Expresses the liveliness, sentience, and agency of things, a concept engaged by scholars who seek to question and complicate the perceptions of what is considered “living” or “alive.” By re-orienting away from humanity as the baseline for liveliness, Indigenous and queer of colour scholars put forth an expanded, other-than-human framework of animacy (see Humanism. In Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, scholar Mel Y. Chen problematizes this “animacy hierarchy,” calling for a reappropriation of language to restructure our criteria for liveness, and to reanimate our conception of that which is living. Language can therefore be taken up in more generative and transformative ways, challenging the terms by which we recognize other-than-human lifeforms (see for example Other Life-Formings, The Cage is a Stage, Those at the Great River Mouth, The Figure in the Carpet).