Projects
Project
Imagining More-than-Human Communities
01.04.2021
to 31.12.2025
General project description
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.
Role
Researcher
Funding
External funding Centre for Unusual Collaborations
Project members UU
External project members
- Clemens Driessen
- Bernice Bovenkerk
- Irene Kuling
- Luuk van Laake
- Yulia Kisora
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