Collaborations Afield: Work Across Ecologies and Disciplines
March 27 – 29, 2025
Mahindra Humanities Center
Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference
Harvard University
Registration is open to anyone interested in attending the conference.
Over the past decade, ecological habitats have been increasingly understood as more complex and elusive to study from the lens of a single author or discipline. As new ways of thinking-by-doing collectively become imperative, collaborative practices both inside and outside of academia have emerged in dynamic and vibrant ways. Artists, anthropologists, archaeologists, architects, ecologists, engineers, herbalists, geographers and local communities have begun assembling and employing diverse methods and theories for researching the field site, advocating for a more expansive exchange between new sets of agents.
Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas will give the keynote address, Amphibian Praxis, at 6:30pm on Saturday, March 29. Just prior to that, at 4pm, Chucho Ocampo Aguilar (SMACT ’21) will be moderating a panel.
Full schedule can be found here.
Collaborations Afield explores the fertile ground of research on the fringe, where collective work takes root across disciplinary boundaries, between human and non-human, biological, microbial, and artificial actors. Work afield signifies both the observational practices of place-based knowledge production and the state of environmental humanities as an area of study itself. To go afield is to venture beyond the range of one’s own expertise by physically working in, and thinking with, the field site. By investigating research questions through close observation, attuned listening, and data gathering, collaborations afield commune around a shared context approached through diverse methodologies.
Across artist residencies, design studios, and science labs, the field has become both a site of inquiry and an object of study. Attending more closely to the bacteria, the reeds, the wind, the soil as matter with which to play and think critically, artists-in-residence at nature conservation sites reframe the environment as a medium in itself. The study of elemental media takes this a step further, re-organizing our perception of dust, air, water amongst other matter as phenomena that speak to deep time and anthropogenic change. To literally tread in the weeds of a wetland ecosystem, as Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas’s Swamp School illustrates, is to move across molecular and planetary scales at once. To study the industrial ruins of the post-Soviet space as Lori Khatchadourian’s project Afterlife of Socialist Modernity does, or to observe architectural heritage in ruin up close as Caitlin Desilvey’s fieldwork for Curated Decay reflects, is to witness how matter is consumed and transformed, allowing new forms of life amongst people and plants to emerge. To collaborate with artificial intelligence in the field site is to deploy new ways of sensing, monitoring, and analyzing environmental data to understand and predict ecosystems in flux. The “patch” for Anna Tsing, the “animistic apparatus” for May Adadol Ingawanij, and “earthbound knowledge” for the Anthropocene Curriculum are all modes of apprehending a globally dispersed, and yet deeply attentive, impulse to study a rapidly changing environment and its human and nonhuman interdependencies.
In these somewhat formalized—yet still unruly and shifting—spaces of gathering, how is fieldwork assembled, archived, and studied? What alternative forms of scholarship in the environmental humanities is made possible when diverse disciplines commune around a shared site? How do emergent practices in observation and documentation of field sites shape theory, and in turn, how does environmental humanities discourse generate new methodologies for fieldwork?
Collaborations Afield invited proposals from graduate students who work within collectives composed of humans and non-humans; work across geographies and scales; and/or embrace disciplinary contamination to think about the environmental humanities in new and expansive ways. The conference invites proposals that engage across, and extend beyond, the following fields: media studies, visual culture, sound studies, history of art and architecture, history of science, anthropology, critical heritage studies, comparative literature, landscape architecture, nature conservation, filmmaking, archaeology, social practice art, plant science, ecology, entomology, mycology, atmospheric science, geology.
