Interwoven Human and More-than-Human Worlds Methods and Practices of a Rhizomatic Turn

List of Figures
Around-With-In: A Rhizomatic Gestation
Preface
Acknowledgments

1. Labyrinth: Turning From...Turning With...Turning Toward...

2. A Narratological Turn

3. A Vegetal Turn

4. An Aesthetic Turn

5. A Pedagogical Turn

6. Turning Into...: Confusions, Chasms, And Chaos

Let Us Ask…
Epilogue: A Love Letter
Salmon, Microbes, and Human: Rhizomatic Precarity and Generosity
Index

Biography

Sayan Dey is an Assistant Professor and Department Chair (English Studies) at Bayan College (affiliated with Purdue University Northwest) in Oman. His latest works are Garbocracy: Towards a Great Human Collapse and Palates of Pleasure: Food, Memories and Culture. He was awarded the Nicolas Cristobal Guillen Batista Outstanding Book Award for Performing Memories and Weaving Archives in 2025 by the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

“Sayan Dey has written a beautifully provocative book that offers a geography from below to challenge imperial anthropomorphism, corporate greenwashing, and consumerism. He invites us to practice ontological humility, gentleness, and sensuousness, insisting on a rhizomatic, multispecies accountability that spans fractured ecologies. From the recentring of intergenerational accounts of monsters to the recognition of memories embedded in forests and the embodied, personal encounters with rivers, trees, and dreams, Dey realises a decolonial ethics and a vision for a more-than-human commons.”

Amber Murray, University of Oxford

 

 

“Strongly rooted in multispecies case studies from India and broader Indigenous communities in the Global South, Sayan Dey’s project offers an exemplary contribution to expanding the scope of global environmental humanities.”

Kiu-wai Chu, Nanyang Technological University

 

“Professor Dey’s monograph makes a bold contribution to reimagining eco-centric pedagogical and scholarly practices through shared narratological experiences of eco-entanglements that recenter nature at the nucleus of knowledge creation. Using a phenomenologically focused autoethnographic approach, Professor Dey critically analyzes the extended material impact of human centrism while embracing planetary-centered principles rooted in indigenous knowledge systems as a guide for inspiring new ways of rhizomatically being and thinking with both human and more-than-human worlds.”

 

Chantal Noa Forbes, California Institute of Integral Studies

 

“In the search for pathways out of the global ecological collapse generated by currently dominant 'materialistic-capitalistic-industrial modes of living', moving towards rhizomatic forms of living and relating to the rest of nature is crucial. This book provides exciting visions of how this may be done.”

Ashish Kothari, co-editor, Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary

 

 

“The governing principle of the universe is harmony, balance, and natural rhythm. Cooperation with this inherent unity of the universe in all its manifestations ensures the mutual survival and flourishing of all life, above all, humans. Sayan Dey makes a compelling case for the healing of the broken relationships by marshalling the power of the rhizomatic turn into current development thinking.”

Thakur S Powdyel, former Minister of Education, Royal Government of Bhutan

 

 

“Using graphic examples, this remarkable book by Sayan Dey is an eloquent and impassioned call for an intertwined sensuous epistemology to replace the anthropocentric reduction, subjection, and exploitation of the more than human world. Its critique cuts deep into the hypocrisy of greenwashing by corporate greed and ideological politics. At a time when the geosphere and biosphere are increasingly in revolt against the centuries of abuse by modern humans, Dey draws powerful attention to the human suffocation of nature and invokes an eco-centric and rhizomatic displacement. Here, our body intuitions of deep relationality with the earth lead and order our cultural practices towards a new amity with the more than human and an urgent revisioning of civilization.”

Debashish Banerji, Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures, California Institute of Integral Studies

 

 

"Sayan Dey speaks to the present through learning from the past not only through the poetic philosophical insights of Rabindranath Tagore on humanity and nature on one hand and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s generative conceptualization of rhizomes on the other, but also, through the imaginative poetics of his argument, Sri Aurobindo, as he articulates catastrophic consequences of unbridled human material growth devoid of spiritual attunement, flourishing, and responsibility. Beautifully written with a sober sense of urgency, Interwoven Human and More-Than-Human Worlds is a must-read for scholars, students, and lay-readers committed to the project, despite these perilous times, of what Dey aptly calls “living futures.”

Lewis R. Gordon, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs at the University of Connecticut, and co-author, with Jane Anna Gordon, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age

 

 

"Interwoven Human and More-Than-Human Worlds provides a wide-ranging and original engagement with human–more-than-human relations, situating rhizomatic thinking as a generative framework for reconsidering ecological practices, cultural narratives, and environmental ethics."

Sophie Chao, University of Sydney