Italian Foodways and "Dunki" Migrations

This project illustrated the Cybercene era’s mechanisms of commodification, othering and wasting by starting with an ecocultural analysis of the life and death of a migrant agricultural worker in Italy in June 2024, Mr. Satnam Singh. Mr. Singh’s story of modern enslaved labor will be followed by a broader exploration and analysis of the contemporary phenomenon of “dunki” (donkey) migration from India to Europe and North America as an example of colonial-Cybercene multispecies, multi-kind and multi-era ecocultural co-becoming.

 

Via this analysis, this project seeks to demonstrate that qualitative humanistic analysis of natureculture as undertaken by the Multispecies Futures Lab can provide an essential compliment to more data-driven analyses of our digitally-connected societies. This completed project resulted in the creation of the first prototype of a Multispecies Thick Map of the Agro Pontino region.

You can read an Open Access article that discusses this project here (published in the California Italian Studies journal).