Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

This research project seeks to understand the process of becoming urban at a critical time in Cambodian history. Combining traditional and distributed ethnographic methods, the research team will explore and analyze the lived experiences of migrants from rural villages to urban centers; the economic, environmental, and social factors that drove the decision to migrate; and the changing connections to place, space, and people that result from becoming urban. Ultimately, the project aims to produce a deeper understanding of the lived experience of migrants and a better account of their transformation from villagers to urbanites.

Human beings are making a profound and irreversible impact on the natural world. This happens largely through industrial activity. And while we have sophisticated abilities to track such changes—for example, we can map the effects of carbon pollution—we lack a deep understanding of the social impact of these “engineered ecologies.” What new political, economic, and legal practices would help states and multinational organizations grapple more effectively with toxic exposure and the unequal distribution of ecological risk? The goal of the Engineered Worlds initiative—comprising three related projects (2014–2016, 2016–2017, and 2019–2021)—was to create new theoretical frameworks and social science methodologies to address these urgent questions.

Because any rigorous attempt to reconsider the terms of environmental justice requires a range of perspectives, the Engineered Worlds project adopted an interdisciplinary approach. The research team brought together anthropologists, historians, geographers, and environmentalists to work in a collaborative setting on the ways industry is irrevocably altering ecologies and social relations. In a series of seminars, workshops, and conferences, they considered what social policies might adequately address problems of toxicity introduced into the environment. More generally, they wanted to take on the challenge: How should humans deal with their own transformation of the natural world? But, of course, to take on the large issues one needs to study specific problems. The research group studied in detail cultural applications of changing agricultural processes, community organizing in the shadow of Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation, and metal production at Peru’s national seaport. Researchers considered various forms of personal identification and collective action in light of the mounting effects of toxicity, financial insecurity, and militarism.

The project included the arts. In the spring of 2015, the research team welcomed two artists for talks co-sponsored by the University’s Arts, Science, and Culture initiative. The internationally renowned landscape photographer Michael Light discussed his work documenting the impacts of mining operations, nuclear weapons tests, and large-scale housing developments in and around Las Vegas, and Columbia University professor of architecture Laura Kurgan explored the use of data visualization as a tool for public education and mobilization on environmental issues.

From the outset, the project self-consciously enlisted the next generation as part of the larger network of scholars working on planetary-scale environmental change. Two collaborative seminars focused on problems of temporality and scale in the earth sciences. Of particular concern was how to visualize the massive data that establishes environmental harm. With better visualization techniques we will be able to think better about how to address the ensuing social harms. Twelve graduate students have decided to do their research and write their dissertations addressing these issues. Several have been awarded external funding; some have presented their Engineered Worlds research to professional association meetings. These seem to be the beginnings of a new field of research.

Although the impact of this generational investment will come into focus over years, the project has already yielded concrete results. The research team is assembling case studies and co-authoring a series of papers to articulate a new methodology for studying planetary-scale industrial effects. They are also honing a new theory of “toxic violence” that reckons with the unintended consequences of industrial activity in the present and on geological time scale.

The group has also made a course on the Anthropocene widely available by circulating a syllabus, crucial texts, and topics for discussion. The challenges that this research team took up—environmental justice and the political challenges of climate change—are being studied by other concerned groups around the world, and a significant number of them are drawing on the work of the Engineered Worlds team.

Human beings are making a profound and irreversible impact on the natural world. This happens largely through industrial activity. And while we have sophisticated abilities to track such changes—for example, we can map the effects of carbon pollution—we lack a deep understanding of the social impact of these “engineered ecologies.” What new political, economic, and legal practices would help states and multinational organizations grapple more effectively with toxic exposure and the unequal distribution of ecological risk? The goal of the Engineered Worlds initiative—comprising three related projects (2014–2016, 2016–2017, and 2019–2021)—was to create new theoretical frameworks and social science methodologies to address these urgent questions.

Because any rigorous attempt to reconsider the terms of environmental justice requires a range of perspectives, the Engineered Worlds project adopted an interdisciplinary approach. The research team brought together anthropologists, historians, geographers, and environmentalists to work in a collaborative setting on the ways industry is irrevocably altering ecologies and social relations. In a series of seminars, workshops, and conferences, they considered what social policies might adequately address problems of toxicity introduced into the environment. More generally, they wanted to take on the challenge: How should humans deal with their own transformation of the natural world? But, of course, to take on the large issues one needs to study specific problems. The research group studied in detail cultural applications of changing agricultural processes, community organizing in the shadow of Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation, and metal production at Peru’s national seaport. Researchers considered various forms of personal identification and collective action in light of the mounting effects of toxicity, financial insecurity, and militarism.

The project included the arts. In the spring of 2015, the research team welcomed two artists for talks co-sponsored by the University’s Arts, Science, and Culture initiative. The internationally renowned landscape photographer Michael Light discussed his work documenting the impacts of mining operations, nuclear weapons tests, and large-scale housing developments in and around Las Vegas, and Columbia University professor of architecture Laura Kurgan explored the use of data visualization as a tool for public education and mobilization on environmental issues.

From the outset, the project self-consciously enlisted the next generation as part of the larger network of scholars working on planetary-scale environmental change. Two collaborative seminars focused on problems of temporality and scale in the earth sciences. Of particular concern was how to visualize the massive data that establishes environmental harm. With better visualization techniques we will be able to think better about how to address the ensuing social harms. Twelve graduate students have decided to do their research and write their dissertations addressing these issues. Several have been awarded external funding; some have presented their Engineered Worlds research to professional association meetings. These seem to be the beginnings of a new field of research.

Although the impact of this generational investment will come into focus over years, the project has already yielded concrete results. The research team is assembling case studies and co-authoring a series of papers to articulate a new methodology for studying planetary-scale industrial effects. They are also honing a new theory of “toxic violence” that reckons with the unintended consequences of industrial activity in the present and on geological time scale.

The group has also made a course on the Anthropocene widely available by circulating a syllabus, crucial texts, and topics for discussion. The challenges that this research team took up—environmental justice and the political challenges of climate change—are being studied by other concerned groups around the world, and a significant number of them are drawing on the work of the Engineered Worlds team.

Engineered Worlds III: Terraformations is the concluding chapter in a multiyear project on assessing anthropogenic environments and planetary conditions. Engineered Worlds interrogates the implications of a world where ecologies everywhere have been effected by human industry, and where new problems of insecurity, the terms and temporality of knowledge production, and the scale of endangerment challenge established categories of thought and analysis. The goal of this collaborative project is three-fold: 1) to create new concepts and methodologies for researching planetary scale environmental problems that are complexity distributed in time as well as space; 2) to connect the individual to the global environment via industrial exposures and to theorize in a new way the relationship between specific kinds of pollution and changing environmental conditions; and 3) to build a network of interdisciplinary scholars working collaboratively to understand these complex problems. Building on past events in 2015 and 2017, this year’s theme "Terraformations" explores "terra" as a formation involving both territory and terror. Its goal is to mobilize insights into human capacities to affect life on a planetary scale and shift them into a discussion of how communities are working to live in and move through such violent conditions - that is, to both assess and engage alternative terraformations.

This interdisciplinary collaboration between archaeologists and geneticists will enhance ancient DNA research at the University of Chicago and spur the development of a curriculum in archaeogenetics to bridge the gap between these two disciplines. An “ancient DNA revolution” is occurring in archaeology and ancient history because of new laboratory and statistical methods for extracting and analyzing DNA from ancient skeletal remains. These new methods have enabled the reconstruction of thousands of complete genomes from ancient specimens found in a wide range of geographical and chronological contexts. These genomes provide striking evidence of ancient population migrations, often challenging archaeologists’ long-held ideas about cultural change. The project will analyze DNA from ancient human remains excavated in the Middle East in order to reconstruct population movements and assess the prevailing explanations for cultural change in the Bronze Age civilizations of this region. This requires close collaboration and frequent discussions between geneticists and archaeologists of the kind the research team intends to demonstrate in this project. A series of workshops and an international conference will foster discussions of how ancient DNA results can best contribute to the construction of historical narratives. In light of concerns about biological reductionism and what some see as the implied racism of genetic studies, the project will seek viable ways of conceptualizing the relationship between genetic variation, cultural and linguistic similarities and differences, and the social construction of ethnicity and group solidarity.

During the last decade, the concept of the Anthropocene has been widely adopted throughout the social sciences and humanities to capture the role of societal processes in the transformation of the earth system and in the genesis of contemporary planetary environmental emergencies, including global heating, biodiversity loss, and ocean acidification, among others. While questions of periodization remain intensely contested in the Anthropocene literature, considerable emphasis has been placed on the “Great Acceleration,” a period of dramatically intensified energy and resource use after World War II that has also witnessed a massive escalation of global carbon emissions, pollution, deforestation, species extinctions, and other leading indicators of planetary environmental disorder.

Building upon the research team members’ previous and ongoing work in several interconnected fields of critical environmental studies related to these themes and extending it through a two-year collaborative initiative in intensive dialogue with other scholars working in parallel directions, this project seeks to develop an alternative analysis of the Great Acceleration as a conjuncture of geohistorical transformation and environmental crisis intensification. This entails, first, developing a systematic critique of the Great Acceleration narrative due to its problematic conceptualization and periodization of historical and contemporary socioenvironmental change. Second, our work will elaborate an alternative account of the historical genealogy, infrastructural anatomy, and metabolic underpinnings of today’s socioecological tipping points in the planetary biosphere.

Our investigations will explore what we will term the “hidden abodes” of the Great Acceleration—veiled yet essential historical-geographical dynamics associated with capitalism’s relentless appropriation of unpaid reproductive and regenerative work to support the profit-driven, productivity-oriented, and infrastructurally intensive dynamic of accumulation. These hidden abodes of appropriation are constitutive of capital’s constantly intensifying yet chronically unstable metabolism of labor, energy, food, and raw materials; they underpin each wave of productivity growth, embodied in the expansion of fixed capital outlays, during the geohistory of capitalism. Against this theoretical background, which is largely derived from co-applicant Jason W. Moore’s approach to capitalist world-ecology and the Capitalocene, our project aims to investigate the historically and geographically specific dynamics of appropriation and capitalization, closely associated with the generalization of a fossil-fuel based metabolic regime and large-scale, planet-encompassing infrastructural systems, during the post-1870s period up through the present. We hypothesize that the latter laid the foundations for the consequent Great Acceleration of the so-called “Golden Age” of postwar capitalist expansion, and thus have also figured crucially in the climate and nature emergencies of our time.

Through discussions and investigations among the core team members, a series of internal seminars and workshops with several scholars who are developing closely allied research agendas, and a concluding public symposium, this project will illuminate the dramatic global socioenvironmental transformations of the last half-century in a longue durée geohistorical context. We also aim to develop a useful theoretical and historical perspective from which to decipher the cascading climate and nature emergencies of the early twenty-first century and the prospects for counteracting them in ways that support social and environmental justice, and the flourishing of both human and non-human life.

This project seeks to uncover “invisible landscapes”—massive, multi-scalar, and multi-temporal human manipulations of the environment that archaeologists have long struggled to visualize, document, and understand. Since the advent of their discipline, archaeologists have occasionally caught glimpses of scattered anthropogenic interventions on otherwise seemingly undisturbed landscapes. Recent technological and methodological advances have revealed the previously unimagined scale and complexity of human impacts on those landscapes: enormous cities hidden beneath jungle canopies in the Americas and Southeast Asia, ubiquitous networks of sophisticated water management features that facilitated agriculture in Arabia, meticulously curated gardens in the “pristine” Amazonian rainforest. Bringing together a core team of three archaeologists and a dozen scholars, scientists, architects, and artists, this project investigates the causes behind the “invisibility” of such landscapes and offers potential ways to reimagine archaeologists' “sight.” More importantly, it also incites discussions about the theoretical implications of these previously unseen landscapes and about the new forms of disciplinary collaborations that their inspection demands. Combining field research with collaborative dialogue, the researchers aim not only to capture and analyze hitherto unseen complex anthropogenic assemblages, but to question what the objects of archaeology are and suggest possibilities regarding what they can be.

The archaeological landscape of Mesopotamia (much of modern Iraq and parts of Iran and Syria) is unique because it is a record of thousands of years of human-environment interactions involving large, complex societies. But trying to reconstruct environmental conditions and geographic distribution of features from only ancient texts and archaeological evidence leads to broad generalizations. We can now combine texts with archaeological evidence, natural science findings, information on environmental processes, and satellite imagery to delve deeper into the physical changes that occurred in Mesopotamian history.

The project used this information to assess the role of environment on the development of culture in Mesopotamia from prehistory to early modern times. It supplied and integrated data on the environmental and human interactions that were factors in the development of early urbanism, state formation, the first empires, and the subsequent fragmentation and coalescence of polities that has characterized ancient Mesopotamia and modern Iraq. The project brought together an interdisciplinary team of international scholars, including epigraphers, archaeologists, and natural scientists, to collaborate closely, through field work, data analysis and a conference, on new and better organized information on the development of the Mesopotamian landscape and the interaction of humans and nature there. This contributed to development of an overview of changing environmental conditions through time and their relationship to the cultural history of Mesopotamia. The resulting data and analyses will be made available through a variety of sources and serve as the basis for further specialized studies.

Both migration and material culture have profoundly shaped societies and cultures across the globe in the modern era. This project explored the relationship between people and things in motion in order to shed light on both the dynamics of migration and the historical transformation of material culture. The research team defined migration broadly, to include intra-state, international and intra-imperial migration, as well as "forced" and "voluntary” migrations. The project's use of material culture was also inclusive, embracing the objects that furnish domestic interiors, cityscapes, tools, jewelry, books, toys, and clothing. The precise relationships between migration and material culture have varied dramatically across time, space, and political and social context. The goal of this project was to analyze and thereby be able to explain the diversity of these relationships and experiences. This project brought together curators, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists working in the United States, Europe, and Israel to consider the relationship between migration and material culture from these disciplinary perspectives. A series of papers presented at workshops organized by the research team were subsequently collected in a volume on migration and material culture titled Objects of War, published by Cornell University Press in 2018.