Nathaniel Otjen
I’m committed to finding more just ways of cohabiting the world with the nonhumans who make our collective lives possible.
As author Nick Jans has observed, humans living during the twenty-first century find themselves “adrift in an increasingly empty world.” My research and teaching challenge the emptiness occurring in material environments and in critical and cultural spaces.
A central goal of my work involves identifying structures and logics of isolation that are responsible for producing human and nonhuman suffering, and then developing modes of being premised upon reciprocity, interdependence, and multispecies justice.
The following questions guide my endeavors:
- How are authors, artists, and activists imagining and creating worlds that actively support humans and nonhumans most disadvantaged by anthropocentrism, neoliberalism, colonialism, and legal and juridical systems?
- How do frameworks of multispecies entanglement and justice offer alternatives to liberal humanism?
- How might “the human” and the borders that contain this entity be expanded to include nonhuman lives in ways that compel collective action and institutional change?
- And how do multispecies approaches that center ecological relationships and communities rearticulate the boundaries, goals, and subjects of justice?