Touching dark: matterings of more-than-human worlds

Abstract

Touching Dark is a hybrid research project that examines how darkness shapes both human and more-than-human worlds. Rather than treating dark as the opposite of light or as a metaphor for fear or ignorance, this project asks what the dark does – how it moves across species, terrains, and times, and how it might sustain or challenge the ways we think and live. It surveys three overlapping dimensions of the dark: the ecological, the epistemological, and the affective. From these vantage points it hopes to show how the dark is generative, relational, and enmeshed with the multiple more-than-human ontologies that flourish with it.

Set decidedly in the Australian context – with its unique ecologies, longstanding care by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and histories of colonial disruption – the project foregrounds the shrinking availability of dark refuges as urban environments, agriculture, and extractive industries continue to expand. It follows darkness from the reaches of outer space down into the geological folds of deep time and attends to the nocturnal creatures and underground organisms inhabiting our cities, forests, deserts, and post-fire terrains. It draws together disparate encounters across fields and species and, through the idea of hybrid imaginaries as a mode of translation, it invites renewed attention to the unseen, the cryptic, and the emergent.

Finally, Touching Dark asks how we can come to care about things we don’t see. Therefore, unfolding across the project are a series of interrelated impressions and provocations that inform a nycto-logics as a set of practices and ethical approaches for co-flourishing with more-than-human worlds. Together these attentions bring us closer to sensing the dark, and to understanding its arrangements and co-constitutive connections of which we are a part.

Date of Thesis submission	2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Western Sydney University
Sponsors	Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship
Supervisor	Chris Fleming (Supervisor) & Anna Gibbs (Supervisor)