We have long told a particular story about what it means to be human: a rational, autonomous individual, separate from nature, in control of the world it designs. This figure has often been treated as the measure of all things: the one who gives meaning, makes decisions and designs the future. But this story has a problem: the world it imagines - separating nature and culture, bodies and machines, self and environment - was never real, and today its limits are increasingly impossible to ignore.
The trouble with the human is that placing one narrow version of the human at the centre has allowed the destruction of everything placed outside it: ecosystems treated as resources, some people rendered as less-than-human, nonhuman beings and forces reduced to passive backdrop.
What more-than-human means
More-than-human is not a single theory, but a family of perspectives shaped by many traditions: from Indigenous cosmologies and feminist science studies to posthumanism, new materialism, multispecies thinking, environmental humanities and science and technology studies. Together, these perspectives challenge the idea that humans stand apart from the worlds they inhabit. The human is never separate from the entanglements through which it lives. We are ecological, sustained by microbes, weather, soil, water and other species. We are technological, shaped by tools, sensors, platforms and infrastructures. We are relational, constituted through the beings, systems and conditions we depend on.
Satellites and sensors shape what becomes visible, measurable and governable on a planetary scale. Forest ecologies emerge through relations among trees, roots, fungi, soils, water, animals and weather. Algorithms sort, rank and value human lives. None of these systems are neutral background. They actively participate in how worlds are made.
The shift, then, is from asking “What does the human do to the world?” to asking “Through what entanglements does a world come into being?”
- Human: The figure of the person traditionally imagined as rational, autonomous, bounded and separate from nature.
- Nonhuman: Beings, materials, systems or forces that are not human, including animals, plants, microbes, machines, infrastructures, algorithms, rivers, weather systems and more.
- Less-than-Human: People who are politically, culturally, economically or technologically devalued, excluded or denied full recognition as human.
- Other-than-Human: Beings and forces distinct from humans, recognised not as inferior or passive but as having their own modes of existence, relation and agency.
- Trans-human: The technologically enhanced human; extended through machines, biotechnology or computation, while remaining the central subject.
- More-than-Human: A perspective in which humans, nonhumans, technologies and environments are understood as entangled participants in the making of life, agency and worlds.
Agency is distributed
Donna Haraway helps us see that humans, animals and machines are not as separate as we often imagine. The boundaries between them are not simply given by nature; they are shaped by science, institutions, politics, histories and everyday practices. What we call “human” does not come from a fixed biological essence, but is made and remade through relations with other species, technologies, environments and systems.
Karen Barad takes this further by arguing that matter itself is not passive. Things do not simply exist on their own and then enter into relations; they take shape through those relations. Bodies, tools, materials, environments and infrastructures all play a role in how situations unfold. Agency, then, is not only about human intention or individual choice. It is distributed across the relations that make action possible.
This also changes how we understand responsibility. If technologies, institutions, materials and environments help shape what happens, then accountability cannot stop with one person or one decision. We also need to look at the systems that made those decisions possible: the datasets, sensors, design choices, funding models, rules and infrastructures involved. This does not mean that human responsibility disappears. It means we have to ask more precise questions: who had the power to decide, who or what was affected, and which consequences were ignored, displaced or made invisible?
In practice, the question “who made this?” is also a question of what was made alongside it, and what was damaged, excluded or erased. Humans build technologies and systems, but those systems also shape how we live, work, see and understand ourselves. Animals, plants, microbes and materials are not just background to human history; they actively shape landscapes, economies and ways of life. Nothing exists or acts alone. Life emerges through interdependence, co-creation and the relations that make worlds possible.
Thinking and making with
At Waag, a more-than-human perspective shapes how we research, design, and ask questions. Rather than approaching problems as external experts, we enter fields of relation: with communities, technologies, infrastructures, materials, environments and nonhuman actors already involved in the situation.
This perspective helps us challenge inherited ideas of control, progress and innovation. It also changes what counts as a good outcome. Instead of asking only whether something works for humans, we ask: what relations does it create? Who or what does it make more vulnerable? What does it silence, extract or damage? And what forms of care, reciprocity, resilience or shared life might it make possible?
