MULTIBEING RESEARCH HUB
Embodied multibeing and multibeing justice research through environmental philosophy, art, writing, activism, and law.
RESEARCH FOCUS
EMBODIMENT & VULNERABILITY
MULTIBEING
MULTIBEING JUSTICE
Intersecting material, social, and cultural embodiment creates uneven experiences of vulnerability across time. Recognizing these exposures draws on transdisciplinary methods combining cultural theory, STS, intersectional environmental feminisms, law, community and vernacular knowledges, and rigorous imagination.
Multitudinous genres of embodied being transition across time and location. The milieu of material, social, cultural, and spiritual kinships that co-constitute being and collective life worlds. As a conceptual approach, multibeing amplifies diverse voices, knowledge, and ontologies, including those of Indigenous and community groups.
Multibeing justice is understood as the foundation for ocean justice, as well as cognitive, ecological, representational, and distributive justice. Multibeing justice is anticolonial, antiracist, intersectional, and situated. It generates conceptual, ethical, and legal insights and responses to the impacts of extractivism on cultural and biodiverse relationships.
The condition of embodied multibeing amplifies exposure to vulnerability. It is an ontological foundation on which all justice modes can be reimagined.
RESEARCH ARCHIVE
Multibeing Drag Rift: Multispecies is a Drag, (Co-authored)
In Worlds Beyond Bios: The Life of Matter and the Matter of Life. Duke University Press.
Multibeing Ocean
Published in Swamphen: A Journal of Cultural Ecology, this core text redefines relational frameworks.
Imagining Justice with the Abyssal Ocean.
In Laws of the Sea: Interdisciplinary Currents. Routledge.
Solwara 1 and the Sessile Ones.
In Blue Legalities, Duke University Press
Taking Criticality to Sea: Symposium recording.
University of Sydney via Extracting the Ocean
Prologue: Towards a Common Heritage for Allkind
A Multibeing resource from TBA21 Academy
Resisting Genres of Worlds Unmaking Worlds
Introduction for Critical Ocean Literacy Toolkit for Educators, TBA21 Academy
An Abyssal Conversation. The Deep Currents Collective In Thinking the World from the Deep Ocean. (Co-authored)
Special Issue, Comparative Law Journal of the Pacific (CLJP).
Ocean Justice: Reckoning with Material Vulnerability
Published in Cultural Politics, this core resource rethinks justice through the lens of multibeing.
Multibeing Drag Rift: Multispecies is a Drag. (Co-authored)
Swamphen: A Journal of Cultural Ecology
Multibeing Not Multispecies - Podcast
A Multibeing resource from the Sydney Environment Institute
EXTERNAL WORK ENGAGING WITH THIS MULTIBEING FRAMEWORK
Baptista, J. A., Neto, P. F., Braverman, I., Steinberg, P., Palermo, G., Helmreich, S., Jue, M., & Childs, J. (2025). Technoscientific imaging and the territorialization of ocean depth. Environment and Planning. C, Politics and Space, 43(5), 805–827.
Chang, C.-H. D. (2026). Exploring Re-animalisation as an Approach to Multispecies Justice: Insights and Lessons from a Farmed Animal Sanctuary in Australia. The University of Sydney, Discipline of Sociology and Criminology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, School of Social and Political Sciences.
Chang, P., Kelley, D., & Ferrell, S. (2025, October 1). Explore Ecology and Extraction at a Performance and Screening of “S̶t̶r̶a̶y̶ D̶o̶g̶ Hydrophobia.” Unframed.
Chao, S. (2026). THINKING BEYOND BIOS IN AN AGE OF PLANETARY UNDOING. In Worlds Beyond Bios: The Life of Matter and the Matter of Life. Duke University Press.
Edwards, C. (2026). Remotely Rendered: Visual Imaginaries of the Twenty-First-Century Southern Ocean. Art History, 49(2), 280–304.
González-Duarte, C., & Méndez-Arreola, R. (2024). “Living in the time of the butterfly:” Engaging more-than-human temporalities to rethink biodiversity conservation. Journal of Political Ecology, 31(1).
Mae Hamilton, J., Neimanis, A., & Campo, E. (2025). An infrastructural politics for climate change adaptation, via weather: Interview by Enrico Campo with Jennifer Mae Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis. Journal of Classical Sociology,25(2), 206–221.
Neimanis, A. (with Hamilton, J. M. & Bloomsbury). (2026). How to weather together: Feminist practice for climate change (1st edition.). Bloomsbury Academic.
Price, C., & Chao, S. (2023). Multispecies, More-Than-Human, Non-Human, Other-Than-Human: Reimagining idioms of animacy in an age of planetary unmaking. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 10(2), 177–193.
Probyn, E. (2023). Aqua/geopolitical conjuncture and disjuncture: Invasion, resources, and mining the deep dark sea. Cultural Studies, 37(4), 696–717.
Quigley, K. (2026). A Grotesque and Inhuman World: Diving for Pearl Shell, Recasting the Coral Sea. Film Quarterly, 79(4), 15–23.
Scharenberg, A., & Armstrong, C. (2023). Ocean Justice: Rethinking Global Justice from the Sea. Soundings (London, England), 83(83), 8–20.
Webster, S. (2023). On matters of justice for species, beings and country. University of Sydney. Sydney Environment Institute.
CREATIVE RESEARCH / VISUAL INSIGHTS
All art work © Susan Reid
ABOUT
Dr Susan Reid is an environmental philosopher, artist, writer, lawyer and activist.
Susan conceived multibeing in 2018 through doctorate research examining pathways for ocean justice. The concept was originally informed by the ocean's diverse expressions of embodied and relational being across different provinces and temporalities. Research revealed how these constituent expressions of being are implicated or refused within the extractive, colonial imaginaries of ocean law and marine sciences. Multibeing highlights how dominating ocean governance approaches elide diverse ways of knowing and practicing relationships of kinship and care, including those exemplified within Indigenous and coastal community epistemologies. Since then, multibeing has developed as an analytical tool and methodology for exploring how diverse cultural imaginaries influence embodied being across watery, earthy, icy, rocky and airy realms.
Multibeing Justice is a way of analysing particular constellations of being and the worlds that they make possible or foreclose. It has particular implications for justice in the context of extractivism and colonialism and their influence on transitioning lifeworlds.