Introducing the mud to the sublime

Description

Mathilda Rosengren (Malmö university) gave a presentation, followed by a discussion with Umut Ozguc (Macquarie University), and questions from participants. William Kutz moderated the seminar.

Presentation Topic
Mathilda Rosengren: In this talk, I will present some reflections on how I, in my present and previous research, have made use of post-humanist and more-than-human theories on ontology and agency to make sense of borderland dwellings in multispecies urban landscapes.

The title of the talk derives from Donna Haraway’s critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “becoming-animal”, with Haraway arguing that their philosophy is one of “the sublime, not the earthly, not the mud”. For Haraway, without this mud – i.e. the ordinary being and everyday interactions between other-than-humans (and sometimes their human companions) – there can be no adequate way of approaching and understanding a world beyond the human.

Here, I draw on my more-than-human urban ethnographies from Germany and Sweden to provide examples of how such muddy, or muddled, relations of entwined everyday actions become meaning-making practices in themselves – outside distinctly human philosophical metaphors, constructed borders or sites of dwelling.

About the series
This was the sixth seminar of the series Dwelling, elsewhere: Comparative-methodological perspectives on borderland inhabitation, arranged by William Kutz and the Öresund Comparative Borderland Research Group, funded by CEMES.

Period	2023 Nov 14
Event type	Seminar
Degree of Recognition	International