Increasingly, our relationships with “natural” phenomena are being mediated by algorithms, screens, and machines: consider, for example, remote sensing of geological activity, or modeling of atmospheric climate change. As new computational methods (e.g., machine learning and artificial intelligence) promise to further improve the fidelity of systems sciences, which assume that more data equals better knowledge, we contend that these methods simultaneously reproduce colonial systems of dispossession and extermination, as well as structure significant blind-spots rendering invisible the radical ecologies surrounding us today.
The Radical Ecologies H-Lab aims to question connections and collisions between power and ecology by incorporating materials, experimental methods, and field-based techniques into human-centered modes of social and cultural analysis. The Rad Lab will address what we call “radical ecologies,” namely, collective forms of life that question how we understand stability, indeterminacy and risk; toxicity and temporality; geo-sociality and science fiction; and multi-scalar holobionts (assemblages of different species into ecological units) and infrastructures.
The Rad Lab will explore the following overlapping themes: designing indeterminacy (as a way to contend with rapid environmental change and increasing unpredictability); temporality (recognizing the simultaneous existence of differing time scales and also emerging novel temporalities); power (as manifested through engineering and science); multi-species relations (ecologies as models for collaborative survival); and toxic animacies (coexistence and collaboration in the context of environmental disturbance).
Lab Team
Maria Paz Almanera, PhD candidate, Media, Culture and Communication, Steinhardt
Tega Brain, Tandon, Assistant Professor of Integrated Digital Media
Elaine Gan, GSAS XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement, Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow
Nabil Hassein, PhD candidate, Media, Culture and Communication, Steinhardt
Elizabeth Henaff , Tandon, Assistant Professor of Integrated Digital Media
Karen Holmberg, Gallatin, Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Science
Meg Weissner, PhD candidate, Media, Culture and Communication, Steinhardt
Diana Zhu, PhD candidate, Media, Culture and Communication, Steinhardt