Thursday 16 October 2025 5:30pm
Pembroke College Auditorium, Trumpington Street, Cambridge
About
Join us to celebrate the release of a new book by Melissa Leach, Honorary Professor, Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge and James Fairhead: Naturekind: Language, Culture and Power Beyond the Human.
Are language and culture uniquely human, justifying an exceptionalism that sets people apart from the rest of nature? New discoveries in the biological sciences have challenged this assumption, finding syntax, symbolism and social learning beyond the human, and identifying culture as a second inheritance system across the phyla from whales to insects and plants. Biologists are constrained, however, by the mechanistic ways communication is understood. In Naturekind, Melissa Leach and James Fairhead address this impasse by extending insights from structural linguistics, social semiotics, anthropology and Indigenous theorization into wider life, integrating them with new biological findings to develop a new structural biosemiotics paradigm. They suggest that this can provide a unified theory of meaning-making across all of nature, or “naturekind,” allowing new theorisation about human and nonhuman communication and culture. They examine people’s communicative encounters with chickens, horses, bees, bats and plants, and with assemblages of living and nonliving entities—forests, seas, soils and cities.
Marrying the new biology with the structural social sciences, they contend, provides powerful insights for living well with wider life on a shared planet, transforming political relations and shaping conservation and restoration policy and practice.
Chaired by Professor Rebecca Kilner, Professor of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, this event is an opportunity to hear and discuss the book’s arguments and implications with the authors and an influential multi-disciplinary panel:
Liana Chua, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
Arik Kershenbaum, Researcher and Author on Animal Communication, Zoology, University of Cambridge
Bram Buscher, Professor and Chair of the Sociology of Development and Change at Wageningen University
Followed by a drinks reception; copies of the book will be available for purchase at a discount.
Registration is free via this link but places are limited so please sign up - registration will close at the end of Monday 13 October.