Conference Agenda

Design research increasingly engages multispecies and more-than-human relations, yet the hierarchies and violences that structure these relations often remain unnamed. This Conversation starts from the assumption that what is left unnamed also remains difficult to question.  Antispeciesism is mobilized here precisely as a practice of naming: not as an ethical stance, nor as a claim about moral priority among forms of life, but as an analytical lens that makes visible how anthropocentrism functions as a hierarchical principle of knowledge, value, and legitimacy. This Conversation proposes to bring multispecies justice into design research precisely as a space of dissonance and divergence. Within design research, the critique of anthropocentrism has often focused on decentring the human through relationality, interdependence, and ecological entanglement. Building on this, what antispeciesism adds to this conversation is not a comparative or hierarchical concern between animals, plants, or other forms of life, nor an appeal to empathy or benevolence, which risk reintroducing paternalistic logics. Rather, it foregrounds a specific and often underestimated angle of the more-than-human: the role of species-based hierarchies as political and epistemic technologies that organize domination, disposability, and differential worth, in ways structurally entangled with colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist regimes of knowledge.

From a decolonial perspective, the anthropos at the centre of modern knowledge is never neutral or universal, but historically produced as white, Western, male (Wynter, 2015), and positioned as fully human in contrast to those rendered less-than-human bodies (Manning, 2016; Ahmed, 2000). From this perspective, anthropocentrism is inseparable from other hierarchical regimes – of race, gender, class, and species (Vázquez, 2024; Lorde, 2018 ed.; Foucalt, 1975; hooks, 1996, 2000; Davis, 1981) – that organize knowledge through exclusion, animalization, and biopolitical differentiation. By bringing antispeciesism into design research, this Conversation seeks to reconnect more-than-human concerns with these broader hierarchies – making visible how design already operates within multispecies relations shaped by institutionalized violence, and opening space for questions that more- than-human design has so far tended to overlook or underarticulate.