My Research
Overview
Much of my work in disrupting logics of isolation, including anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism, involves asking what happens when concepts that belong exclusively to the domain of “the human” are thought within multispecies contexts. For instance, how does studying the presence of culture, care, gender, knowledge, resistance, and history among more-than-human animals compel scholars, activists, public intellectuals, authors, and students to engage these beings differently? Without diminishing more-than-human beings, how does thinking across species lines generate more expansive understandings of these concepts? And how might more just and inclusive ways of being and thinking follow?
Literature offers an especially rich place for doing this work. I understand literary texts as not only cultural repositories that chronicle multispecies encounters, but also as lively documents that arise through relationships — both real and imagined — with nonhumans. From this perspective, my task is to develop modes of reading capable of accounting for the multispecies stories and relationships that bring literature and culture into existence.
Book Projects
My first book, provisionally titled Entangled Lives: Multispecies Selves, Justice, and Narratives, considers how contemporary life writing has expanded the borders of the self to include more-than-human beings. I ask how the entangled selves described by authors such as Jamaica Kincaid, Jane Goodall, and Mark Doty can disrupt the liberal human subject and its logics of isolation that cause violence to humans and more than humans. Throughout the book, I show that the entangled self articulated in multispecies memoirs provides a model for reimagining and replacing the liberal subject that remains at the center of justice and juridical theory. Entangled Lives proposes modes of multispecies justice that aim to preserve and sustain multispecies relationships, and that produce more livable worlds for diverse beings, human and otherwise.
My second book project considers displacement as a defining environmental problem of the twenty-first century, one that harms human and more-than-human communities and severely restricts possibilities for coexistence. I consider how the concept of “home” has undergone a resurgence in environmental thought and discourse, at a time when unprecedented numbers of humans and other beings are experiencing displacement from the places, ecologies, and relationships that sustain their sense of being. The project sets out to understand how neoliberal policies have produced global crises of “homelessness,” and to ask how the concept of “home” might provide a rubric for resisting displacement and producing more just and livable worlds.
Audio Documentary
Mining for the Climate is a collaborative audio documentary series that explores the impacts of critical mineral mining on communities and ecosystems. Working closely with local communities, we consider how new and old forms of mining are fueling the energy transition and what the consequences are of a more mining-dependent society on humans, other beings and the climate.
Season 1 takes listeners to a proposed lithium mine in Gaston County, North Carolina, an agricultural region hailed by green technology and mining companies as a future hub for the production of lithium batteries. We talk to local residents who oppose the 1,500-acre open-pit mine proposed by Piedmont Lithium and we delve into the issues at stake if domestic reliance on mining deepens.
Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, and PlayerFM.
Mining for the Climate is a production of Blue Lab, an environmental research and storytelling group at Princeton University directed by Allison Carruth. Webpage and cover art design by Barron Bixler. Created by Juan Manuel Rubio and Nate Otjen with research, writing and production support from Alex Norbrook, Grace Wang and Max Widmann. Hosted by Juan Manuel Rubio, Max Widmann, Alex Norbrook, Grace Wang and Nate Otjen and mixed by Juan Manuel Rubio, Nate Otjen and Grace Wang.
Profiles
