EcoCultureLab emerged at the University of Vermont in 2016 as a group of scholars, artists, and citizens interested in exploring — philosophically, artistically, and practically — the implications of the “Anthropocene predicament.” Our understanding of that predicament was that the human relationship with the nonhuman world — as evident in climate change, the extinction crisis, and all their associated cultural and political impacts — required rethinking, revisioning, and remaking, and that the creative arts play a crucial role in this.
Between 2016 and 2020, supported by funds from the Steven Rubenstein Professorship in Environment and Natural Resources, a position held by professor Adrian Ivakhiv (coordinator of EcoCultureLab; that’s me writing this), and by occasional funds from the Gund Institute for the Environment, the University of Vermont Humanities Center, and other sources, we organized events, talks, meetings, and exhibitions. The largest of these was the 2018 festival-symposium Feverish World, 2018-2068: Arts & Sciences of Collective Survival.
Since the Covid pandemic began in the spring of 2020, EcoCultureLab has continued in muted form, supporting occasional local events and meetings but nothing on the scale of Feverish World. Since 2022, I (Adrian Ivakhiv) have undertaken a series of research travels supported by a sabbatical and multiple fellowships, which took me to California (the University of California Santa Barbara) and Germany (the Freie Universität Berlin), with road trips and detours elsewhere, and which included collaborative projects on visuality and the Anthropocene (at Cinepoetics), on digital culture (forthcoming in a book called The New Lives of Images), and on the environmental arts and humanities in wartime Ukraine (to be published as an anthology called Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth). In the meantime, artist and agroecologist Kristian Brevik helmed EcoCultureLab’s more local activities in Burlington and at UVM.
Beginning this summer, I will be transitioning into a position as J. S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. I have outlined a set of priorities (ecological, decolonial, and digital) that I will pursue in my work there over the next five years. Among other things, I hope to continue the kind of work we have done with EcoCultureLab on a somewhat different scale. Specifically, I would like to explore the possibilities of turning the EcoCultureLab idea into an international network, with something like an “EcoCultureLab West” (working name) based in Vancouver, and with others elsewhere. For instance, I’m in dialogue with a group in Warsaw, Poland, working to develop a similar “lab” there.
The next phase will be exploratory, as we investigate questions around what kind of artistic-intellectual work is being done by similar groups elsewhere and what the role of an EcoCultureLab network might be. A key part of the EcoCultureLab vision is the opening up of academic institutions like universities and colleges to their non-academic local and civic contexts through activities by which academia interfaces with public efforts to transform society along ecocultural lines.
EcoCultureLab is hardly unique in proposing and working along these avenues. But the vision has yet to crystallize in a sufficient widespread way. I (/we) plan to investigate the most promising ways forward in this task. If you have ideas (or, for that matter, funding!) to contribute to this rethinking, please write to me, cc:ing ecocult@uvm.edu to keep the UVM EcoCultureLab team in the loop. We can’t guarantee an immediate reply, but we’ll take all ideas seriously.