This two-day symposium (Oct 16 & 17) 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. The Imagining More-than-Human Communities team is 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 public keynote lecture by Dr 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 non-human sense perception.

Would you like to join? Make sure to register by Thursday, October 9.

Programme

The full programme will be published here in the course of September.

Thursday, October 16

13:00 to 17:00

Friday, October 17

9:00 to 17:00

Registration

If you experience problems using the QR code, please use this link to register.