Multispecies Worldbuilding Lab

Elizabeth Hénaff considers plants and microbes, and relations between multicellular and unicellular organisms that challenge how we think of individuals and collectives, hosts and symbionts. She talks about her collaborative study of microbial life that has evolved in the sludge under a Superfund site, the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY.

Hénaff works at the intersection of biology, genomics, computation, art, and design. She is a professor of Technology, Culture & Society at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. 

ASHLEY DAWSON talks about "extreme", or urban densities like New York City, where social inequalities and uneven effects of colonial violence and capitalist development are increasingly exacerbated by extreme weather and environmental degradation. He calls on the power of storytelling to radically imagine different futures.

Dawson works across the fields of postcolonial studies, environmental humanities, and climate justice. He is a professor of English at CUNY Graduate Center and College of Staten Island, and leads a Climate Action Lab. 

JULIE GUTHMAN talks about strawberries, soil fumigants, pathogenic fungi, farmers, and scientists — a dynamic more-than-human assemblage that has remade California agriculture. Her rigorous and expansive study warns against the technoscientific fix, as well as the challenges of acknowledging that there is no easy way out.

Guthman is a geographer and social scientist who has written extensively about California farms. She is professor of Social Sciences at University of California Santa Cruz and a Guggenheim fellow.

JAMES HIGHAM talks about the evolution and ecology of nonhuman primates as well as the ethics and politics involved in long-term fieldwork with: rhesus macaques at Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico, which was wiped out by Hurricane Maria in 2017; and the movements of the people and cattle at Gashaka Gumti in Nigeria. He is interested in variation and sexual selection, and the urgent question around conservation.

Higham works across the fields of primatology and Anthropology at New York University where he also leads the Primate Reproductive Ecology and Evolution Group.