New articulations of biopower and coloniality, shifting patterns of capitalism and political economy, technological change, and environmental threat raise new questions about what it means to human, and at home in the world. Within the context of these transforming landscapes, our research explores the assembling and disassembling of people and histories, in conversation with ecological communities and both built and natural environments. The ‘Anthropocene’, an era in which human agency has been scaled up to embrace and endanger the entire planet, demands renewed attention to the intersections of nature/culture, as well as to other practices and understandings of the ecologies that bind diverse peoples to each other, and to the non-human world. New findings in microbiomics and epigenetics, meanwhile, encourage us to understand human bodies as open and porous environments. In responding to new intellectual and ethical challenges, and to their long-running histories, we seek to trace the lines of connection, harm, responsibility and care between human and non-human life, environments, and technologies.