Agata Kowalewska

Agata Kowalewska is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw and a visual artist. Her research and art address the relationships between the human and the nonhuman, and the politics and ontologies of this division—the feral, entangled, and troublesome natures, often looking to art and aesthetic experience as a mode of enquiry and knowledge creation. Her doctoral project examines the current changes in the status of the human-nature relationship in Poland through the prism of Polish visual arts from the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In 2015/16, during a year-long stay at Goldsmiths, she conducted a research project “Tomorrow in a Year: The Politics of Ips Typographus in the Białowieża Forest,” a fieldwork-based study that explored the conflict over the protection of one of the last primeval forests of Europe, looking at the roles played in it by masculinist and xenophobic narratives, the Catholic Church, aesthetics, and conservatism in nature conservation. Agata published papers on feral and urban nonhumans, nature conservation after the end of Nature, and body technicization. A recipient of artistic and research grants, she completed several projects that bridge art and academic inquiry, including on Svalbard and the Latvian coast; she has also been involved in collaborative initiatives, including the “New Alphabet School” at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the “Ship of Opportunity” project. Agata’s research interests include nonhuman entanglements, environmental activism, othering, feminist studies, and diverse forms of knowledge creation.

Publications

• [forthcoming] Kowalewska, A. (2020). We set fire to the sea. Toxic glowing algal blooms in the Baltic. In A. Tsing, J. Deger, A. Saxena, & F. Zhou (Eds.), Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• [in print] Kowalewska, A. (2019). Feral urban wild boars. Managing spaces of conflict with care and attention. Przegląd Kulturoznawczy, 42(4).
• Kowalewska, A. (2019). Nonequilibrium landscapes and nature conservation in the Białowieża Forest. Polish Journal of Landscape Studies, 2(4-5), 107–114.
• Kowalewska, A. (2016). Symbionts and parasites – digital ecosystems. In Ł. Jonak, N. Juchniewicz, & R. Włoch (Eds.), Digital Ecosystems. Society in the Digital Age (pp. 71–82). Warsaw: DELab UW.
• Kowalewska, A. (2016). Maurice Merleau-Ponty i Don Ihde wobec ucieleśnionej relacji z technologią (M. Merleau Ponty and D. Ihde on the embodied relations with technology). Sensus Historiae, 22(1), 43–52.