Habitability

The term "habitability", now central in political discourse and climate assessment in framing and defining conditions that make life possible in a particular environment or surroundings, has also played an important role in environmental humanities since its foundation as an interdisciplinary field, and has inspired its research in various ways. We, the Laboratory: Anthropology of Environment | Human Relations at Humboldt University Berlin (hereafter "the lab" or "LAEHR"), take up from the generic understanding of habitability as a reference point to invite readers to join us in using our anthropological toolboxes to explore and revisit the notion. Thinking with, and from, our ethnographic research collaborations in which we thrive and learn, we bring to the study of habitability analytical sensibilities informed by and in critical conversation with relational approaches in anthropology, feminist science and technology studies, and new materialist thinking (Beck 2008, Haraway 1997, Ingold 2000, Latour 2004, Mol 2002, Star 1991, Stengers 2023, Strathern 1991 and Tsing 2005). Drawing on these traditions, we propose two approaches to habitability. First, using it as a conceptual tool to expand empirical cases and analyses across spatio-temporal scales, incorporate a more-than-human lens, and resist dichotomous thinking. Second, examining it as a multiple and contingent phenomenon that is produced in situated processes of co-becoming, so ascertaining its meaning in practice.