Maya Kóvskaya (PhD UC Berkeley, 2009) has twenty years of experience living and doing research in China, and nearly a decade in India. She recently relocated to Chiang Mai to expand the ambit of her research to include Southeast Asia. She has authored, co-authored, edited, translated, and contributed to numerous books and articles on the intersection of the political and ecological with the performative, the semiotic, in visual and popular culture. Her work takes the form of “onto-epistemological” investigations, and current research includes work on ecosemiosis and the Anthropocene, reading anthropogenic trophic cascades as indexical signs of relative multispecies un/sustainability, as well as political ecophilosophical research on “politics beyond the human and the multispecies polity.”
She draws critically on Anthropocene studies; post-colonial, indigeneity, and critical race studies; multispecies and critical life studies; western and Chinese political philosophy; Ordinary Language Philosophy; practice, performativity and speech act theory; linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistic pragmatics; Peircian semiotics; and new materialist, post-humanist philosophy of science to theorize performative and indexical forms of eco- and biosemiosis, and expand studies of political membership and entangled world-making beyond the human-centric. She recently conceptualized, curated and researched the Natchez Field Station as part of the year-long Mississippi. An Anthropocene River research program (2018-2019), organized by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, investigating the emergent etiologies of the Anthropocene in Natchez through linkages between human supremacism and white supremacism, ecocide and genocide, chattel slavery and the rise of the plantation model.
She is also writing a book, entitled Anthropocene Altermodern:Vernacular Visual Cultures and Ecological Remediations in Indian Art, exploring competing conceptions of the human in relation to the natural world, as well as resistance to the Anthropocene, understood as a necropolitical excrescence of extractive colonial modernity. Maya is founder of the Amor Mundi Guerrilla Think Tank, and ARC Platform (Anthropocene Research & Curatorial Platform), curating workshops, symposia, salons, exhibitions, and multidisciplinary field meetings, and bringing together philosophers, artists, scientists, writers, humanities and social science scholars, legal scholars, and activists to build new knowledges and practices to confront the unfolding ecological catastrophe of the Anthropocene. She is teaching at the Department of Social Science and Development Faculty of Social Sciences, Chiang Mai University
