Hybrid event
Thursday 19 November 2026, 4-6pm (GMT)
Registration links to be added soon
Beinghood: More-than-Human Intelligence and Ancestral Futures
Fernanda Gerbara, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Exeter
in conversation with Jemma Foster, Founder and Director of Wild Alchemy Labs
What changes when we recognise plants, animals, rivers and forests as beings from whom we can learn? What responsibilities emerge when intelligence is understood through relationships that extend beyond the human?
Drawing on her forthcoming book, Chanting Spring: Indigenous Wisdom for Ancestral Futures, Fernanda Gebara introduces beinghood: a mode of existence grounded in relation, presence, agency and participation in a world of many beings. The concept invites reflection on how we recognise other forms of existence without making resemblance to humans the measure of their significance.
In this proposed conversation with Jemma Foster, plant intelligence becomes a starting point for considering the wider meanings of ancestral intelligence. Foster would contribute perspectives on plant intelligence and human–plant relationships, while Gebara would draw on two decades of work and learning with Indigenous peoples, particularly in the Amazon, to discuss cosmologies in which more-than-human beings are teachers, ancestors and participants in social life.
Here, ancestral intelligence encompasses both the intelligences of beings who precede and sustain us and the practices through which humans learn to listen and respond to them. In dialogue with Ailton Krenak’s notion of ancestral futures, the conversation asks how these relationships might guide our responses to ecological and social crises.
Bringing anthropology into conversation with plant intelligence and lived practices of attention, the event considers how recognising other beings as sources of knowledge could transform our understanding of responsibility, coexistence and the futures we make.