Afgesloten projecten
Project
Imagining More-than-Human Communities
01-04-2021
tot 31-01-2024
Algemene projectbeschrijving
What can we do to feel more in touch with the natural world? Is technology a barrier, or can it help us communicate and feel empathy with other species? Could technology help foster a sense of community between humans and nonhumans? If so, what might such a more-than-human community look like—or feel like, smell like, etc.? Whom would it include? And who decides?
Our project sets out to imagine a more equitable community of humans and nonhumans and to make it a reality in our everyday lives. The project is animated by two basic premises:
- The spaces we inhabit are already more-than-human; we just need to learn to see (and feel) that humans are not separate from nature. We want to develop awareness and ideas for how these spaces can be playfully and creatively experienced as more-than-human communities.
- Truly unusual interdisciplinarity must be inter- and multispecies (more-than-human) and predicated on playful (open-ended) interaction, not exploitation and extraction (of data, resources, etc.).
How can we break out of our anthropocentric worldview? Drawing on our shared expertise in engineering, ethics, ethology, language and representation, we want to develop an escape room format that unites technology, sense perception, and creative problem solving to stimulate the more-than-human imagination. Ultimately, we would like to take this on the road, to engage playfully with students, academics, policymakers and stakeholders in a variety of (unusual) settings (animal sanctuaries, zoos, farms, robotics labs, etc.).
A playfully designed multimedia and multisensory more-than-human-community experience combined with facilitated discussions will enhance the collective insight in our own communities and strengthen the desire to look for multispecies alternatives for the challenges that societies face.
Betweter Festival Utrecht - Experiment High-Five with a Non-Human
On 29 September 2023, the Imagining More-than-Human Communities team ran an experiment at the Betweter Festival in Utrecht. Attendees were invited to explore a new haptic interface and imagine what it would mean to interact with a nonhuman entity remotely via the medium of technology. We asked participants to reflect on how technology can help us feel more connected with the nonhuman world.
Rol
Uitvoerder
Financiering
3e geldstroom - overig Centre for Unusual Collaborations
Projectleden
Overige projectleden
- Clemens Driessen
- Bernice Bovenkerk
- Irene Kuling
2016-2022 (NWO-Aspasiapremie): Relation(al) Matters - Towards a Queer Feminist Cosmopolitics
I currently work on a project in which I investigate from a feminist philosophical perspective the complexity and non-innocence of critical claims that stress relationality and entanglement as primary to contemporary planetary existence. Contextualising my research in the tradition of feminist difference thinking, in this project I think with contemporary queer, feminist and decolonial approaches to explicate both promising theoretical potential and pressing ethico-political challenges of a feminist 'different difference'. I work toward conceptual tools that further a feminist philosophical thinking which pushes through oppositions, antagonisms and the dominant binary structures of in-/exclusion, and critically analyse today's neoliberalism and hegemonic globalisation. My thinking takes recourse to philosophies of immanence, decolonial and feminist critical theories/philosophies (from difference, queer, critical race and new materialist/posthuman(ist) perspectives), and in the framework of such a plurivocal ethico-onto-epistemological framework I envision what I call a queer feminist cosmopolitics - a relational politics that affirms difference(s) as prerequisite to social justice and equality, and unworks (neo)colonial anthropocentrism and/as human exceptionalism.
In the context of the project I have initiated the Relation(al) Matters Arrchive which aims to collect plurivocal insights and practices regarding the relational matters of our contemporary planetary condition.
2012-present: Terra Critica: Interdisciplinary Network of the Critical Humanities
Terra Critica is an international research network in the humanities, bringing together scholars specializing in critical and cultural theory. Its aim is to reexamine critical theory and critique under the conditions of the 21st century – given our immanent, terran existences, globally entangled across flows of capital, people, and ideas and living in ecological and economical multidependences. Terra Critica wishes to strengthen the Critical Humanities as a crucial site for critical analyses of our present, meeting regularly for workshops, conferences, and public events that aim to provide a platform for discussion and publication in as much as an exchange of ideas and knowledges.
The network was initiated by Birgit Mara Kaiser and myself in 2012, with a group of core members and a wider circle of participants to the regular meetings. It has been supported by the University of Utrecht and the NWO-Aspasiafunds, and continues to be supported by its different contributing institutions.
For current projects and events, see Terra Critica: Interdisciplinary Network for the Critical Humanities