Toward a Negative Zoology — Mayanthi Fernando on More-than-Human Worlds
Anthropologist Mayanthi Fernando explores the intersections of secularism, animality, and more-than-human worlds in Columbia's Pedagogy of the Deed series.
Why we picked this
The phrase 'negative zoology' is deliberately disorienting. Fernando is asking what happens when we stop classifying animals as resources and start recognizing them as political subjects.
Mayanthi Fernando’s lecture challenges the boundaries between human and non-human worlds, asking what becomes possible when we abandon the secular, modern framework that treats animals and ecosystems as inert objects awaiting human management. Her concept of “negative zoology” refuses the taxonomic impulse, the drive to classify, rank, and instrumentalize other species, and instead explores what shared existence looks like without hierarchy.
This talk is part of the Heyman Center’s spring Thursday Lecture Series, themed “Pedagogy of the Deed,” which examines the relationship between education and action. Fernando’s contribution pushes that question beyond the human: if pedagogy is about transformation, who and what gets to be transformed?
Free and open to the public at the Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room.