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
• dr. H.M.B. (Heidi) Lesscher
• prof. dr. Kathrin Thiele

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

To face human population growth, increasing environmental constraints and changes in socio-cultural values, animal breeding must evolve toward a more sustainable model that guarantees production while promoting efficient resource use, animal health and welfare, and preserving genetic diversity. Thanks to recent developments in omics technologies, it is now possible to rethink breeding, taking advantage of improved knowledge on genome-to-phenome relationships that accounts for both genetic and non-genetic mechanisms controlling traits. GEroNIMO will work on chicken and pig, the most used sources of animal protein worldwide, to provide breeders with new knowledge and tools to promote innovative genome- and epigenome enabled selection methods for traits related to production (quantity and quality), efficiency, productive longevity, fertility, resilience and welfare. A large number of animals from cosmopolitan and local breeds will be characterized phenotypically, genetically and epigenetically under different environments to i) identify underlying biological mechanisms affecting trait variation, ii) develop methods to improve selection strategies integrating genetic- and non-genetic factors, and iii) propose strategies to optimize the conservation of genetic and epigenetic diversity. GEroNIMO proposes demand-driven innovation employing a multi-actor approach through the involvement of breeders, professional associations of animal production, and scientists, engaged from the planning phase to the dissemination of results over Europe. GEroNIMO will build on existing academic and commercial knowledge and will analyze large populations to quantify the contribution of genetic and epigenetic variation in gene expression, trait variation and trade-offs between traits. GEroNIMO will also propose a comprehensive and enhanced characterization of diversity by integrating epigenetic diversity into conservation purposes, corresponding to a new integrated conservation strategy.

The SAS research team is responsible for WP5 on the societal and ethical dimensions of this project.

• prof. dr. F.L.B. (Franck) Meijboom
• dr. K. (Koen) Kramer