Witnessing the World Otherwise Network

The Witnessing the World Otherwise Network aims to provide a platform to consider and explore how testimony, in both its anthropocentric, legal, literary, and philosophical forms, works to reveal the limits and possibilities of community.

The group offers a space for considering testimony in a broadened field – where non-human agents (animals, environments, technologies) challenge the boundaries of who or what can testify, and to whom. What kinds of community are possible – or necessary – when the very conditions of life are increasingly 'dehumanising', but also when the traditional figure of the human subject is itself under question? Can an individual testify for many? How do changing technologies mediate how we witness the climate crisis? What's the relationship between dehumanisation and the post-human, especially in racialised and/or colonial contexts? Can the earth and/or animals testify (e.g. in the context of environmental personhood)?

Ultimately, the group seeks to promote an interdisciplinary engagement with philosophy, at the intersection of the environmental humanities, Holocaust studies, postcolonial and indigenous studies, etc. At its heart is a contemporary political imperative: to reimagine how we think of ourselves as individuals and how we can bear witness in an era of profound ecological and cultural transformation.

Convenors:

Cameron Etherton, DPhil in French, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages

Magdalena Blincoe-Deval, DPhil in Ukrainian and Russian, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages

Orestis Tzirtzilakis, DPhil in Greek, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages

Eve Judah, PhD in French, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge

Witnessing the World Otherwise Network is part of TORCH Student Networks