Extinction Studies Working Group

This page includes text from the website of the Extinction Studies Working Group which was taken down in September 2025. The group was formed by Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew in 2011 and was active for roughly a decade. Many of the members continue to work in this area and to collaborate on a variety of projects, but the larger group structure is no longer in use.

About Us

We are a group of humanities scholars dedicated to the future of life in this time of extinctions. Our historical moment is one of unprecedented loss of planetary forms of life. Our research and writing is situated in a lively practice that emerges from our entanglement in these processes of loss.

Four main themes inform our work: time, death, generations and extinction. Time carries the emerging richness of intergenerational life on earth. Death is the necessary counterpart to life enabling and nourishing new generations, which constitute ongoing patterns of embodied inheritance. In its current manifestation, extinction is the violent termination of these gifts of time, death and generations.

Our vision for extinction studies is to engage with the profound implications of this cascade of loss.

Members

Michelle Bastian, University of Edinburgh
Matthew Chrulew, Curtin University
Rick De Vos, Curtin University
Donna Haraway, University of California Santa Cruz
James Hatley, Salisbury University
Eben Kirksey, Deakin University (now University of Oxford)
Jacob Metcalf, University of California Santa Cruz
Deborah Bird Rose, University of New South Wales
Mick Smith, Queen’s University
Thom van Dooren, University of Sydney
Jeffrey Bussolini, City University of New York
Hugo Reinert, University of Oslo

Key Collaborative Publications

Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death and Generations
Columbia University Press: New York (2017)
Edited by Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew
More information at the publisher’s website.

  • “Foreword” Cary Wolfe
  • “Telling Extinction Stories: An Introduction” Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew
  • “Walking with Ōkami, the Large-Mouthed Pure God” James Hatley
  • “Saving the Golden Lion Tamarin” Matthew Chrulew
  • “Extinction in a Distant Land: The Question of Elliot’s Bird of Paradise” Rick De Vos
  • “Monk Seals at the Edge: Blessings in a Time of Peril” Deborah Bird Rose
  • “Encountering Leatherbacks in Multispecies Knots of Time” Michelle Bastian
  • “Spectral Crows in Hawai’i: Conservation and the Work of Inheritance” Thom van Dooren
  • “It is an entire world that has disappeared” Vinciane Despret

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Unloved Others: Death of the Disregarded in the Time of Extinctions
Special issue of Australian Humanities Review, 50 (2011)
Edited by Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren

  • “Introduction” Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren
  • “Arts of Inclusion, or, How to Love a Mushroom” Anna Tsing, for the Matsutake Worlds Research Group
  • “Dis(appearance): Earth, Ethics and Apparently (In)Significant Others” Mick Smith
  • “Vultures and their People in India: Equity and Entanglement in a Time of Extinctions” Thom van Dooren
  • “Blood Intimacies and Biodicy: Keeping Faith with Ticks” James Hatley
  • “Getting a Taste for the Bogong Moth” Kate Rigby
  • “Speculative Fabulations for Technoculture’s Generations: Taking Care of Unexpected Country” Donna Haraway
  • “Flying Fox: Kin, Keystone, Kontaminant” Deborah Bird Rose
  • “Managing Love and Death at the Zoo: The Biopolitics of Endangered Species Preservation” Matthew Chrulew
  • “Planet Beehive” Freya Mathews