Vicki Kirby is Professor Emerita in the Social Sciences, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, and a Neubauer Fellow at the University of Chicago. The motivating question behind her research is the puzzle of the nature/culture, body/mind, body/technology division, because so many political and ethical decisions are configured in terms of this opposition. She is also interested in ‘the language question’ – what is language, and how does the way we answer that question define the human and inaugurate the political? Books include What if Culture was Nature All Along? (Edinburgh); Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Duke); Judith Butler: Live Theory (Bloomsbury) and Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (Routledge). She is a member of the Terra Critica international think-tank and currently holds a Peek Grant through the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna that will bring research in human cognition into conversation with plant sciences.