Maya Kóvskaya

Maya Kóvskaya (PhD UC Berkeley, 2009) is the founder and head of the Amor Mundi Institute and Amor Mundi Multispecies Ecological Worldmaking Lab and teaches Multispecies Anthropocene Studies, Semiotics, STS, and Theory at Chiang Mai University in the Faculty of Social Science. As an Inklaks Visiting Professor, they taught the MPhil-level Curatorial Intensive at JNU's School of Arts and Aesthetics in 2015. In 2011, they collaborated on the Yamuna-Elbe project by teaching a Writing Ecologies workshop and were the inaugural Public.Art.Ecology Critic-in-Residence at KHOJ in 2009. They were also a decade-long participant in the Anthropocene Project and Campuses organized by the Max Planck Institute and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and curated site-specific interventions at the Natchez Mississippi Field Station as part of the Mississippi: An Anthropocene River. Kóvskaya's ecophilosophical work elaborates on what they call the Anthroposupremocene, interrogating the invidious, hierarchical-dualist division between humans and the more-than-human natural world. Their multispecies ethnographic research explores concepts such as “feral agency,” “more-than-human speech acts,” “multispecies language games,” “eco-performativity,” and “eco-semiosis” to investigate the extralinguistic ways in which nature “speaks.”