Nothing New

“That non-humans are social actors and important to human worlds may be a new idea to many in a Euro-Western framework. But Indigenous peoples and many Eastern cultures have long understood that humans cannot be separated from what we often call ‘nature.’ This way of looking at the world may be new to a Euro-Western approach, but other cultures have been thinking this way for time immemorial. Kim Tallbear, a researcher who studies the way science is done, calls the impulse to see people as separate from nature a “settler colonial binary.” That’s because people from Europe, and the settler colonial societies that they founded such as those in North America, have held as a core belief for centuries the idea that humans have dominion over the more-than-human world, and that we live apart from other life forms. This Euro-Western view of the world rests on the assumption that humans are different and therefore separate and better. The scholarly term for this is human exceptionalism. It is bound up with patriarchy and white supremacy and has fuelled many forms of oppression, profoundly shaping the world we know today.” *

* Elton, Sarah. 2022 "More-than-human." Showing Theory to Know Theory, eCampusOntario.

💧More-than-Human
💧Representations of Agency
💧More-than-human Labour