based conflicts, challenges to democratic norms, increased inequality, the Digital and A.I. revolution and the planet's sixth mass-extinction) are not separate phenomena but present important and understudied interconnections. 

   To analyze these interconnections and locate pathways towards restored bonds of multispecies care and kinship, the lab proposes the Cybercene as a new gathering principal to study the current ecocultural era in our planetary history. As lands burn, oceans boil, species go extinct almost unnoticed on a daily basis and political/economic/cultural conflicts (local, regional and global) multiply, we seek to foster collaboration and communication between experts within and beyond academia to develop alternative knowledges and ecocultural practices.

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Roughly encompassing the first two decades of the 21st century and still ongoing, the Cybercene is defined in a forthcoming book by Professor Vetri Nathan as a pivotal period in which online on-screen “realities,” digital representations and narratives  have quickly and effectively transformed identities and substituted the value of actual bodies and living habitats. We believe that naming, understanding and addressing this transformation can allow us to locate and deploy more effective pathways to mitigate some of the major crises, both natural and cultural, of our era.

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Our lab aims to utilize this definition of the newest sub-era of the Anthropocene as a springboard to undertake activities within two main "clusters" of collaborative research, teaching, and community engagement in the Environmental Humanities. Please add and follow us on Instagram for weekly news on these projects!

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CLUSTER 1: Multispecies Studies: This cluster makes the case for an urgently-needed multispecies paradigm-shift in the humanities and sciences. This cluster encourages transcultural and collaborative explorations (between human and more-than-human experts) to locate pathways that counter  corrosive ecocultural practices. We believe that These approaches can lead to regaining thriving multispecies communities at the local (Los Angeles), regional (Southwestern U.S.), state (California), national (United States) and intercontinental/planetary scales.

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CLUSTER 2: Cybercene Studies (CS): in which we examine theoretical frameworks that will help us better understand the intimate yet complex connections between virtual-vs-embodied ecocultural identities and relationships. How do Cybercene mediatic representations, narratives and fantasies directly or indirectly shape our individual and collective approaches, attitudes and practices towards actual lives, bodies and ecosystems?

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CLICK HERE to explore the ecosystem of current and future projects  organized around these two main clusters: (Multispecies Studies and Cybercene Studies) at the Multispecies Futures Lab.

 

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A HUMANITIES PERSPECTIVE

A MULTISPECIES PERSPECTIVE

AN EMBODIED PERSPECTIVE

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   This lab was conceived between 2019 and 2022, founded in May 2023 and housed at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) since 2024 as The Cybercene Lab. In May 2025, it was renamed as the Multispecies Futures Lab to more accurately represent its primary goals and new projects, i.e. functioning as a gathering space for collaborative interdisciplinary explorations of pathways towards multispecies wellbeing and ecocultural habitability in a digitally-connected planet.

 

We believe that the deeply entangled "naturalcultural" crises of our times must be urgently mitigated by better engagement and communication between scholars in the humanities and other disciplines, between academic and nonacademic experts, between human and "more-than-human" experts and between all these knowledge producers and the general public.

 

   For this reason, our conversations at the lab are include not only other academics, but also towards leaders, non-humanist scholars of environmental, cultural and digital culture, policy makers who would like to include important humanities-based perspectives into their planning and new initiatives and animal/plant/fungi/microbial perspectives. We also hope the lab will become a space to learn from actual multispecies practitioners (the bodies on the ground) who are diligently striving towards multispecies ecocultural healing and habitability within their own communities globally.

 

The lab is also committed to developing new humanistic qualitative methods to enhance affective and epistemic impacts of multispecies abundance and damage: for example, multispecies thick mapping, developed and now being deployed by the lab in its current projects.

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In the tradition of a training lab in the sciences, the Multispecies Futures Lab is also committed to teaching and fostering research projects by students, both at the graduate and undergraduate level.

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   Please excuse us while we build our complete site with links and more information (Coming soon)

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