Ruud van Els is a doctoral reseacher focussing on the zoopolitical history behind the anthropocentric structuring of our everyday lifeworld. The purported turning point in this history, towards which his argument converges, is what he calls 'the funerary revolution': a newly proposed axial period in which the distinction and struggle between humans and other animals acquired a spatio-material engraving that privileges the human. From there, then, the gravestone marks the first stone of this anthropocentric structering: its cornerstone. 

His research is part of the ARC Discovery Project 'Living Together: New Approaches to Multispecies Conflict and Coexistence'.