Welcome to the Living Climate Futures Lab’s first newsletter. We are a new interdisciplinary initiative bringing together twenty MIT faculty and staff from across the Institute. We were the recipients of the inaugural Faculty Driven Initiative (FDI) Seed Grant from the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC) in spring 2025.

The Living Climate Futures Lab is premised on the recognition that climate change – its causes, impacts, and solutions – are simultaneously economic, ecological, political, technological, social, and cultural. To grasp its complexity, we must conceptualize climate change in holistic ways that cross a range of social and environmental settings and draw upon the expertise of diverse academic disciplines. We aim to build a community of practice where scholars, educators, organizers, and other professionals from a wide range of disciplines can work together towards this vision.

Building and sustaining long-term partnerships, both within MIT and with community partners, is key to our vision. We hope that this newsletter will be a means through which we start to build these relationships.

We look forward to sharing our work with you.

The LCFL team

We currently comprise of 20 faculty, staff, and affiliates from across MIT. We are grateful for administrative support from the MIT Anthropology admin team: Amberly Steward, Carolyn Carlson, and Kate Gormley.

Learn more about our members →

MIT-Hannan Fresh Food Box Pilot

Lab members Susy Jones, Senior Sustainability Project Manager in MIT’s Office of Sustainability (MITOS), and Heather Paxson, Professor of Anthropology and Associate Dean for Faculty, spearheaded a pilot collaboration between MITOS, MIT Anthropology, Hannan Healthy Foods, and the MIT Farm student organization. The six-week pilot brought together over 80 students and faculty for volunteer farming sessions at Hannan Healthy Foods to harvest produce, which was then sold at a produce stand on campus at a price far below market. Learn more in this MIT News article.

Building Climate Justice Infrastructures

Associate Professor of Anthropology Bettina Stoetzer & Postdoctoral Associate Briana Meier cultivated their collaborative research initiatives with community partners in the Pacific Northwest with the support of a 2025 MITHIC Humanities Cultivation Fund award. They completed field research over the summer and fall, and are now finalizing a co-authored peer-reviewed journal article on the relation between killer whale conservation, climate change, and Indigenous sovereignty. They will also be teaching the course From Lab to Land: Infrastructures of Climate Change in the Pacific Northwest (video), based on this research partnership, in Spring 2026.

The Nomadic Concepts in Climate and Energy workshop brought together MIT Climate Project leads, research staff, and SHASS faculty, researchers, and PhD students to initiate a shared conversation around key conceptual frameworks in climate and energy research. The goal was to begin building relationships of trust and deepen mutual understanding across disciplines through collaborative reflection on how core terms are used and interpreted, as a means towards co-creating a shared conceptual foundation for future interdisciplinary research in climate and energy. The workshop included hands-on engagement with selected tools designed to support dialogue across knowledge cultures. The outputs will inform the development of a joint SHASS–Climate Project toolkit to support ongoing collaboration.