Rachael Gittins

PhD Candidate

Manchester Metropolitan University

Rachael’s NWDCTP-funded project looks at the account of sense-making given by Jakob von Uexküll and Gilles Deleuze and how their work can be used to challenge historic ideas of multi-species sense-making processes. Her thesis contends that their emphasis on sense as non-transcendent and non-normative can offer an alternative to the dominant portrayal of animal lives in the history of philosophy as characterised by a ‘lack’ and subsequently devalued insofar as they do not conform to historically defined ideas of human meaning and human experience. 

In reformulating sense as rooted in the primacy of sensory experience and relationality it becomes, as Uexküll claims, a ‘biological principle’ found across more-than-human life. Rachael is also particularly interested in Deleuze and Uexküll’s respective relationships to ethology and art, and the influence these interdisciplinary elements have on their theoretical practices.

Rachael coordinates an online network of PhD researchers working across Critical Animal Studies, Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Science. They host monthly work-in-progress sessions and an interdisciplinary reading group aimed at considering some of the thematic questions of the group’s research in different mediums.

For more information, please see www.multispeciesencounters.wordpress.com