WHEN: Wednesday 20 November 2-4pm
WHERE: 969 Raymer Rd, Kelowna, BC V1W 1K1
WHAT: Join Dr Susan Reid for this informal workshop to explore how different concepts of other-than-human agency are navigated within interdisciplinary research.
Agency is often used interchangeably with animacy, intention, sentience, function, spirit, power, kinship, relation, action. It can also encompass affective modes, and concepts of resistance, care, and repair.
Knowledge systems and practices influence how agency or agency-like terms are understood. For different Indigenous knowledge practices, agency offers an approximation of the constitutive spirits and energies of human and other-than-human lifeworlds–not as abstractions or representations but as lived experiences (See (Todd 2016) (Vanessa Watts 2017). Within biological sciences, agency is commonly characterised mechanistically, as a quality of physically measurable purpose, function, directionality, or goal-directedness. It is also associated with sentience, often to the advantage of nonhuman justice projects but also criticised if too broadly applied.
Across the past couple of decades, concepts of other-than-human agency have shape-shifted within posthumanist approaches, environmental humanities, and feminist, queer and critical cultural studies scholarship. Some familiar examples include: interspecies and epistemic agency(Haraway 1991; 1988); intra-action and material relationality (Barad 2003), ‘animacies’ queer agency (Mel Y Chen 2012); political and gestational agency of water (Chen, MacLeod, and Neimanis 2013); distributed agency and Gaia concepts (Latour 2014); phenomenological approaches (Neimanis 2017), transcorporeality and material agency (Davis 2022; Alaimo 2016); multibeing ocean agency (Reid 2023; 2020), and for idioms of animacy, see also (Price and Chao 2023). If agency’s meaning is influenced by particular epistemological and ontological approaches, how might interdisciplinary scholars navigate these differences and intersections? From what position is agency ‘recognised’ or ‘extended’? What do we want of agency?
ABOUT: Dr Susan Reid is a Postdoctoral fellow with UBCO’s Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies. Susan researches multibeing ontologies with a focus on ocean and justice.
What to bring
The reference list is not at all prescriptive. If you can take a look at the links provided and read one or two articles, that would be great.
Bibliography
Alaimo, Stacy. 2016. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs 28 (3): 801–31.
Chen, Cecilia, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis, eds. 2013. Thinking with Water. Montreal & Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press.
Davis, Heather M. 2022. Plastic Matter. Elements. Durham: Duke University Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99.
———. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–81. New York: Routledge.
Latour, Bruno. 2014. “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” New Literary History 45 (1): 1–18.
Mel Y Chen. 2012. Animacies. Duke University Press.
Neimanis, Astrida. 2017. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Environmental Cultures Series. Bloomsbury.
Price, Catherine, and Sophie Chao. 2023. “Multispecies, More-Than-Human, Nonhuman, Other-Than-Human: Reimagining Idioms of Animacy in an Age of Planetary Unmaking.” Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal 10 (2): 177–93.
Reid, Susan. 2020. “Solwara 1 and the Sessile Ones.” In Blue Legalities, edited by Irus Braverman and Elizabeth R. Johnson, 25–44. Durham: Duke University Press.
———. 2023. “Ocean Justice: Reckoning with Material Vulnerability.” Cultural Politics 19 (1): 107–27. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-10232516.
Todd, Zoe. 2016. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29 (1): 4–22.
Vanessa Watts. 2017. “Indigenous Place-Thought Agency amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!).” Re-Visiones (Madrid), no. 7.
All FEELed Lab events strive to be feminist, anticolonial, antiracist, queer and accessible spaces.
The FEELed lab 