As posthumanist discourse attempts reposition the human as one of many subjects in relation to ecologies and other inhuman agencies, doing away with a Cartesian human exceptionalism is one of the key problems. From Haraway’s naturecultures, positing human culture as one of many, to Colebrook’s discussions of inhuman agencies, what ‘the human’ means to us is the heart of this theoretical field. In this paper I engage with theories within the discourse and posit them against a dialogue with Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, as well as with the ideas of George Bataille on how the human separated herself from other animals and in doing so created what we call Humanity. The aim is to find inhuman agencies and bring to light how they act upon the human, but also how perceiving the inhuman is, as Bataille writes, closed to us. What we find through a process and concept of annihilation of Humanity with the human, brought forth from a reading of the Biologist’s relation to the lighthouse and the tower in the novel, is that even though we may be able to perceive the inhuman, we might be always already anthropocentric in this perception. I suggest a reversal of Haraway’s term; culturenatures, as a way to understand this anthropocentric perception, in that just as our culture is borne from nature, other naturecultures are closed to us.

Thesis advisor: Robin Fleming / My dissertation, “Multispecies Communities: An Early Medieval Environmental History of Britain and Ireland c. 600 to 1000 CE,” investigates invertebrates, plants, and non-humans as multispecies communities, and my study reveals a way to understand how early medieval people understood and lived with their environments through their ecological material surroundings. This period witnessed the economic and cultural shifts in post-Roman, northwestern Europe in Britain and Ireland, which resulted in the emergence of new types of rural settlements, towns, “productive sites,” and monastic communities, all of which created a new ecological footprint. Our textual sources from this period are limited, and very few describe what settlements and houses during this shift looked like, so instead, we must rely on archaeological excavation to understand them. I work within the natureculture framework as formulated by ecofeminist Donna Haraway. Natureculture is defined as the entangling of nature and culture, something that happens when human and non-human agents move across species lines and live under and share the same ecological pressures. My dissertation asks how medieval people conceptualized themselves through bodily and household interactions when their day-to-day lives overlapped with invertebrates. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

We live in a time marked by ecological precarity and crisis. Critical scholars of the Anthropocene have identified extractivism and its associated ideology of human exceptionalism as driving forces behind these crises. This thesis joins a call to develop naturalcultural theory – ways of conceptualizing the more-than-human world and our place in it as humans that do not rely on longstanding distinctions between “Nature” and “Culture.” Moreover, scholars and activists have clearly outlined the urgent need for us to change the way we live with nonhumans. As a step towards such new ways of living with nonhumans, in this project I study how foragers foster multispecies ethics through their encounters with nonhumans, using multispecies ethnography as my primary methodology. In this thesis, I develop a theoretical framework through which to understand forager-plant interactions, informed by my experiences in the field interviewing and observing foragers as they harvest plants and directly studying the plants that my participants frequently interacted with. I tentatively propose a distinction between extractive and non-extractive approaches to foraging. Overall, I suggest viewing plants and humans as living-persons who are tangled in a field of socioecological relations to one another. Through partial and intermittent encounters, they become contaminated and adopt new habits that affect their future interactions with other living-persons. This has important implications for how we conceive of ethics as only incorporating nonhumans as objects of ethical consideration rather than ethical subjects in their own right.

On the brink of a sixth mass extinction, I renegotiate, through crafting, some basic assumptions on which our economy-culture is built, those of separation and dominance. The project Till Källan / Water Talks is based on a method where I ask various places what they would want me to do on site. It is a process of reconnecting to place and the non-human, a radical rethinking of relationship between human and the other. I investigate the possibilities of craft to be a conductor of that relationship.The paper tracks various lines of thought around my practice, like trickles gathering more water into my pond. It starts in a quantum physics philosophical base for how the world is in a state of becoming through intra-action, on to why water is the perfect medium to affect the world through a puddle. I look at how my practice has an affinity with animism as philosophy and indigenous ways of relating to place and materials. I explore various facets of performativity, in world-making, craft-making, in the resulting objects and in the restoring of relationship through ritual. The enquiry that runs through the paper is what craft is when the object was made for a place rather than for the “art-world” or other economic systems. Going back and forth between a western and a non-western mindset, between practice and theory and between the poetic and prosaic, makes for a synthesizing of sources, leading up to the concept of Rewilding Craft, and a number of crafted objects and images that speak of the relationship.

This work examines a relational ontology with the focus on our relationships with the more-than-human world. The aim is to investigate a subject that is more suitable to face the challenges of our times. Inspired by the posthumanistic project as presented by Rosi Braidotti I propose a non-anthropocentric reading of Martin Buber’s I and Thou. In the first section of the essay I present an overview of Buber’s understanding of the subject and I also answer the question whether we can consider the I-Thou relationship to include the non-human world. In part two I investigate the characteristics of such a relationship, covering as well the act of dialogue. This opens up for a new understanding of the subject as constituted by relationships including non-human others. As an example of how to protect living I-Thou relationships with non-human others through the I-It logic of law I present the case study of the river Wanganui in New Zealand and its newly acquired status as a subject by law. Finally I conclude by discussing a possible ethic where relational capacities are key.