My Green Grants project is the Multispecies Worldbuilding Lab, which is a small team of students, artists, ethnographers, and media designers who produce a podcast about climate change. We invite scientists, writers, and artists to talk about a particular organism, ecology or site that they study, and the interdisciplinary methods or tools that they’ve used or developed in the course of their research. We also discuss their teaching practices or how they engage others around difficult conversations about climate change. What makes our podcast different from other podcasts about climate change, I think, is that we are interested in giving voice to the human interviewee, as well as the thing or place that they study. So we aim to combine interviews with field recordings and experimental soundscapes to give listeners a more intimate and visceral sense of the liveliness of worlds outside. I’m interested in experimenting with ways of listening to nonhumans, or allowing animals, plants, microbes, water to speak alongside the human voice. 

I started interviews in June 2019 and we’ve interviewed four amazing people thus far: Julie Guthman, a geographer who studies strawberries and fumigants in California; Ashley Dawson, a postcolonial writer and climate activist who looks at extreme weather and cities like New York during Hurricane Sandy; Elizabeth Henaff, a plant/computational biologist who studies bacteria in the Gowanus Canal; and James Higham, a zoologist-anthropologist who studies monkeys in Puerto Rico and Nigeria. We’ve just finished editing their interviews and we are really excited to launch our website this month (December 2019). Please check it out at www.multispeciesworldbuilding.com and help us get the word out to your social networks! In Spring 2020, we’ll be adding a new episode every month; please subscribe so you don’t miss out! Each episode promises to be quite different as each focuses on a specific organism (for example, bacteria or strawberries) and also a different kind of academic or artistic practice. 

I’ve been wanting to work with sound as a tool for understanding multispecies worlds and climate change for a while, so I’m really excited to launch the site and start getting feedback, start spreading the word. At the same time, I did run into some steep learning curves over the summer and fall! For example, it took a while to find good people to work with, to figure out a working method and storyline, and then to brainstorm the “character” of the podcast. I think we could only work those out by doing the interviews and starting to work through actual episodes. Our initial plan has expanded somewhat: I originally did not think to include the full interviews but to post shorter episodes. But through weekly meetings and tests over the summer, I realized that listeners were really interested in those as well. So, the site will launch with four full interviews (about 60 minutes each). We will then create shorter 15-minute episodes with field recordings and soundscapes to accompany those interviews. My hope is that the two versions may be useful teaching tools for undergraduate and graduate courses, so we wanted to provide listeners with options.

Elaine Gan is an artist and theorist who engages with the fields of science & technology studies, multispecies ethnography, environmental humanities, and experimental digital media. She is assistant professor/faculty fellow at New York University, Center for Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement and co-editor of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (Minnesota 2017).