A virtual event series of roundtable discussions and calls to action.
2026-2028
What would it mean to see today’s AI data centers, border checkpoints and ICE detention facilities as part of natural history’s imperialist tradition—infrastructures built to capture, categorize, and control the people and animals, worldviews and relationships to land that disrupt the prevailing order? Who commands these infrastructures and what escapes their control?
Natural History from the Other Side looks at the world from the perspective of those cast as the “other”—those wrenched from life and treated as data, specimens, or threats to be studied, documented and surveilled. It asks us to look directly at the imperialist world—not to dwell on its power, but to see the power it has failed to contain.
This virtual event series brings together scholars, activists, and organizers for roundtables on infrastructures of enclosure—past and present—and the forms of life that exceed them. Drawing on long traditions of anti-imperialist worldmaking, these conversations offer tools, strategies, and perspectives to understand what is at stake in today’s struggles over life and land—and how we might enter these struggles from the other side.
A virtual programming series organized by the 2026-2028 Red Natural History Fellows with The Natural History Museum. Made possible with support from the Henry Luce Foundation, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, and 4Culture.
Events
The Data Center Frontier
What fuels the data center economy? What minerals are mined to build it, and what energy systems power it? Who bears the environmental and social costs—and what can we learn from the long tradition of Indigenous resistance to extractive infrastructure, as well as recent campaigns challenging data centers in the U.S.?
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