Short Abstract

This workshop explores emerging multispecies collectives in restoration landscapes. As nonhumans move into landscapes shared with people through ecological restoration, we examine how human and nonhuman trajectories meet and reconfigure local practices, affects, and politics of collective life.

Long Abstract

As wolves return to European pastoral landscapes and even cities, elephant populations rise in Southern African conservation areas, and South American forests are being restored with the help of reintroduced seed-dispersing camelids, diverse people worldwide are reconfiguring their lives alongside nonhuman species. Ecosystem transformations bring new people (such as conservationists or tourists), while others (such as farmers or livestock keepers) adapt or leave. Ecological restoration projects envision new forms of coexistence, making humans and nonhumans neighbors in shared landscapes.

This workshop interrogates the multispecies collectives emerging in restoration landscapes. First, it examines what constitutes collective life with nonhumans: what are the visions, affects, practices and rules of collective living that are emerging, contested and negotiated with nonhumans in restoration landscapes? Second, it explores the roles of nonhumans in reconfiguring collective living: how do animals and plants transform the lives of local people when they arrive in the landscape? How do they shape the political and affective negotiations about what the landscape should look like and how people and nonhumans should live within it? Third, it investigates emerging forms of political governance: how are nonhuman needs, perspectives and choices considered in the political decisions made locally by people? Which humans and nonhumans are considered part of the collectivity, according to which explicit or implicit criteria, and by whom?

We welcome ethnographic contributions from diverse settings worldwide, including rural, urban, Indigenous, and non-Indigenous communities.