Programme 01
Open Air Sustainability Labs
Six field intensives, each guided by a regional research cluster and a community partner. We treat each landscape as a portal: a material entry point into how the climate crisis was assembled, and how people living there survive and resist it.
01 · CA
Year 1–2
Crawford LakeKionywarihwae
Milton, Ontario, Canada
Reading a lake core for more than one beginning
Read the lab02 · GB
Year 2–3
RBG Kew
Richmond, London, United Kingdom
A garden built by empire, decarbonising in public
Read the lab03 · BB
Year 3–4
Saint Ann's Garrison
Bridgetown, Barbados
Garrison, plantation, museum: one continuous landscape
Read the lab04 · IN
Year 4–5
Aravali & Kalpavalli
Gurugram, Haryana · Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh, India
Restoration as a conversation between communities and land
Read the lab05 · ZA
Year 5–6
Xolobeni Coast
Eastern Cape, South Africa
The decision that sets the frame for a continent
Read the lab06 · US
Year 6–7
Biosphere 2
Oracle, Arizona, United States
A sealed ark on unceded ground
Read the labHow a lab runs
Preparation, field intensive, mobilisation
Every lab is staggered across the seven years so that team members can contribute to more than one. Insight from Crawford Lake travels to Kew; the Kew archive turns out to hold the forestry records that matter at Aravali. That cross-fertilisation is the point, and it is what makes the network planetary rather than a set of parallel case studies.
Each lab includes:
- A regionally specific research cluster convened with the local partner
- A Summer Institute for trainees and emerging scholars
- A Spec Life Symposium sharing outcomes across the network
- Serial digital publication in the Speculative Life Almanac with Concordia University Press
- Peer-reviewed plant narratives in the Plant Humanities Lab at Dumbarton Oaks
- Co-written faculty and graduate student articles, edited collections and monographs
Fieldwork follows a composite ethnography method: collaborative, attentive to materiality and multiplicity, and committed to provisional construction towards a more habitable world. We convene with and as members of the local context, under community-led protocols.