Lecture Series, Winter Term 2025-2026
The Research Training Group „Fixing Futures“ is excited to continue our lecture Series: „Re-Configuring Resistance: Implications Potentials and Limitations for More-Than-Human Politics“ this winter term.
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?
After three thought-provoking lectures on the theoretical nuances of more-than-human politics and resistance last semester, we are thrilled to continue these discussions this winter semester with Munira Khayyat and Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera, who will hold lectures with subsequent discussions on empirical instances of more-than-human resistance.
Lectures in Winter Term:
Munira Khayyat: „Return to the End of the World: Another Season of War in South Lebanon“
Prof. Dr. Munira Khayyat (NYU Abu Dhabi)
Date. Tuesday, December 9, 2025, 6-8 pm (c.t.)
Location. SH 1.104
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Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera: „Where Waters Weep and Lands Remember: Grief and Environmental Struggles in Mexico“
Dr. Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera (DePaul University)
Date. Tuesday, December 16, 2025, 6-8 pm (c.t.)
Location. SH 1.104
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