Lecture Series, Summer Term 2025
The Research Training Group “Fixing Futures” is excited to announce our upcoming lecture Series: “Re-configuring Resistance: Implications, Potentials and Limitations for More-Than-Human Politics.”
In light of the complex interplay of regimes of power that permeate the socio-material worlds of the Anthropocene, this series delves into the relationship between resistance, future-making and the more-than-human. Drawing on the concept of more-than-human politics, we explore the implications, potentials and limitations of re-configuring our conceptualisations and practices of resistance beyond anthropocentric confines to imagine and enact more-than-human futures differently.
More-than-human politics challenge dominant onto-epistemologies by rethinking how we know and act within naturecultures. It resists the logics that have driven planetary crises and continue to shape planetary futures. At the same time, it unsettles familiar notions of resistance, which often rely on human-centred ideas of agency, intentionality, and subjectivity (cf. Molfese 2023). This framework questions entrenched assumptions about power, agency and political action by foregrounding non-human capacities of “making others act” (Rodríguez-Giralt et al. 2018). Yet, the potential of more-than-human approaches for political change and critical scholarship remains contested. An overly affirmative emphasis on entanglements can obscure constellations that resist relationality (Giraud 2019) and overlook historical differences that ‘matter to ecological politics’ (Büscher 2021), thereby risking erasing the gendered, racial and colonial histories of dehumanisation that continue to shape planetary injustices (Wynter 2003; Jackson 2020).
In this light, the relationship between resistance and the more-than-human remains a site of productive tension – one that invites us to rethink resistance not as a fixed or purely oppositional force, but as a situated and relational practice attuned to the multiple agencies and asymmetries of the Anthropocene. For this reason, we want to ask two questions: First, how does thinking with ‘more-than-human politics’ offer potentials of unsettling and resisting in the Anthropocene? Second, how can engaging resistance and the more-than-human in dialogue prompt a re-configuration of their conceptual boundaries?
This summer semester, we are thrilled to invite Mona Lilja, Mikael Baaz, Jamie Lorimer and Carlotta Molfese to Goethe University to hold lectures with subsequent discussions on the theoretical nuances of both the concepts of resistance and more-than-human politics and what it means to bring them together. In the following winter semester, we look forward to continuing this debate by focusing on empirical instances of more-than-human resistance.
Lectures in Summer Term:
Mona Lilja and Mikael Baaz (University of Gothenburg)
„What We Are Talking About When We Are Talking About Resistance (today)„
Monday, June 02, 2025, at 18-20 (c.t.) at PEG 1.G165
Jamie Lorimer (University of Oxford)
„Time for rewilding: The more-than-human politics of nature recovery in Europe„
Tuesday, June 17, 2025, at 18-20 (c.t.) at SH 5.105
Carlotta Molfese (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)
„From resistance to prefiguration: Advancing a less-anthropocentric framework„
Tuesday, July 08, 2025, at 18-20 (c.t.) (ONLINE via Zoom: https://uni-frankfurt.zoom-x.de/j/68167462379?pwd=oMOO9YmE1BhbmtXGFK910Jjyrack4d.1)
Dates for the winter term will be announced separately!