Volume-exclusion interactions play a crucial role in the collective behaviour and self-organisation of anisotropic particle systems, from liquid crystals to biological populations such as dense suspensions of myxobacteria and migrating cells. Even when particles have negligible volume, their mutual exclusion can generate a non-trivial effective volume in configuration space, strongly influencing macroscopic dynamics and the emergence of orientational order. In this talk, we first consider hard Brownian needles in two dimensions and use matched asymptotic expansions to derive a nonlinear kinetic equation for their density in position and orientation. We explore the resulting excluded-volume effects, including the emergence of an isotropic-to-nematic transition at increasing densities. We then extend the framework to finite-width rod-like particles, investigating how particle geometry and aspect ratio modify the effective interactions, and finally discuss active elongated particles, where steric interactions combine with self-propulsion to produce richer collective dynamics.