When Animals Speak: Rethinking Interspecies Dialogue Beyond Anthropocentrism

Contemporary thinking on animal–human relations reflects a profound shift away from entrenched anthropocentrism toward a more inclusive, multispecies perspective that recognizes nonhuman agency and reconfigures traditional power hierarchies. Recent scholarship challenges the notion that communicative and ethical capacities are exclusive to humans. This symposium explores the reorientation toward interspecies perspectives that challenges traditional ecological knowledge and invites a reevaluation of ethical and political practices in our shared environment. Collectively, these perspectives urge us to rethink human–animal relationships/hierarchies as complex, dynamic interactions marked by mutual dependency, care, and dialogue, ultimately promoting a more sustainable and egalitarian coexistence.

We propose to invite scholars who are doing cutting-edge work on these issues: Rodrigo Bulamah (University of Rio, Brazil - cultural anthropologist; Francophone and Haitian studies); Alexandru Nicolae Stermin (Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania; ecology and biology) ; Anastassiya Andrianova (North Dakota State University - comparative literature; Ukrainian and Russian studies; media studies). One of the aims of the symposium is to offer perspectives on human-animal relations from different disciplines: humanities, social sciences, and biology/ecology. In all these fields, scholars are engaged to rethink our ethical frameworks by critiquing human exceptionalism, and positing that human-animal relations must be understood in the context of colonial legacies and socio-economic structures that often position animals as subordinate beings. The emergence of a multispecies scholarship in all these disciplines encourages more inclusive thinking and practices that bridge the divide between human rights and animal welfare, fostering systemic changes necessary for a just coexistence in the context of and in response to the anthropocene.