Fellows Planetary Agency & Politics (2025)
Fellows Planetary Scholars & Artists in Residence Program 2025: Planetary Agency & Politics
SUMMER FELLOWS 2025
Ingvild Syntropia
Ingvild Syntropia is an artist-philosopher, treading the sensorial landscape of interspecies kinship and storytelling. She is part of Sympoiesis: interspecies synaesthesia through Art & Science, where she explores topics such as interspecies relations, deep time, acting techniques for empathy, the creative process, and what it means to embody the values of the future today. She has collaborated on various documentary films in the Netherlands, Kenya, Norway, and the UK. Her upcoming documentary on the donkey skin trade is her debut as a director. She is also a vocalist in Necessary Animals (UK), and sings Nordic Folk. She has a BA in Philosophy and the History of Ideas, Southampton & Bergen University, and an MA in Media for Development and Social Change, Sussex University. Originally from Norway, Ingvild has, over the past decade, lived as an expat in the UK, France, Switzerland, Brazil, and now the Netherlands. |
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Danilo Olivaz
Danilo Olivaz defines himself as a weaver of people, ideas, and creative flows. His life has been transformed by extraordinary educational opportunities in Brazil and abroad. With an interest in the idea of decentralization, he has worked as independent researcher in the Complexity Sciences, and since 2015, he has been a digital nomad and freelancer. Since 2020, he has been a father, neo-rural and CS instructor in digital education platforms. Recently, he has worked as interspecies synesthesia explorer and self-proclaimed amateur artist. As a community weaver, he is involved with the Earth Species Project, and is the initiator of Sympoiesis
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Project: Towards Symbiocracy - Nature's AI-Avatars As part of a larger exploration of Nature's AI-Avatars and the emerging framework of symbiocracy, this project embarks on the creation of an AI-Avatar for the Lahn River. This concept envisions political agency for natural entities, empowering rivers, forests, and ecosystems to communicate their needs and advocate for their rights. For the Lahn River AI-Avatar, an expressive interface for the river will be developed, giving voice to its ecological status, informed by real-time environmental data. This project builds on the success of the Rio Sagrado AI-Avatar, integrating advanced technologies such as sensors, AI, and cultural storytelling to enable rivers to participate as actors in their ecosystems and communities. Working closely with local groups, including Lila-Living Lahn and Lahn CleanUp, the AI-Avatar will be created through workshops and participatory activities. The ultimate goal is to foster deeper connections between humans and their environment, promoting the recognition of natural entities as political beings. Therefore, the Lahn AI-Avatar will not only embody scientific insights but also become a catalyst for regional environmental initiatives, offering a blueprint for planetary democracy through meaningful, cross-species dialogue. |
Sophie von Redecker
Sophie von Redecker is currently completing her PhD in Organic Agricultural Sciences at JLU Gießen with a scholarship from the Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation. In her dissertation, she proposes the Agrarian Humanities as a new research field, which complements Critical Agrarian Studies with approaches from More-than-Human Studies, Environmental Humanities, artistic research methods, and decolonial science criticism. She is a state-proved actress and has curated exhibitions that arose from scientific-artistic research. She is an associate member of the research cluster "Crisis and Socio-Ecological Transformation" at Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation. She received her first training from strawberries and sandy soil on the organic farm, where she grew up.
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Project: Planetary Agency Within The Human - An Un/learning Through Peasant Knowledges This project investigates "planetary agency" based on small-scale agricultural practices and the knowledge of the more-than-human. In this project, agroecological farming contexts are seen as experimental fields that demonstrate the interconnectedness of human and non-human actions. Furthermore, fields, gardens, tomatoes, or plants are understood as teachers, positioning the researcher more as a listener and learner, in order to “think with” what we call nature, as Donna Haraway suggests. What does it mean to listen to “nature” amidst the ecological crisis? How does this change our democratic thinking? What can ecosystems teach us about agency, human-nature relationships, and the decolonization of these relationships? Based on participatory-art-based research with fields and farmers, the project aims to explore how alternative agricultural practices, which embody ecological sensitivity and non-exploitative, care-based relationships with the more-than-human, model a more-than-human planetary democracy. By engaging with the knowledge of farmers and ecosystems, the project seeks to reshape our understanding of agency and democracy, asking how we can create a planetary democracy that includes non-human voices, which resonate through us, the so-called humans, in decision-making processes. |
FULL-YEAR FELLOW 2025
Erle Ellis
Erle Ellis is Professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). A Global Highly Cited Researcher, he studies the global ecology of human landscapes in the Anthropocene. He teaches environmental science and landscape ecology at UMBC and has taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He is an author of the US National Nature Assessment and the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment, a Fellow of the Global Land Programme, Senior Fellow of the Breakthrough Institute, former Anthropocene Working Group member and Visiting Fellow at Oxford’s Martin School. He published Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction in 2018.
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Project: Exploring An Aspirational Approach to Planetary Futures Conditions have improved for many people across the planet. The opposite is true for the rest of life on Earth. Prevailing frameworks to address nature’s decline have focused on setting goals, targets, or boundaries to limit human harm to environments or species. While such approaches have been useful in clarifying concerns and creating demands for action, their focus on people as the problem has also proved divisive, disempowering, and has not helped to achieve the broader scales of human cooperation needed to reverse ongoing global crises. It is time to move beyond narratives of harm and failure to harness widespread human aspirations and capabilities to shape a better future through approaches that promote and measure societal progress towards a world where people and nature thrive together. The Human Development Index (HDI) has helped inspire decades of remarkable progress across the human world by focusing on, promoting, and measuring advances in people’s abilities to lead the lives they value. This project explores the possibilities and challenges of developing an analogous approach to promoting and measuring societal progress towards a future where people and nature thrive together. A nature relationship index developed through an international process of expert consultation and concept testing could assess and promote improvements in human relationships with nature through a set of open-ended indicators that measure societal relationships that safeguard a nature that is thriving, accessible, and used with care and respect. By raising the bar for human progress to include mutually beneficial relationships with the rest of the living world, the unprecedented planetary force of human aspirations might be leveraged to shape a better future for all. |
WINTER FELLOWS 2025
Angela Snæfellsjökuls Rawlings
Angela Snæfellsjökuls Rawlings is a Canadian-Icelandic interdisciplinary artist-researcher with an ecological emphasis. They work with languages as their dominant exploratory material. Rawlings’ books include Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Coach House Books, 2006), Gibber (online, 2012), o w n (CUE BOOKS, 2015), si tu (MaMa Multimedijalni Institut, 2017), and Sound of Mull (Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, 2019). In 2022, Rawlings co-curated the SPHERE Festival for the Canadian National Arts Centre’s Orchestra in partnership with the Canadian Museum of Nature, the Royal Danish Library, and Nordic Bridges. In 2024, Rawlings founded Snæfellsjökul fyrir forseta, Iceland's first rights of nature movement. They teach at the Iceland University of the Arts.
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Project: Glacial Vocabulary Through their role as founder of Snæfellsjökul fyrir forseta in 2024, Rawlings has worked with a team of human volunteers to propose how a glacier may participate directly in the Icelandic government through the role of the presidency. This legal innovation arose via artistic interventions that embraced embodiment, alterity, humor, interdependence, and ecocentrism as key to conceiving of a glacier for president. With the neologism að jökla (to become-with glacier), they will map embodied and relational experiential knowledge transfer of glacial encounter. As an expansion of the initial work devised for Snæfellsjökul fyrir forseta, this knowledge-map will investigate communication with glaciers through temporal and sensorial attunements. Potent for inter-entity sense-making, the development of a glacial vocabulary may prototype how geosemiotics can contribute to participatory, democratic governance tools that include the more-than-human. The results will be encoded in a new set of performance scores (instructions) available for use in a democracy prototype toolkit. Developing participatory performance scores will cast new definitional potential onto the term political theatre, where such scores can be used for ecosystem engagement and more-than-human communion or consultation. |
Eva Meijer
Eva Meijer is a philosopher, visual artist, writer and singer-songwriter. They write novels, philosophical essays, academic texts, poems, and columns, and their work has been translated into over twenty languages. Recurring themes include language including silence, madness, nonhuman animals, and politics. Meijer also works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. They are the co-chair of the Dutch study group for Animal Philosophy. Recent academic books in English include Multispecies Assemblies (Vine Press 2024); Multispecies Dialogues. Doing Philosophy with Animals, Children, the Sea and Others (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming 2025); and When Animals Speak. Toward an Interspecies Democracy (New York University Press 2019). More information can be found on their website: www.evameijer.nl.
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Project: Multispecies Assemblies Animals speak. Plants do too. Seas and mountains are not the background to human actions, but have value in themselves. Many more-than-human beings are political actors. All of us are part of a web of relations in which we affect others and are affected by them. To counter the current ecological destruction and find more just ways to co-exist, humans need new ways of doing politics with other Earth beings. This projects devleops a new political model: the multispecies assembly. Multispecies assemblies are a form of direct democracy in which some beings speak for themselves and others are represented. During the residency, Meijer will explore how this local model of multispecies direct democracy translates to larger scales (i.e. national, European, and international levels of politics) and existing multispecies political institutions, organizations and practices. Furthermore, they will also investigate how we can include the perspectives of other beings like nonhuman animals and plants in knowledge creation about these questions, specifically regarding the formation of future, more just communities, and democratic practices. Living differently as humans is possible, but we must begin to listen to others and learn from them. |
Milja Kurki
Milja Kurki is a professor and the EH Carr Chair at the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK. She is currently interested in questions around planetary multispecies politics. For many years, she has been interested in debates on democracy, the nature and development of sciences, including cross-disciplinarity, and the implications of cosmological imaginations for our ways of doing politics. Her most recent book explores relational cosmology and its implications for planetary politics.
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Project: Exploring the Wheres and Hows of Planetary Multispecies Politics Kurki is interested in how and where we create the possibilities for new forms of planetary multispecies politics. In particular, she wishes to explore collaboratively the following questions: 1) How might we think and practice planetary democracy as more than a ‘single institution’, allowing for a pluriversality of meanings, modes of communication, and sites of engagement? 2) How might we think and practice planetary democracy as made by and designed by non-human as well as human actors? 3) How might we account for the informal as well as the formal, emotional as well as rational, place-based and planetary dimensions of the shift to planetary politics? 4) How and where might we engage with physical infrastructures and ways of moving in new ways as part of planetary politics? |
Stefan Pedersen
Stefan Pedersen is a political theorist who draws on international political theory and global environmental politics to study the past and prospects of planetary politics. He completed his PhD at the University of Leeds and is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced International Theory, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. In late 2024, he was a Visiting Researcher with the Sydney Environment Institute (SEI) at the University of Sydney. Since 2019, he has been co-convener of the Earth System Governance Project’s Taskforce on Planetary Justice and has co-edited a newly published Special Issue on Planetary Justice for the journal Environmental Politics. His single- and co-authored works have also appeared in Environmental Values, Environmental Philosophy, Globalizations, and Journal of Political Ideologies. He has previously been awarded the Streit Council-Frank Fund Fellowship.
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Project: Biospheric Politics and Planetary Democracy. The aim of this research project is to theorize how the primacy of the biospheric interest – which must be prioritized to secure a viable, long-term, future for humanity – ought to be reconciled with the democratic imperative for individual emancipation and communal self-governance. It takes as its basic premise that large-scale interventions in the global economy and the political transformations necessary to arrest and reverse the Earth System crisis will have to be legitimized through a new mode of planetary politics that will more precisely be ‘biospheric’ (as in biosphere-centric). This biospheric politics will have to be ontologically adapted to suit the physical realities uncovered by Earth System science (ESS) over the last century and normatively geared to handle the planetary challenges that ESS have by now identified. But biospheric politics will not have the necessary democratic purchase to fulfill its transformational promise unless it is grounded in a concomitant ethic of regional, local, and communal autonomy – i.e., the right to choose one’s own path and representative leadership as a (salient) community. This points to the need for respecting diverse approaches to living life on Earth, e.g., in terms of culture and the multispecies constitution of communities grounded in place. However, employing a local perspective also highlights the need for liberation from structural injustices which are presently beyond the capacity of singular communities, on practically every scale – and whose fuller emancipation can therefore not be achieved in isolation. In this task, a planetary subject acting as a unified demos has a better chance of succeeding through instituting a constitutional framework for a legally binding planetary democracy. Within the broad biospheric and emancipatory parameters laid out above, the project will seek to both assemble and create a cohesive range of concepts and ideas for imagining a biospheric community capable of its own self-governance as a whole, while maximizing the autonomy of its multifarious parts. |