What if the plants, animals, fungi and microbes around us were not simply resources to protect or control, but part of the communities to which we belong? And what is possible when we connect knowledge across disciplines to create something new together? Dr. Vetri Nathan is asking these questions and helping the rest of us do the same.

Currently an associate professor in the European Languages & Transcultural Studes, Vetri studied Italian literature and Zoology as an undergraduate student. He continued to study Italian Cultural Studies in graduate school but has now found his way back to a form of ecological study through multispecies studies. A young discipline explored in his new book Our Multispecies Futures: Control, Care and Kinship in a Transformed World and through the work of his Multispecies Futures Lab, multispecies studies aims to “emphasize interconnectedness by looking at specific methods that will go beyond the master narrative of human exceptionalism.” The lab has worked to develop naturalcultural discourse analysis, a method that examines how cultural narratives shape our understanding of and relationships with the natural world and vice-versa, and multispecies thick mapping, which visualizes these connections as seen in their prototype projects on the Scala dei Turchi and the Agro Pontino.

 Now, Vetri is bringing the lab’s transdisciplinary methods abroad. By establishing the Global Institute branch of the lab, he has begun to hold workshops that act as “accelerated courses, that allow young researchers to get the basic new methodologies that are being proposed by the lab.” The first workshop just took place in Naples focusing on coexistence with Mount Vesuvius and the Campi Flegrei volcanic complex, the result was a “truly collaborative [process], in which the students and the local professors I collaborate with are able to get the method, but then tell the story of their land themselves.” As Vetri and the Multispecies Futures Lab continue to expand their work globally, they are putting the very principles of multispecies studies into practice because understanding our interconnected world is going to take looking beyond any single place, community, discipline...or species.