Research Project

Autonomy Is Not Freedom

Project Team:

2025 – 2026

Digitally enhanced image of a path through a forest — Photo illustration courtesy of Autonomy Is Not Freedom, with photos from Gulf South Open School, Hase’, and Untidy Objects.

Key Question

Can collective art- and land-based practices offer effective new models for rights discourse in environmental politics?

Project Summary

Three interdisciplinary groups—Awi’nakola, Gulf South Open School, and Untidy Objects—come together to share land-based research and speculative art developed in response to their distinct North American contexts. How can such approaches offer new models for rights discourse in environmental politics based on interconnection rather than autonomy? Powerful recent efforts to protect lands and waters have involved the extension of legal rights, obligations, and protections under law to those other than human beings, using liberal and neoliberal legal frameworks where the political subject is specifically autonomous. Yet such conceptual separation—whether of people from land, or species from one another—runs counter to the three groups’ perspectives, methodologies, and political propositions. The researchers collectively argue that drawing boundaries between things through the language of rights, and offering similar autonomy to non-human beings, can only be a short-term measure and not a sustaining political practice. The three groups will learn from each other’s distinct practices and contexts, and consider how interdisciplinary art- and land-based research might help reshape rights discourse in environmental politics. This temporary, geographically dispersed “collective of collectives” will test methods to co-learn across distance; share strategies to protect lands, waters, and beings based on interconnection rather than autonomy; explore art’s potential and limitations within this larger work; and write a synthesis of their methodologies and beliefs to support the socio-political transformations needed to address climate catastrophe. This collaboration builds on the Neubauer Collegium’s collaboration with Awi’nakola on a 2023 program and on a 2023–2025 Collegium seed grant supporting Untidy Objects’ creation of a living sculpture and its ongoing co-constitution and annotation with other human and non-human entities; and it welcomes the Gulf South Open School as a new partner.