What does it mean to live together in a world that is already more-than-human? How might we rethink community, responsibility, and care in ways that include not only other species — animals, plants, microbes — but also technologies, infrastructures, and forms of intelligence that are not our own?

Too often, we rely on stories that separate humans from the rest of the living world — or cast technology solely as a barrier between us and more authentic contact with “nature.” This project asks what happens when we resist that split. How might we learn to see, feel, and think with other species — and with the technologies that bind us together — without pretending we can ever fully step outside a human perspective?

Bringing together researchers from literary studies, philosophy, cultural geography, soft robotics, animal ethics, and cognitive science, Imagining More-than-Human Communities explores how we might cultivate more equitable and attentive ways of living with nonhuman animals, plants, and technologies. We draw inspiration from tentacular, more-than-human thinkers — Donna Haraway, Vinciane Despret, Ed Yong, James Bridle — to ask what forms of curiosity, experiment, and play might help us notice the multispecies communities we already inhabit and imagine new ones.

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.

Imagining More-than-Human Communities Symposium | 16–17 October 2025 | Utrecht University Museum

This two-day symposium brings together scholars, artists, and practitioners from across disciplines to explore what more-than-human communities might look, feel, and sound like — and how we might begin to imagine them differently. What kinds of stories, methods, and practices can help us move beyond the assumption that humans stand apart from the rest of the world?

Rather than conventional conference papers, participants are invited to share an “object lesson”: a short, informal presentation centred around a specific object — a text, artwork, image, tool, interface, or phenomenon — that inspires their work and touches on the theme of imagining more-than-human communities. We are especially interested in how such objects engage one or more of the senses, and how they might help us to attune ourselves to nonhuman ways of being, perceiving, and relating.

The symposium will also feature a keynote lecture by Maan Barua (University of Cambridge), author of Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology (2023), and will coincide with the launch of an interactive public installation at the University Museum exploring nonhuman sense perception.

• dr. Kári Driscoll
• prof. dr. Kathrin Thiele
• L. (Leon) Borgdorf MSc

• Clemens Driessen
• Bernice Bovenkerk
• Irene Kuling
• Luuk van Laake
• Yulia Kisora