Dufourcq’s research focuses on the relation between imagination and reality with a particular attention to animal imagination. She has for several years explored how humans imagine animals, the imaginative capacities of animals, and the interrelation between the two.
‘Human and animal imaginations share more similarities than traditional philosophical anthropology acknowledges,’ Dufourcq explains. As contemporary research increasingly reveals the imaginative capacities of non-human animals, Dufourcq examines how concepts of consciousness, imagination, and subjectivity need to be fundamentally redefined within the context of human-animal relationships’’.
Dufourcq’s project aims to foster more ethical relationships between human and non-human animals, and to promote ecologically responsible narratives, attitudes, and practices among humans. Ultimately, Dufourcq states “Best knowledge practices begin with imagining what it is like to be a non-human animal””
About Annabelle Dufourcq
Dufourcq (1976, Clermont-Ferrand) received her PhD (summa cum laude) from the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, for research on the relation between imagination and reality in the philosophies of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Earlier, she obtained a French Agrégation and studied philosophy at University Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand.
After her doctorate, she held positions at Charles University, the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague and was courtesy associate professor in the philosophy department of the University of Oregon. Joining Radboud University in 2015 as an assistant professor of metaphysics, she is now head of the Department of Metaphysics and Philosophical Anthropology and director of the Center for Continental European Philosophy.
In 2022, she received the Radboud Science Award with which she developed a lesson for elementary school students, about her research on fantasy in animals. Furthermore, she is Socrates Professor by special appointment in Humanistic Philosophy, on the relationship between humans and nature, at Wageningen University.