MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | DOING NOTHING/NOTHING DOING | SPRING 2026

The Work that Nothing Does: A Call for Radical Doing and Undoing in Multispecies Worlds

How might we think about “doing nothing” as both a perpetuation of multispecies harms and an ethic for transforming these harms and imagining and practicing gentler and more caring multispecies futures of shared flourishing? The everyday relationships in which we’re entangled with other species are often so normalized, so taken for granted, that we can imagine we’re doing nothing at all to harm other species and the world around us. But even as we might think we’re doing nothing, we’re always doing something. Uncovering that “something” requires excavating the normative systems driven by a capitalist and colonial orientation to the world and our perpetuation of those systems in often-unnoticeable ways. It requires attending to what that nothing is that we’re doing. Calling for a political and ethical praxis of a different kind of doing nothing—in the sense of doing no harm, we pause, we stop, we observe, we cultivate attentiveness, we make attempts at understanding, we fail, we try again, we sit in a state of unknowing and think about this incomplete knowledge not as a way to justify violence through willful ignorance but as an orientation through the opposite—that doing nothing can mean that we err on the side of stopping what we’re actually doing as a path to respect for the radical alterity of their being, humbly recognizing our own limitations and our own lack of understanding? Can we sit, carefully, in a state of stillness and unknowing, in this state of doing nothing? And can we look at our current state of seemingly doing nothing as always doing something and that a different configuration of doing nothing, as in the form of attentiveness this kind of doing nothing invites, necessarily demands a transformative mode of living and being that leads to doing a very different something?

Doing Nothing/Nothing Doing
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