Hyphen Colloquium: More-than-human Socialities (2025)
Hyphen Journal presents:
Hyphen Colloquium: More-than-human Socialities
Wednesday 25 June 2025, 2–5pm BST.
Panel 1: 14:00–15:20
Being, thinking and knowing-with
Elżbieta Kowalska, Beatriz Paz Jiménez and CONCH (Rhona Eve Clews & Elaine Fisher)
Panel 2: 15:40–17:00
Sensing and making sense
Sensory Experience Design Studio (Nong Hua Lim, Kornbongkoch Harnpinijsak and Weichen Tang), J. Rojas Routon
Location
Room C109
University of Westminster
115 New Cavendish Street
London W1W 6UW
And online
Register here.
To mark the launch of Hyphen Journal Issue 3.2: Ecologies, we invite you to a hybrid (in-person/online) colloquium. The issue explores expanded notions of ecology and interdependence, with contributions that critically engage with themes including human-bacterial relations, non-binary bodies and ice, women in decolonial anti-extractivist activism, the Covid pandemic as pandaemonium, photography and nitrogen-altered landscapes, synthetic sound ecologies, dwelling and consumer culture, more-than-human notions of film curation, and intersections between new materialist thought and particle physics, through both theoretical and practice-based approaches.
This colloquium will feature contributors to Issue 3.2, as well as the forthcoming Issue 4: Socio-ecological Practice, who will present and discuss their research.
The colloquium will be held as part of the University of Westminster’s Graduate School Festivall 2025 – Challenging Pasts / Critical Futures.
Abstracts
Elżbieta Kowalska, Mapping the gut buddies
Elżbieta’s talk is centred around key cultural and medical concepts that she met on the way while doing autoethnographic research about so-called human microbiome, which can also be viewed as a human-microbes assemblage. The process of mapping is evoked here as it is crucial to create the space of legibility, path of knowledge, and self-orientation. This “line of flight” map is crucially participating in imagining, perceiving, and creating future relationships not only with humans’ inner bacterial realm but with wider planetary ecologies.
Beatriz Paz Jiménez, Challenging the narrative about wild edible greens in urban imaginaries
Cities are sites of displacement. Elemental, mineral, animal, vegetable, and human bodies have been uprooted from their native landscapes to fuel the economic forces that shape the urban sphere. But cities do more than shift materials—they also displace imagination, memory, and pathways of creation. This is a form of relational extractivism, one that draws upon life itself, and inevitably, upon foodways.
Yet within the cracks of the city, a living and growing resistance persists—an embodied knowledge that teaches us ancestral ways of envisioning a future grounded in co-creation rather than extraction. Wild edible greens emerge as a nurturing force, offering a means to counteract relational dislocation and to re-territorialise our bodies as urban dwellers.
Through art, social communication, and food practices, we can learn together how to sow these greens in our collective imaginaries—and from there, return to the soil.
Sensory Experience Design Studio (Nong Hua Lim, Kornbongkoch Harnpinijsak and Weichen Tang), Sensing Our Environment – the ‘Sounds and Sweet Airs’ Project
This is a sensory project that aims to evoke conversations about human-environment relationships through an immersive synthetic sound ecology featuring several mechanical ‘species’ of creatures that generate sounds from everyday recycled materials. These critters, each having its own personality, are sensitive to different elements of the physical environment. When distributed in a built environment, they create an evolving soundscape that reflects the state of the space they occupy and collectively produce a nature-like sound atmosphere the kind of which is gradually disappearing in our ever urbanised environments. Through a series of iterations and evolutions, the work rethinks humans’ sonic relationship to the built environment in relation to memories of natural habitats. By immersing the audience in a sound field of subtle auditory cues, the project stimulates more intimate sensory connections to the spaces around us.
J. Rojas Routon, Auxiliary notes, musings and daydreams
The author of ‘Pandaemonium, 2020 hindsight and Animal life’ will informally discuss the sources of inspiration, the images and ideas that lead to writing, as well as, some secondary themes and inevitable lose-ends that haunt the text.
