Adaptation

Human beings are not alone in finding ways to live across an extraordinary range of environments on earth.

In more recent years humans have moved beyond the confines of our planet, envisioning a future where our species adapts to biospheres beyond the earth. We have transformed our environments, first locally and now on a global scale, creating extraordinary and potentially cataclysmic challenges for us and for other species.

In the School of Humanities, researchers study the ways that people have continually adapted to environmental, historical, and cultural change around the world and throughout history.

We examine the ways that processes such as state formation, human migration, colonisation, conflict, language contact, cross-cultural interaction, inter-generational dynamics, changing conceptions of embodiment and identity, and climate change have shaped and continue to shape our social, cultural and political lives.

We examine the ways that, over millennia, people’s behaviour and relationships with the environments they inhabit have been shaped by gods and spirits, and interrogate our impact on the more-than-human world of plants and animals.

Through our research into the history of adaptation, we are contributing to new understandings of our capacity to respond to – and perhaps to help save – the world in which we live.

Our projects

• Indigenous Grasslands for Grain