Didier Zuniga
Pronouns: he/him
Personal Website: https://didierzuniga.com
Contact
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Arts - Political Science Dept
- didier@ualberta.ca
Overview
Area of Study / Keywords
Nature Feminist theories Posthumanism New Materialisms Decolonial & anticolonial political thought Aztec (Mexica) and Nahua political thought Mesoamerican metaphysics
About
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. I was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre de Recherche en Éthique in Montreal (2022-2023), and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University (2020-2022). I received my PhD in Political Theory from the University of Victoria, British Columbia (2020). I was born and raised in Mexico City.
Research
My research and teaching program is organized around the theme of ‘politics beyond the human’. Broadly conceived, my work seeks to expand the realm of the political beyond both anthropocentrism and humanism. It does so by learning from and engaging with alternative ways of relating to the multiplicity of beings, ecosystems, and interconnected webs of life on Earth. My main goal is to extend ethics and politics beyond dominant understandings of ‘the human’, and thus to deparochialize and to ecologize political thought.
I am currently working on rethinking how to conceive of thought and knowledge beyond the conventionally understood human-animal mind. In this work, I focus particularly on Aztec (Mexica), Nahua, and more broadly Mesoamerican metaphysics and aesthetics.
Please visit my website for a list of publications.
Teaching
I am keenly interested in supervising honours and graduate students in political theory, particularly those with a passion for exploring environmental and ecological political thought, as well as ethics and politics beyond 'the human'. I welcome students who draw on critical approaches, especially feminist theories, decolonial, postcolonial, and anti-colonial thought, comparative political theory, disability studies, and critical animal studies.
Courses
POL S 298 - Topics in Political Science
A variable content course, which may be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: POL S 101 or Department consent.
POL S 305 - Contemporary Political Theory
Focuses on struggles over citizenship, the self, and social justice through the work of theorists like Arendt, Beauvoir, Freud, Fanon, Foucault, Rawls, and Tully. Prerequisite: POL S 210 or 211 or 212 or consent of Department.
Featured Publications
Didier Zúñiga
European Journal of Political Theory. 2025 April; 10.1177/14748851231214252
Theory & Event. 2025 January; 28 (1):120-144 10.1353/tae.2025.a947376
Didier Zúñiga
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. 2023 June; 10.1080/13698230.2020.1772605
University of Toronto Press. 2023 January;
Contemporary Political Theory. 2022 June; 21 (2): 198 - 218 10.1057/s41296-021-00514-9
Constellations. 2021 January; 10.1111/1467-8675.12499
Didier Zúñiga
Hypatia. 2020 April; 10.1017/hyp.2020.7
View additional publications