More than human UCL: a transdisciplinary mini-series
A three-part workshop exploring how UCL research can contribute to emerging multi-species study and practice
More than human UCL: a transdisciplinary mini-series
28 Mar 2026 - 30 Jun 2026
‘More-Than-Human UCL’ is a three-part transdisciplinary programme exploring how UCL research can contribute to emerging multispecies study and practice. Bringing together anthropology, archaeology, heritage, visual art, and environmental humanities, the series will foreground the more‑than‑human worlds that shape and are shaped by UCL’s campus and research. Its overarching aim is to build a community of practice that experiments with alternative ways of co-living with plants, fungi, animals and other non‑humans.
Funded by the Anthropocene Early Career Researchers fund.
Exploring Bloomsbury Group living histories alongside the plant life in UCL campus
Join us for a reflective, creative workshop tracing the intertwine histories of plants and people in Blommsbury. We will explore the plant worlds that shaped—and were shaped by— the Bloomsbury Group an early twentieth-century circle of writers, artists and intellectuals, including Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes, who lived and worked around Bloomsbury. Their ideas about art, literature, friendship and modern life were rooted in the neighbourhood’s distinctive gardens, squares and green corners.
Together, we will consider what it means to live with plants in heritage sites. Through walking, sensing and simple sketching exercises, we will rethink care and ecological belonging across the UCL campus and its surrounding landscape.
The workshop will include:
· a guided multi-sensory tour around Bloomsbury
· collaboratively creating multimedia artworks
· a small group discussion at the IOA building
Meet plants, meet people, meet your own UCL life anew.
Exploring more-than-human heritage through art–science worlding
How might cultural heritage be explored as an ongoing set of relationships between people, materials, and other living processes?
The Multispecies Heritage Co-Lab is a speculative workshop that brings together artistic and scientific approaches to explore the multispecies lives of everyday heirlooms - a small assemblage of objects from 1950s Hong Kong. The lab approaches them as an ecological landscape and encourages close attention to how materials, organisms, environments and human continuously reshape one another.
Inspired by Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the workshop invites participants to experiment with new ways of sensing and interpreting heritage through a series of art–science exercises. Through collaborative reflection and smell mapping, participants will contribute to a collective “multispecies archive” that explores how cultural meaning emerges through ongoing interactions between humans, insects, fungi, and materials.
No prior experience is required — only curiosity and a willingness to explore how heritage might be read not only by humans, but also by insects, fungi, and time.
Date: 6 May, 2026 (Wed)
Time: 2.00pm
Venue: UCL Institute of Archaeology, B13
To participate, please contact merry.chow.19@ucl.ac.uk
Details TBC.