Agenda

Learning With workshop series:
Secularity and the Deanimation of Nature

Mayanthi Fernando
UC Santa Cruz
In dialogue with Antonia Majaca and Roberta Raffaetà

Friday, Oct 9th, 2026, 10:00-13:00

In this era of anthropogenic climate change, more and more people rightly argue that we must reject the human exceptionalism that brought us here and learn to live in more-than-human worlds. But many of the assumptions underpinning the Anthropocene are also effects of secularity. These include the idea that nature is inert, that humans are impervious to more-than-human forces, and that human mastery of the universe is possible. Wouldn't any way forward, then, require untethering ourselves from secularity as well? And what would that entail within the academy as much as beyond it? The academy is the citadel of secularity, where norms about nature and humanity, science and religion, body and mind, physical and metaphysical, and, above all, real and not-real are generated and zealously upheld.
This untethering matters for two reasons. First, most communities threatened by the current ecological crisis do not abide by secular categories. Their worlds are composed of a multitude of beings and more-than-human agencies, and taking those communities seriously is an ethical and political necessity. Second, the crisis is built on secular distinctions between human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, subject and object, present and past, yet it is also collapsing them. The result is what many climate writers call an "uncanny" present. By this they mean the unsettling return of the repressed, in this case the formidable power of more-than-human forces and human dependence on and vulnerability to them. But these forces appear uncanny only from the perspective of separation, and another name for their repression is secularization.
This workshop traces the emergence of what Mayanthi Fernando calls secularity's "twinned ideology of disembodiment and deanimation." It begins before the sixteenth century, when even Europeans lived in a more-than-human world in which bodies were agentive and porous to extrahuman forces and nature was alive and powerful. It then follows how, over the following centuries of secularization, bodies came to be seen as inert, mute, and impermeable; nature as orderly, uniform, and knowable to Man; and the modern self as rational, autonomous, and distinct from its body. Finally, it retells the story of secularization as a messier one, in which the transformations enacted by secular modernity were never complete. We will ask whether secular moderns retain traces of a more porous, capacitated body than many of us imagine, and whether recognizing those traces might be a first step toward a more-than-secular coalitional politics.

Mayanthi Fernando is Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Her research addresses secularity; Islam; more-than-multispecies ecologies; histories of the body and consciousness; liberalism and law; and gender and sexuality. She is the author of The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Duke, 2014) and co-editor of Trouillot Remixed: The Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader (Duke, 2021). Her next monograph, Companion Spirits: More-Than-Secular Journeys in More-Than-Human Worlds, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in March 2027.

"Learning With” is an experimental workshop series and the primary methodology of the Radical Epistemologies cluster at NICHE led by Antonia Majaca. 
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (GA n. 949742 HealthXCross).