About 

The Infrastructures, Sustainability and Commons Lab (ISC Lab) is the Research Lab of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.  ISC is affiliated with the VU Institute of Societal Resilience.

Starting point for ISC is our ethnographically-informed understanding that environmental and human sustainability passes through radical rethinking of established socio-cultural logics about nature, society, economy, politics and the position of human beings in the world.

Our overarching goal is to understand critically and provide research that will facilitate for grassroots and other interventions that challenge the insecurities and risks we are facing as humanity in a hyper-mobile and over-heated world, where the future of earth and humanity is at stake.

We seek to comprehend the most urgent problems of the anthropocene and search for solutions based on the merge of the multifarious collective human intelligence, our common resources, human diversity and social solidarity in order to contribute towards the shaping of the future infrastructures for new socio-material arrangements that will be resilient to such insecurities and risks.

The Lab is directed by Prof. Dimitris Dalakoglou, VU's Chair of Social Anthropology and Prof. Marjo de Theije, Anthropology's Research Director, and it features the research of VU's anthropologists along other ethnographic-based researchers of VU within Anthropology department and beyond.

MISC has an advisory committee that includes Prof. Issy Drori (VU, Organisational Sciences),   Prof. Rebecca Bryant (Utrecht University, Anthropology) and Prof. Marianne Maeckelbergh (Leiden University, Anthropology).