Research

NICHE is a cooperative, interdisciplinary, experimental Research Center. Drawing on the humanities, humanistic social sciences, and the arts, NICHE aims to address the urgent social and cultural challenges posed both globally and locally by the current and unprecedented environmental crisis, which is also a crisis of the imagination.

Buddhism and Ecology
Principal Investigators Francesca Tarocco

By critically examining Buddhist-inspired worldviews that saw human beings as an integral partof a cosmos dominated by nature, this cluster explores the interplay of Buddhism and the environment in Asia and beyond. It also examines Buddhist representations of nonhuman animals and human-animal relations, non-human actants, artifacts, hermeneutics textual forms, infrastructures, as well as Buddhist-inspired technology, in the sense of an application of knowledge that connects us inter-subjectively with the material world.

Energy Humanities
Principal Investigator Enrica De Cian and Antonella Mazzone

This research cluster examines people's energy habits, behaviors, and traditions and their broad implications for society and the environment. It aims to uncover the role of society, values, and culture with mixed-method approaches that place humans and their interactions with space, culture, and society at the center.

Solutions
Principal Investigators Steen Rasmussen and Massimo Warglien

Living artifacts, i.e. artifacts that have livingness and growth as a defining property, challenge our conventional view of the role of human and non-human agency in shaping the material environment in which we live. In this Research Cluster we will combine multiple research strategies, from ethnography to computational modeling, to explore the nature of living artefacts and the implications for the design of innovative, sustainable solutions to key environmental challenges.

Technoscience and Justice in Multispecies Worlds
Principal Investigator Roberta Raffaetà

This cluster mainly draws from the ERC project HealthXCross’s research and activities, extending beyond it. Core topic of the cluster is how to live well in an entangled and multispecies world. Key questions refer to what ‘living well’ means in its connection to social justice and in times of ecological transition, and how technoscience articulates it. The methods of inquiry are mainly anthropological, in strong alliance with other disciplines.

Ecological Art Practices
Principal Investigator Cristina Baldacci

The research cluster Ecological Art Practices questions the relationship between art and the environment intertwining ecocritical approaches, radical imagination and creative sustainability. It focuses on environmental concerns related to anthropogenic climate change on a local (Venice) and global level, by examining the challenges and possibilities of art practices, as well as of art histories and theories, and of natural and cultural archives. Water as a medium, a metaphor, a space for action and (social, cultural, biological) diversity is a core topic. The cluster aims both to create inclusive occasions for interdisciplinary exchange – among scholars and cultural practitioners working across the field of contemporary art practice and theory – and to foster international collaborations with (art) research centers and commons.

Environments and States in East Asia
Principal Investigators Maddalena Barenghi and Rita Dal Martello

The research cluster aims to engage scholars from various disciplines to develop regional microhistory projects on the political ecology of early and middle-period states and empires, and to explore how states used resources, such as people, land, water and river systems, and forestry, in different regions and territories across East Asia from high antiquity to the early middle period (10th century CE).

Religion and Water
Principal Investigator Shaul Bassi

The research cluster Religion and Water examines the conceptions of water in various world religious civilizations, as well as the practices, rituals, texts, ideas, mythologies connected to water and their broad ecological implications.

Waterscapes
Principal Investigator Pietro Daniel Omodeo

This research cluster investigates the dynamic entwinement of nature, episteme and agency on the basis of the study of territories that are defined by moving waters, such as the lagoon of Venice, the Kaveri Delta in India, the Mississippi river, the basin of Tenochtitlán (the former Aztec capital and present-day Mexico City) and the Yellow River. As water is indispensable for life, its regulation and control has always constituted a fundamental asset of power as biopower. We do not consider our cases in isolation but as local developments which, rooted in various cultural pasts, have become increasingly interconnected, eventually reaching a planetary significance, the unity of which has recently found its concept, namely the scientific projection of the Anthropocene as a geo-anthropological system embracing both geology and culture. Yet, this concept is empty, if it is not brought back to its roots, that is, human agency at the confluence of nature, scientific knowledge and technological-transformative labor.

The NICHE Centre offers several types of in-residence fellowships including a Senior Research Fellowship.

Fellowships include personal office space at the Centre and access to the collections in the University’s libraries and those of the colleges and universities in the Venice consortium. Preference will be given to applicants in the final stages of writing or revising substantive scholarly work. Please indicate in your statement of purpose if you have a preferred publisher or have already signed a contract with one.

While in residence at NICHE, fellows will make one presentation of their work. They are encouraged to collaborate with the Institute’s initiatives and programming and with NICHE Research Scholars. They are also expected to engage with the wider academic community by attending events and meeting with the University’s faculty members and other visiting scholars.
The fellowships are not academic appointments and have no teaching responsibilities.