Geographies of Life and Living

About Our Cluster

Some of the most pressing scientific, social, economic, and political challenges of our time depend on how and where boundaries are drawn between life and non-life, and human and non-human life. Our research projects think about life as intimate, as embodied, and as endured. We also examine how life is talked understood in the abstract - from political claims that life is singular and universal, to the inhuman lives of ecological phenomena, and to visions and impacts of life in the future affects the present.

Some of our current work examines:

• the production and experience of life and death for different peoples and non-humans in the midst of environmental change and climate crisis
• new configurations of human and non-human life that are emerging in the midst of changes in contemporary capitalism and technoscience
• how livable worlds are often created in harmful and damaging conditions, with particular emphasis on migration and displacement
• how global transformations expand racial, gendered, classed, social, and ethnic inequalities

Underpinning our work is an exploration of concepts and research methods attentive and open to multiple understandings of life. Collectively, we are interested in the substantive reasons that life matters to inequality and harm. The geographies produced and lived as life intersects economics, politics, and environments focus our cluster activities and events.

We invite current research, teaching and academic staff, postgraduates, and colleagues elsewhere to propose ideas for collaboration, workshops and symposia.