The Cybercene Lab
Our Multispecies Futures in a Transformed World
Welcome!
Conceived in 2022, founded in May 2023 and housed at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) since 2024, this humanities 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 aim to explore interdisciplinary and pragmatic pathways towards wellbeing and restored habitability. The primary question that guides our activities is:
How do we imagine, create and maintain successful and thriving multispecies "naturalcultural" communities regionally, nationally and globally?
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 depart from this definition of the newest sub-era of the Anthropocene to establish two main "clusters" of collaborative research, teaching, and community engagement in the Environmental Humanities. Please add and follow us on Facebook and/or Instagram for weekly news on these projects!
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CLUSTER 1: 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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CLUSTER 2: Multispecies Healing and Habitability (MHH): This research cluster encourages transcultural and collaborative explorations to locate humanistic pathways that counter corrosive ecocultural practices. We believe that qualitative and holistic approaches are crucial to move us towards global multispecies healing and habitability. 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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CLICK HERE to explore the ecosystem of current and future projects organized around these two main clusters (Cybercene Studies and Multispecies Healing and Habitability) at The Cybercene Lab.
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A HUMANITIES PERSPECTIVE
A MULTISPECIES PERSPECTIVE
AN EMBODIED PERSPECTIVE
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We at The Cybercene Lab firmly believe that major ecological and socio-cultural crises of our times (such as climate change, challenges to democratic norms, increased inequality, the planet's sixth mass-extinction) are not separate phenomena but present important interconnections. We also believe that these crises must be urgently mitigated by deeper engagement between scholars in the humanities and other disciplines.
For this reason, our work at the lab is directed not only towards other humanities scholars, 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. Even more importantly, we hope the lab will become a space to learn from actual 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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Please excuse us while we build our complete site with links and more information (Coming soon)
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Public outreach of our research will be found at the associated website: cybercene.org (Coming soon)
Meet the Cybercene Team!
P.I./Faculty Director
Dr. Vetri Nathan
Associate Professor
Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies (ELTS)
University of California, Los Angeles
Vetri Nathan's research and teaching interests include the Environmental and Digital Humanities, Migrations, Multispecies, Food and Media Studies.
His forthcoming book project "The Cybercene: Our Multispecies Futures in a Transformed World" takes an unusual pathway to being researched and written, as it is intimately entangled with the birth and research activities of this new lab.
Dr. Nathan holds his Ph.D. from Stanford University (2009). Prior to joining the University of California in 2024, Professor Nathan taught at the University of Massachusetts Boston (2011-21) and at Rutgers University (2022-24).
His initial research focused specifically on Italy's fraught response to migration from the Global South of the world. His first book, Marvelous Bodies: Italy's New Migrant Cinema (2017, Purdue University Press) explores thirteen key full-length Italian movies released between 1990 and 2010 that treat this remarkable moment of cultural role reversal through a plurality of styles. He continues to explore questions related to ecocultural diversity and sustainability in Italy, Europe and the Mediterranean.
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