The Cybercene: The Othering of Europe's Black and Brown Migrants and Pathways towards Ecocultural Healing

The Center for European and Russian Studies presents a new faculty talk by Dr. Vetri Nathan, Associate Professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies (ELTS) at UCLA. This talk was held on Tuesday, November 26, 2024 at 4:00 PM in Bunche Hall Room 10383.

About the Talk

This talk with introduce and define the term “Cybercene” as a transformational sub-era of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Wasteocene and briefly describe the four foundational premises that underpin the activities of a new humanities lab, The Cybercene Lab, founded in May 2023 and now starting up at UCLA in 2024-25. The four premises draw from the latest thinking in the Environmental and Multispecies Humanities: namely, the analysis of natureculture, utilizing intersectional decolonial epistemologies, seeking a material turn, and limiting anthropocentricity. Lab P.I. Dr. Nathan will illustrate the Cybercene era’s mechanisms of commodification, othering and wasting via an ecocultural analysis of the life and death of a migrant agricultural worker in Italy in June 2024, Mr. Satnam Singh. Mr. Singh’s story of modern racialized enslaved labor will be followed by a broader analysis of the contemporary phenomenon of “dunki” (donkey) migration from India to Europe and North America as an example of colonial-Cybercene multispecies, multi-kind and multi-era ecocultural co-becoming. Via this analysis, this presentation seeks to demonstrate that qualitative humanistic analysis of natureculture as undertaken by The Cybercene Lab can provide an essential compliment to more data-driven analyses of our digitally-connected societies.

About the Speaker

Dr. Vetri Nathan is Associate Professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies (ELTS) UCLA since July 2024. He is also founder and Principal Investigator of a new humanities lab “The Cybercene Lab” (www.thecybercenelab.org). Vetri holds his Ph.D. in Italian from Stanford University (2009). His first book, Marvelous Bodies: Italy’s New Migrant Cinema (Purdue University Press, 2017) explores contemporary Italian films released between 1990 and 2010 that represent the nation’s cultural challenges caused by immigration from the Global South. His research activities, publications and teaching interests include Global Migrations and Postcolonial Theory, Environmental and Public Humanities, Food Studies, Mediterranean Studies, Italian Cinema and Media Studies.

Venue

Bunche Hall 10383
(10th floor of Bunche Hall)
315 Portola Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095

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