Worlds Beyond Bios: The Life of Matter and the Matter of Life

Worlds Beyond Bios builds on recent theoretical and ethnographic approaches to the more-than-human, exploring how entities not traditionally recognized as “alive” play active roles in shaping multispecies worlds. Drawing from Indigenous and Global South epistemologies as well as anthropology, the environmental humanities, and political theory, the contributors develop philosophies and practices of engagement with matter that are agentive and affective. Taken together, they offer ways of theorizing relations, justice, and materiality in an age of planetary unmaking and colonial capitalist logics, grounded in an ethics of responsibility and repair. From the political agency of mountains and the liveliness of sand to the spectral futures of coal and the opaque aesthetics of dust, Worlds Beyond Bios reveals how assumed borders between bios and non-bios are not only porous but politically consequential.

Sophie Chao is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney.

Christine J. Winter is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Otago.

David Schlosberg is Professor of Environmental Politics at the University of Helsinki.