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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores "multispecies mourning" as an act of resistance and remembrance among Indigenous Marind inhabiting the West Papuan oil palm frontier.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing from long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Indonesian-controlled region of West Papua, this paper explores the cultural and political significance of mourning among Indigenous Marind communities whose intimate and ancestral relations to native plants, animals, and ecosystems are increasingly threatened by mass deforestation and monocrop oil palm expansion. Cross-pollinating environmental humanities scholarship with Indigenous multispecies philosophies, I examine three emergent practices of “multispecies mourning” on the Papuan oil palm frontier – the weaving of sago bags as a form of trauma therapy, the creation of songs prompted by encounters with roadkill, and the transplanting of bamboo shoots as part of customary land demarcation and reclaiming activities. Multispecies mourning offers potent avenues for Marind to collectively memorialize the radical loss of lives and relations prompted by capitalist landscape transformations. At the same time, multispecies mournings constitute forms of active resistance and creative refusal in the face of extractive capitalism’s ecocidal logic. Bringing together plants, people, and places, their distributed sentience and materiality offers hopeful pathways for multispecies solidarities, in and against the rubble of agro-industrialism and its necropolitical undergirdings.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the politics of wildlife gardeners creating habitat for native bees and pollinators, and the care-full approaches that challenge urban-nature binaries and contemporary extinction narratives.

Paper long abstract:

There has been extensive coverage around bee declines, and the knock-on impacts this has on biodiversity globally. Climate change, industrial agriculture and diseases have all impacted bees at different scales around the world, and the impacts on agricultural and ecological systems that would result in their loss dominate much of the discourse.

In response to these threats, communities around the world have responded by reimagining private and public green spaces to be more inclusive – creating habitats for native pollinators to thrive. From petitions banning pesticides to converting nature strips to ‘pollinator pathways’, residents have been reshaping neighbourhoods in careful and creative ways. However, these initiatives have also faced challenges through political structures and power hierarchies that oppose individual and collective actions for multispecies justice.

My paper addresses the politics of wildlife gardening, and the care-full approaches that are required to allow multispecies communities to thrive. Drawing from empirical research, I explore how creating spaces for bees is a care-full political action that resists dominate narratives around extinction and loss in the Anthropocene.

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Paper short abstract:

Through my Ph.D. research, I aim to understand how sustainability is tied to human-animal and environmental health. To do so, I aim to study a Sardinian cheese called “su casu marzu” (“the rotten cheese”) as a product of a multispecies alliance between men, sheep, microbes, and Piophila Casei flies.

Paper long abstract:

What does “sustainable food” mean? And how is it tied to human-animal health? To answer these questions, I set to reflect on how ethical and instrumental practices are embodied in multispecies assemblages, both through intensive and extensive breeding methods. Sardinia represents an excellent case study due to the continuous translational processes between capitalist and local practices for animal breeding and food production. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I aim to apply Haraway’s symbiogenesis to the relations that bind together the different species gravitating around cheesemaking in Sardinia. In particular, I will investigate a Sardinian traditional cheese called su casu marzu (“the rotten cheese”), produced through an alliance between men, sheep, microbes, and the maggots of Piophila Casei flies. This cheese embodies a set of nutritional, reproduction, and caring practices of different species: its supposed sustainability is impossible to separate from its embeddedness in multispecies life and death processes. Multispecies assemblages express these trajectories through their interactions with ecosystems and often materialize them in the form of food products. Anna Tsing’s matsutake mushroom is an example of such co-dependency: its life is dependent upon sociopolitical as well as environmental forces, among which human disturbance is but one of the factors. Through such understanding, I intend to contribute to the reflection about human-animal health, highlighting how one-health approaches cannot ignore local multispecies configurations. Specifically, I am to observe the links between different practices of human-animal health and food sustainability.

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Paper short abstract:

Amidst local opposition and their own misgivings, animal rights activists in Kerala had no option but to feed starving animals during the pandemic. This paper charts the moral dilemmas and debates that they had to settle to ask how care can be defined when it cannot be easily logically defended.

Paper long abstract:

In Kerala, street dogs began to starve as the pandemic hit the state, as early as January 2020. Restaurants and grocery shops completely closed down, and the garbage dumps that were the regular food haunts of street dogs began to slim down. Attentive to these changing landscapes for the street dogs, local animal rights activists began to routinely feed them with the assistance of recruits they called “feeders”- animal lovers who were available only to feed the dogs and who by their own admission, could not do much more for the animals. This paper charts ethnographically the moral dilemmas the local activists had to settle to feed these dogs. Many of them believed that feeding them by routine every day at designated spots with palatable food would make them dependent on humans for food, and curtail their foraging prowess. Further, Kerala has a hostile history with street dogs seeing them as rabid beasts who are unpredictable and unruly. The activists had to constantly negotiate their positions in the local communities and not make themselves out to be too “extreme” or too “radical”. At the same time, they were bound by the question of care as an inescapable moral question that was closely connected to avoiding death. Here, care did not carry logical consistency of action, but a moral acuity that was foremostly concerned with ensuring the street dogs’ survival. How can we understand this concerted effort of “care” in terms of providing food for the starving dogs?

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Paper short abstract:

My paper engages two core questions, namely: (a) What is the idiom and affective relations through which the indigenous Naga people, in the Eastern Himalaya, relate to crops? (b) How do they experience and cope with profound environmental changes?

Paper long abstract:

With the unfolding of state and capitalist investments in infrastructure (Bhattacharya 2019; Wouters 2020), and sensitive geopolitics—amid world-historical processes of climate change—the greater Himalayan region is identified as an ecosystem at particular risk where species, human included, are experiencing profound environmental changes (Pandit 2017). Moreover, within the greater Himalayan region (or what I call the Himalayan adjacent), following a series of ceasefire and peace agreements between state and insurgent entities, the highlands of Northeast India have, in recent years, been configured as a new resource frontier, as well as a capitalist corridor between South and Southeast Asia. These are expected to drastically impact ecosystems, cultural identities, and people-land relations at an unprecedented scale (Loong 2019). Using the multispecies approach, and employing relational ontology frameworks, in particular, the 'plant turn' (Sheridan 2016; Chao 2018), my paper thus engages two core questions, namely: (a) What is the idiom and affective relations through which the indigenous Naga people, in the Eastern Himalaya, relate to crops? (b) How do they (the Naga people and the indigenous crops they co-evolved and co-exist with) experience and cope with profound environmental changes? Furthermore, using the framework of 'shared vulnerability,' developed in the emergent field of multispecies justice (Celermajer et al. 2020), I examine the changing multispecies relations of the Naga people and their co-existent species (namely the indigenous crops) that have lived with them for centuries.