News and Events
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We have recently co-produced a multimedia essay on the decline of the critically endangered regent honeyeater. The piece is the product of a collaboration between scholars in the humanities, design, and biology: Thom van Dooren, Zoë Sadokierski, Myles Oakey, Timo Rissanen, Samuel Widin, and Ross Crates. You can read/view the full essay here. The south-eastern corner of the Australian continent was once criss-crossed by the nomadic flight paths of the Regent Honeyeater. For hundreds of thousands of years, they winged their way up and down this vast continent. Today, however, the species is listed as critically endangered and is just…
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New book explores hunger as a more-than-human phenomenon in West Papua
Environmental humanities scholar and anthropologist Dr. Sophie Chao (University of Sydney) has published a monograph with Duke University Press, titled Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger. The book draws on Chao’s ethnographic fieldwork in West Papua and examines how Indigenous Marind communities understand and theorize hunger in the context of mass deforestation and industrial oil palm plantation expansion. Instead of seeing hunger as an individual, biophysical state defined purely in nutritional, quantitative, or human terms, Chao investigates how hunger traverses variably situated humans, animals, plants, institutions, infrastructures, spirits, and sorcerers. When approached through the lens of Indigenous…
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The radical work of mourning: the power of grief in a time of extinction
In April 2024, we co-organised a roundtable discussion on the role of mourning and grief in a time of extinctions. The panel comprised Unworlding Collaboratory members Blanche Verlie and Thom van Dooren with our colleague Zoë Sadokierski. The event was a collaboration with ABC Radio National’s Big Ideas program, produced by Natasha Mitchell. An edited recording of our discussion is now available from the ABC’s website. Join Natasha Mitchell and guests for a poetic discussion on the ways you can create space to grieve for species that are going, going, gone. Powerful interests collude to tell us that expressing emotion is hysterical, and that humans…