Arwen Meereboer

Arwen Meereboer is a doctoral candidate at Åbo Akademi in philosophy. Her work focuses on exploration of a new materialist and post-human ethics through children’s literature. Her work, through engaging deeply with children’s literature and taking it seriously, hopes to engage the ways literature, and children’s literature in particular, is capable of getting access to the more emotional and irrational ways we as humans are in relationship to the world around us. In her thesis Meereboer will be focusing on the Moomin book series by Tove Jansson, and the Pettson and Findus series by Sven Nordqvist. This focus was chosen because both Jansson and Nordqvist show a deep love and attention to detail for their specific surroundings. Their works are very localised, and bound to their environments, Jansson’s to the Finnish archipelago and Nordqvist to the southern Swedish countryside. Due to this love and attention both Jansson and Nordqvist show forth the more-than-human-world in their work and their work becomes a valuable philosophical resource for the exploration of a post-human ethics. This deep attention means it is also a valuable resource for the formulation of a post-human ethics.