3.8 Radical Animism, with Rowan Deer

Forum on Religion and Ecology: Spotlights

This episode of Spotlights features Rowan Deer, PhD, author of Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World (Bloomsbury, 2020), which brings together literary, philosophical, and scientific perspectives to rethink animism for the Anthropocene. She discusses the way her book juxtaposes authors like Virginia Woolf, Lewis Carroll, and William Shakespeare with the Copernican Revolution, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious. She also discusses the the role of deconstruction in her writing, correcting some common misunderstandings of deconstruction and Jacques Derrida.
More information about her book is available on the publisher's website here.
Some other pieces of interest include her article on fungi and language, "Mycorrhizal Metaphors," available open access at Ecozona.
Another relevant essay is "Reading in the Dark," published by Orion Magazine.