04 Sep Worlds Beyond Bios: The Life of Matter and the Matter of Life
A new edited volume, Worlds Beyond Bios: The Life of Matter and the Matter of Life (Duke University Press, 2026), 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.
Website: https://dukeupress.edu/worlds-beyond-bios
Editors: Sophie Chao, Christine J. Winter, and David Schlosberg
Contributors: Eunice Andrada, Karin Bolender, Judith Nangala Crispin, Elizabeth Duncan, Eickelkamp, Ute, Natasha Fijn, Erin Fitz-Henry, Gastón R. Gordillo, César Enrique Giraldo Herrera, Zsuzsanna Ihar, Giulia Lepori, Yasmine Musharbash, Astrida Neimanis, Craig Santos Perez, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Susan Reid, Jenny García Ruales, Makere Stewart-Harawira, Malini Sur, Blanche Verlie, Jamie Wang, Christine J. Winter, Jelle J P Wouters, and Faizah Zakaria
Praise
“This is a fantastic collection. Threaded throughout is the argument that, to perceive and do justice to climate and environmental catastrophe, we need to undo the normative binary of life and non-life. Hybridizing Indigenous and folkloric forms of knowledge with contemporary arts, science, and sustainability aspirations, the essays are haunting, inspiring, insightful, evocative, poetic, tragic, fierce, and grief stricken.” – Samantha Frost, author of Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human
“This quite brilliant book thinks anthropologically and ethnographically across the life/nonlife boundary to surface relations and politics among humans and nonhumans. The editors urge us not only to enfranchise non-human in our analyses of the bios, but also to extend our anthropological attentions to the agencies of the other-than-or-more-than-organic” – Stefan Helmreich, author of A Book of Waves
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