Transspecies Kinship and Hominid Ecologies: Imagining Livable Worlds in a (Post)Apocalyptic Present

The ongoing sixth mass extinction makes urgent the need to reformulate dominant ideas about the place of humanity in the world. This project aims to conceptualize and articulate alternative understandings of what it means to be human that could support livable worlds – for humans and the more-than-human world.

It does so through exploring contemporary speculative fiction by feminist, indigenous, and black diaspora writers that imagine worlds where humans are inescapably entangled with the more-than-human. It reads these works in contexts that form alternatives and/or opposition to an anthropocentric ideal of human mastery. The project speaks to concerns raised in the critical posthumanities and materialist feminism, but aims to set up and explore “conversations” between various traditions and forms of writing.