Big changes are happening now!
The Cybercene Lab is now based out of the University of California Los Angeles.
Please bear with us as we transition in the next months..More updates on Facebook and Insta!
Teaching
The Lab aims to become an incubator of innovative teaching in the Environmental Humanities, broadly defined, at the university level.
We hope to be a resource and source of ideas for students by integrating the multiple research pathways into exciting and thought-provoking courses, both at graduate (M.A./Ph.D.) and undergraduate (B.A.) levels.
New Lab-Centered Graduate Seminar
COMING IN WINTER 2025!
ELTS 206 Topics in Cultural Studies
Graduate Seminar
Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies (ELTS)
Winter 2025
Tuesdays 4-7 pm
Professor Vetri Nathan
Multispecies Humanities
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This new transcultural and transdisciplinary course introduces students to the key terms and primary methodological approaches via the newest thinking in the Environmental Humanities to analyze the entangled lives of humans, fungi, plants, microorganisms and animals.
As the planet faces its sixth (and first anthropogenic) mass-extinction, we will explore interdisciplinary and decolonial ways of engaging with and re-valuing manifestations of “natureculture” in diverse examples of restorative practices within bodies, lives and ecosystems, as well as in literature, film and art. We will question whether we can continue to sustain foundational dichotomies such as culture/nature, meaning/matter, human/nonhuman and national/transnational. We will examine how these opposing cultural categories formed the basis of Europe’s colonial domination of multispecies life across the continents. Finally, the course will explore how these dichotomies have been challenged by often-repressed epistemologies of Indigenous and other resilient marginalized communities and are also finally being questioned by recent academic work in the Environmental Humanities, Multispecies (“More-Than-Human”) Studies, Ecocriticism, New Materialisms, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Studies.
This course is being incubated by a new experimental humanities lab that is starting up at UCLA in AY 2024-25. For more info on the lab, please see www.thecybercenelab.org
Students from all disciplinary backgrounds are welcome, including from the environmental and sustainability sciences.
New Undergraduate General Education Course
(Pending Approval)
COMING IN SPRING 2025!
ELTS 25
Prof. Vetri Nathan
GLOBAL FOOD STUDIES:
ECOCULTURAL DIVERSITY AND SUSTAINABILITY
Food is culture - and has been a global force since the first formation of human societies. The intercontinental movement of tomatoes, sugarcane, rice, tobacco and spices has directly influenced populations, economies, empires, and ecologies, while food today shapes our local and transnational experiences of nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, race, labor and natural ecosystems. In this interdisciplinary course, we will explore how people use food to imagine themselves as individuals and/or as part of a group as well as a wider globally-interconnected ecosystem. we will identify the importance of food in different eras and cultures by exploring the way the nationality, race, gender, socioeconomic status, etc. influence global food choices or practices. We will also examine how a diverse range of cultures are maintained or transformed through food. through the examination of scholarly research and global culinary traditions, we will explore the complex relationship that societies, nations and ecosystems have with food. We will explore how Europe’s relationships with the global south in colonial and postcolonial times influenced and continue to influence global culinary ecocultures, as well as understand the ways in which decolonial and indigenous approaches are paving the way for a more sustainable planetary future.
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We will explore some interconnected questions throughout the quarter: How do food traditions and practices shape communities by both fostering collaboration and dividing people? What are some prevailing humanistic theories that help us identify and understand more subtle meanings of food? How does food become a vector of power and identity in societies? How can historical and contemporary food practices allow us to understand formations and practices of cultural diversity and environmental/ecological sustainability? How do food practices define and redefine our species and our relationship with other living beings?
