Anthropology of life: Contemporary Anthropologies of More-Than-Human Socialities

We invite PhD students of Anthropology and related disciplines to take part in a course dedicated to an investigation of how contemporary anthropology theorizes the ways in which anthropology's core issue of relationality extends beyond the interhuman to include other forms of life and vibrant materialities.

While anthropology is still a science where humans and interhuman relations play a key role, current anthropological theorizing has taken an interest in broadening its scope of what constitutes, and is allowed to operate within, what is usually referred to as 'the social'. Motivated partly by how the Anthropocene makes understandings of human-nonhuman relationalities urgent and by how it at the same time unsettles anthropocentrism, anthropology has seen a profusion of approaches that seeks to develop new ways of understanding human life and its relations to different forms of active nonhuman and other-than-human life forms, be it plants, animals, water, oceans, air, spirits, and techno-scientific infrastructures. The extension of sociality and relationality that these new ways of studying life entails, raise a series of questions that will be addressed by the course teachers. These include:

1. What does human existence become if we take into account that humans are 'amphibious beings', thriving and struggling with and in their more-thanhuman enmeshments?
2. How does urban inequality unfold if we approach it as an atmospheric, airmediated phenomenon?
3. How does different life forms come together, become entangled and disentangled, as they travel across boundaries?
4. What are the bio-political implications of the dissolution of boundaries between humans and animals?
5. What are the implications of the ways in which knowledge about the nohuman is produced and mediated?
6. What does temporality become if it emerges from human-nonhuman relations?

We encourage PhD students to engage these and related questions and contribute to the course with empirically based, hands-on analyses of human nonhuman relationalities. The anthropology of life arguably opens a particularly potent space for comparative qualitative research, due to the ways in which historical understandings, symbolic structures and social institutions, all inhere specific understandings and disciplinings of life in all its various forms. We welcome PhD students who are researching human developments related to societal challenges such as ecological crises, economic uncertainty, deprivation and dispossession, food, agriculture and fisheries, urbanization, ocean related issues and other research themes that can be relevantly connected to the course theme.

Upon successful completion of this course the participants should be able to:

10 ECTS:

• Formulate and express arguments about how more-than-human connectivities might recast what the human being is, particularly its relations towards the material world.
• Articulate an understanding of the human being in relation to key concepts for the course, such as atmosphere, biopolitics, temporality, relations, agency, and environment.
• Demonstrate critical and experimental approaches within both theory and methodology when it comes to the entanglement and disentanglement of humans and non-humans, also as these traverse domains and boundaries.
• Being able to discuss the concept of 'more-than-human socialities' as a starting point for understanding Anthropology and related disciplines.
• Identify, analyze, and juxtapose various analytical and theoretical positions on the nature of more-than-human socialities specifically drawing on the literature assigned to the course.
• Prepare and present an essay or thesis chapter that engages one or several of the issues of the course and which makes use of one or several case studies.
• Receive and provide constructive criticism on a submitted essay.

5 ECTS:

• Formulate and express arguments about how more-than-human connectivities might recast what the human being is, particularly its relations towards the material world.
• Articulate an understanding of the human being in relation to key concepts for the course, such as atmosphere, biopolitics, temporality, relations, agency, and environment.
• Demonstrate critical and experimental approaches within both theory and methodology when it comes to the entanglement and disentanglement of humans and non-humans, also as these traverse domains and boundaries.
• Being able to discuss the concept of 'more-than-human socialities' as a starting point for understanding Anthropology and related disciplines.
• Identify, analyze, and juxtapose various analytical and theoretical positions on the nature of more-than-human socialities specifically drawing on the literature assigned to the course.
• Prepare and present an essay or thesis chapter that engages one or several of the issues of the course and which makes use of one or several case studies.
• Receive and provide constructive criticism on a submitted essay.