Introduction to "Thinking with More-Than-Human Subsurfaces"

As part of an interdisciplinary research team called “Thinking Deep,” which looks at “novel creative approaches to the subsurface” (Royal Holloway, University of London, n.d.), we registered a growing interest in the more-than-human subsurface across art, geography and beyond. As such, we put together a call for papers for the 2023 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, inviting papers that give thought to the environments below our feet—environments which have been “decentred from our imagination” (Hawkins, 2020, p. 4). In response, we received a wide range of interdisciplinary presentations that were willing to think-with cave-, marine- and soil-dwelling creatures; microbial networks and other elements of the subsurface. We ran two sessions and heard from academics and artists whose research centres the theme of the more-than-human within the subsurface, and who explore the ways in which our disciplines can best engage with these underground beings, habitats, and imaginaries. [...]