Rethinking Human Relationships with the More-than-Human Spiritual, Indigenous and Relational Paradigms in Conversation
This seminar creates a public forum that brings together international scholars and artists from a plurality of backgrounds.
The seminar addresses the significant shift that is currently taking place across the sciences and arts, challenging binary distinctions such as nature–culture, human–nonhuman, mind–matter, reason–emotion and subject–object. Within the humanities and social sciences, this shift is often referred to as the ‘relational turn’. Rather than emphasising human exceptionalism, it problematises this notion and instead highlights interconnectedness, mutuality, kinship and the entanglement of all beings within complex ecological and cosmological networks. This has profound implications for environmental ethics, political theory and how we conceptualise religion and spirituality. Under a relational paradigm, spiritualities can be understood as expressions of interconnectedness with the non-human, the ‘sacred’ and the more-than-human worlds, rather than as human-centred belief systems.
This seminar invites participants to engage in critical, interdisciplinary dialogue about evolving understandings of the relationship between humans and more-than-human worlds (sometimes referred to as ‘nature’). Drawing on diverse perspectives, including contemporary Earth-based spiritualities, Indigenous traditions and emerging theoretical paradigms, the seminar will seek to identify, challenge and reframe the dominant narratives that have shaped modern exploitative thought since the rise of colonialism, extractive capitalism, industrialisation and the philosophical and scientific objectification of ‘nature’.
A central aim of the seminar is to critically examine these inherited structures and ask: why are humans typically positioned as superior beings, endowed with consciousness, rationality and universal rights? What underlies our modes of relating to the non-human world, and how might these be reimagined?
The seminar will facilitate various forms of conversation, including papers, roundtables, artistic performances and shared experiences involving non-human voices and presences.
One and a half day programme and further details forthcoming.