More than Human Dictionary

Dictionary of planetary more-than-human participation, a concept note.

Concept

The more-than-human agenda spans multiple disciplines, epistemologies, ontologies, and practices. However, these different approaches employ distinct terminologies that obstruct cross-disciplinary dialogue. This challenge intensifies when collaborations involve nonhuman entities that lack language in the conventional sense.

Therefore, we propose a dictionary that translates concepts, terms, practices, and perceptions across domains and beings to unite planetary communities. This project follows the principle of "nothing about us without us", ensuring that governance, design, and knowledge systems acknowledge and incorporate nonhuman perspectives and agencies.

Model

We draw on historical dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary, which traces the evolution of words and their meanings over time. Our dictionary extends this approach to document histories, meanings, and usages across human disciplines whilst also accounting for nonhuman ways of knowing and being.

Each entry provides:

Multiple meanings across contexts.
Etymologies and conceptual histories.
Examples of usage in different domains.
Cross-references to related concepts.
Critical questions about power and representation.

Format

Entries follow an alphabetical organisation. An online platform would enable searching, sorting, cross-referencing, and dynamic updating. The dictionary acknowledges that meanings evolve and that different communities use terms in distinct ways.

Sample Entry: Agency

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈeɪdʒənsi/

Etymology of the English word: From Latin agere ("to do, to act") → Medieval Latin agentia ("capacity to act") → English agency ("action, intervention, capacity to act").1

Evolutionary history of the phenomenon: In physical systems, some argue that rudimentary forms of agency emerged with the capacity of matter to respond to environmental conditions and self-organise, from chemical autocatalysis to thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium. In living systems, agency evolved through natural selection as organisms developed sensors, memory, and decision-making structures that enabled adaptive responses to environmental challenges. Simple prokaryotes exhibit basic sensorimotor coupling; multicellular organisms evolved nervous systems and collective behaviours; social species developed cultural transmission and distributed cognition. Agency thus represents a continuum from physical causation through biological autonomy to reflective consciousness, rather than a binary distinction between passive matter and intentional actors.

Core idea (cross-domain): The capacity to make a difference in a situation through intention, behaviour, presence, constraint, or influence. The concept applies to humans, nonhumans, collectives, and systems.

Meanings and uses (more-than-human/cross-disciplinary):2

Human-centred (common usage): The ability of a person to choose, decide, and act intentionally, often linked to autonomy, responsibility, and rights.

Example: "The policy aims to increase community agency over local resources."

Social-scientific (relational/structural): Agency as something enabled or constrained by social structures such as institutions, norms, and infrastructures, rather than purely individual will.

Example: "Agency here is shaped by housing law, credit systems, and kin networks."

More-than-human/posthuman (distributed): Agency as emerging from assemblages of humans, nonhumans, tools, environments, and histories. No single actor possesses it alone.

Example: "The flood's agency was not intentional, but it reorganised land use, governance, and species movement."

Ecological/biological (organismal): The ways organisms modify conditions for themselves and others through niche construction, signalling, symbiosis, and other processes.

Example: "Beavers exercise agency by building dams that reshape habitats for many species."

Material/technical (affordance/infrastructure): Objects and systems shape action by enabling, limiting, and nudging behaviour without implying consciousness.

Example: "The platform's defaults have agency in steering how people share information."

Spiritual/Indigenous (personhood/kinship frames): Some traditions attribute agency to landforms, waters, ancestors, and other-than-human beings as persons or relations rather than resources.

Example: "The river is treated as a living relation with agency and obligations attached to it."

Notes on translation across domains:

Intentionality is not required in many more-than-human uses. "Agency" can mean effect or world-making capacity rather than conscious choice.
Specify which sense you employ: moral agency (responsibility), causal agency (making a difference), political agency (collective power), or distributed agency (assemblages).

Related terms (cross-references):

Actor, assemblage, affordance, autonomy, causality, responsibility, relationality, subjectivity, worlding.

Critical questions:

Who or what is granted agency, and who or what is denied it?
Is agency framed as individual or distributed?
Is agency tied to rights and responsibility, or to influence and effects?
What kinds of evidence count for agency in this context: speech, action, impact, relation, story, measurement?
What power relations are produced by this attribution?

Purpose

This dictionary serves scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and communities working towards more-than-human design, management, and governance. It promotes cross-disciplinary collaboration whilst challenging anthropocentric assumptions embedded in language. Moreover, it provides a framework for recognising nonhuman contributions to knowledge and decision-making systems.

Next Steps

Develop additional sample entries for key terms such as intelligence, collaboration, stakeholder, rights, representation, place, justice, care, and flourishing.
Consult with experts from various disciplines and Indigenous knowledge holders to ensure rich evidence base, examples, accuracy and inclusivity.
Establish editorial principles that acknowledge and implement multiple ontologies/epistemologies.
Obtain funding for platform development, maintenance, and community engagement.
Pitch to potential partners and publishers.
Create an online platform that enables community contributions and ongoing revisions.

Footnotes

Other human languages or machine languages/approaches can be listed here. For example, the misalignment between human natural languages can be very telling. Concepts such as agents in computational multi-agent systems will also be relevant.˄
These can be expanded to provide references to disciplines and the usage within them. We can commission experts to highlight challenges and opportunities or provide examples.˄