Thom van Dooren

Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies
School of History and Philosophy
University of New South Wales

My work centres on loss and death in multispecies contexts. Focusing primarily on several species of birds that are approaching extinction, I am concerned by what this absence of particular life forms (and their forms of life) might mean: what is really lost here, what does this loss bring with it, and what does this situation tell us about ourselves and our place in a changing world? I am currently completing work on a book – Flight Ways: What is Lost in Extinction – that takes up these questions with a focus on five groups of birds: North Pacific albatrosses, Indian vultures, an endangered colony of penguins in Australia, Hawaiian crows, and the iconic whooping cranes of North America. In each case my writing draws biology, ecology and ethology into conversation with ethnography and philosophy, to do a kind of ‘multispecies storytelling’ that highlights the complexity and entangled significance of these (possible) extinctions.

With Deborah Bird Rose I have also recently completed work on an edited collection titled Unloved Others: Death of the Disregarded in the Time of Extinctions (2011, Australian Humanities Review). Some of my recent work on the natural and cultural history of vultures has also recently been published in a little book called Vulture (Reaktion Books, UK, 2011). For more information and a full list of publications..