California Italian Studies

These field notes—in contrast to a typical journal article—employ a creative structure and approach to explore the goals and activities of a new humanities lab. The notes begin by remembering the tragic death of a young migrant agricultural worker in the Agro Pontino region of Italy, Mr. Satnam Singh. This untimely loss of life is then contextualized within the contemporary phenomenon of “dunki” migration from India to the Global North and read through the notion of “the Cybercene”—a transformational ecocultural sub-era of the Anthropocene. Via the theoretical lens of the relatively new field of multispecies humanities, the Agro Pontino is shown to be an ecocultural space replete with colonial-Cybercene multispecies, multi-kind and multi-era co-becomings. The second section briefly describes two more projects to illustrate the lab’s four basic theoretical premises: namely, i) the analysis of natureculture, ii) the use of situated decolonial epistemologies, iii) the search for a material turn, and iv) delimiting anthropocentricity. These foundational premises, newly developed methods such as “multispecies thick-mapping,”  “naturalcultural discourse analysis” and the use of the Cybercene as an ecocultural rather than a techno-scientific organizational principle are offered as exciting avenues for future analyses of profoundly entangled naturalcultural identities and multispecies affects, interests and destinies.