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- Convenors:
-
Maarja Kaaristo
(Tallinn University Manchester Metropolitan University)
Greca N. Meloni (University of Vienna)
Lucya Passiatore (Tallinn University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores methodological and epistemological challenges in human-environment research within the fractured disciplinary fields and political polarisation. We welcome discussions of multi- or interdisciplinary, activist and co-creative approaches to research in contested study contexts.
Long Abstract
In a world of what has been termed a “permacrisis” or “polycrisis”, anthropologists studying human-environment relations are confronted not only with political polarisation, increasing global inequalities, and climate denialism, but also with increasingly fractured fields of study and methodological and ethical tensions. The “field” is marked by contested knowledges and conflicting values; the narratives of “hard” and “soft” sciences remain ontologically, epistemologically, and methodologically divided. This panel invites critical reflection on how anthropologists (and researchers from related fields) navigate these increasingly fragmented terrains. We ask: what kinds of anthropologies become possible when we take seriously the entangled realities of human and more-than-human worlds in the context of the polarising logics that threaten them? What forms of fieldwork and knowledge (co)creation practices emerge when researchers are situated between different discourses (academic, scientific, bureaucratic, activist, etc.) that sometimes are in tension? What new tools and forms of mediation, translation, and co-production of knowledge become possible in these interstitial spaces of human-environment research? We welcome papers that explicitly address the methodological challenges of studying human-environment relations in polarised and (politically) charged contexts. We are particularly interested in ethnographic work that engages in multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary collaborations, activist scholarship or creative data co-creation methods to tackle the pressing issues, including but not limited to climate crisis, resource conflicts, and environmental justice.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper examines digital environmental activism in Ecuador during the 2025 constitutional referendum. Using hashtag network analysis, it reflects on digital fieldwork, political polarization, and more-than-human claims within contested human–environment relations online in Ecuador
Paper long abstract
In November 2025, amid escalating sociopolitical polarization, Ecuador held a national referendum whose constitutional dimension threatened to unsettle long-standing protections for nature. In this contentious setting, environmental organizations, Indigenous collectives, and independent activists mobilized both on the streets and online to resist extractivist expansion and defend more than human worlds. This paper examines the methodological and ethical challenges of conducting digital fieldwork in such fractured terrains, rethinking research possibilities at the intersection of human–environment relationships under polarization.
This paper examines the forms of digital activism developed by these actors through the analysis of social media activity. By mapping and analyzing a network of hashtags, the study demonstrates how digital fieldwork can be conducted to capture activist dynamics and discursive strategies online. The research adopts a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative and quantitative analysis to explore both the structure of digital networks and the narratives circulating within them, as well as different modes of visualizing the results.
This research is framed within the FUTURNAT project, which investigates cultural imaginaries of the relationship between humanity and nature in media, activism, and environmental communication. The project aims to identify emerging narratives that promote cultural change toward sustainable futures, with an interdisciplinary perspective and a strong focus on sociocultural diversity in the Ibero-American region and North–South global dialogue.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines an experimental, activist-led ethnographic methodology in human–environment research. Based on collaborative fieldwork in conflicted Carpathians in Poland, it explores positionality, knowledge co-production, and mediation across fractured epistemic fields.
Paper long abstract
This paper discusses an experimental methodological approach to researching human–environment relations grounded in engaged and collaborative anthropology. The project was co-designed with the Wild Carpathians Initiative and examines environmental conflicts in the Carpathian region through activist-led ethnographic fieldwork.
The study responds to the challenges of conducting research in the field characterised by contested knowledges, unequal power relations, and tensions between scientific, activist, and local perspectives. Methodologically, it explored a decentralised research design in which environmental activists were trained in ethnographic methods during an intensive two-day workshop and subsequently conducted fieldwork themselves. Their research focused both on local community attitudes toward environmental protection and on reflexive accounts of their own positionality as openly identified activists in the field.
This approach raises key methodological and ethical questions relevant to human–environment research in polarised settings: How does activist positionality shape access, trust, and the production of ethnographic knowledge? What forms of data emerge when researchers operate simultaneously within advocacy-oriented and analytical frameworks? How can reflexivity be collectively negotiated rather than individually managed?
The paper reflects on the frictions, ambiguities, and tensions generated by this research design. It argues that activist-led ethnography can function as a form of methodological mediation across divided epistemic domains, enabling the co-production of knowledge that would be difficult to access through conventional academic fieldwork.
By critically assessing this collaborative methodology, the paper contributes to broader debates on interdisciplinary, participative, and ethically situated research practices in contemporary human–environment anthropology.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how anthropological research can contribute to co-create innovative modes of thinking and acting when encounters of different knowledges take place. This provides the opportunity to adequately address challenges of communities to adverse effects of climate change in Oceania.
Paper long abstract
Island communities across Oceania face multiple adverse impacts from the global climate crisis and thus become a focus of attention for adaptation measures, typically implemented by international NGOs, and aiming to address these challenges in areas such as crop cultivation. These interventions predominantly employ concepts grounded in natural science and solutions based on unilinear thinking. Project implementations thus become sites where encounters of divergent concepts, knowledges, and practices take place. Community members’ concepts, for instance of climate change, and practices dealing with challenges often differ epistemologically and ontologically from those used in adaptation projects: they may be based on holistic frameworks that resist categorical distinctions of environment and human life or nature and culture.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Oceania and participation in multiple international and interdisciplinary research projects, this paper explores how anthropological research might contribute to co-create innovative modes of thinking and acting. Focusing on the dual perspective of Pacific Islanders on their environment, namely knowing and interacting with the land and the ocean, it argues that an anthropological approach can initiate an iterative process of collaboratively identifying epistemological and ontological differences and facilitating knowledge co-creation with research partners. This might take the form of laboratories, underlining the importance of experimenting collaboratively with conceptual framings and approaches for developing knowledge and practices that resonate with contributors’ frameworks while adequately addressing challenges to adverse effects of climate change.
Paper short abstract
A multispecies autoethnographic relational account of a high mountain tiger and an anthropologist-ecologist in an Indigenous Himalayan territory. Using remote camera technology, the paper explores human-animal relationality, unequal marginalities, and the politics of conservation and development.
Paper long abstract
This paper is a multispecies autoethnographic account of the intersecting lives of a high mountain tiger living in an Indigenous territory in the Himalayas and an interdisciplinary anthropologist-ecologist (I). Our story unfolds within a crowded milieu of actors–an Indigenous community, conservation researchers, local elites, and other development and conservation actors. The paper experiments with knowledge produced through relationships forged between me and the tiger, whom I come to know exclusively through the application of remote camera technology. As our story develops through a series of serendipitous events over many years, I explore how tiger research is deployed to present very different visions of tigers, nature conservation, and development. Our story challenges preconceived conditions of marginality of Indigenous People and wild animals: who marginalises whom, when, for how long, and how. I show how tiger conservation is employed to dispossess local people of land, in turn dispossessing tigers of free-will and agency. However, the tiger's wide-ranging and elusive ecology means that it is at once easy for powerful actors to deny their existence (and push ahead with land diversion), and difficult because they can show up at any location at any time, making it challenging to draw hard boundaries between ‘wilderness’ and ‘civilisation’ in this vast landscape. Ultimately, the paper presents a novel case of multispecies relational fieldwork.
Paper short abstract
The aim of the paper is to explore possibilities of including more-than-human beings, namely medicinal plants in anthropological analysis and ethnographic research located in Indigenous Peruvian Amazon. I combine hybrid methods and theories from the field of semiotics, ethnobotany, ontological turn.
Paper long abstract
When considering humans and their societies, anthropologists should not omit the importance of plants, which co-habit and co-produce relational eco-cosmos with people, and which also create their own (social) relationships with other entities, leading to the emergence of more-than-human entanglements and dialogues. Drawing on ‘anthropology beyond humanity’ (Ingold, 2013), anthropologists can not only include non-human beings in ethnographic research, but should also try to take them seriously, as equal protagonists or ‘interlocutors’. However, this raises the question of how – as anthropologists – can we explore multi-species links that elude conventional ethnographic methods, and exceed Western ontological and epistemic frameworks. Preparing for the first fieldwork in Amazon rainforest in August 2026, this paper addresses considerations on overlap between anthropology and botany in the context of Indigenous ontology (animism) and academic epistemic frameworks. Therefore, the aim of the paper is to explore possibilities of including more-than-human beings, namely medicinal plants, in anthropological analysis and ethnographic research located in Peruvian Amazon. As an aspiring ethnobotanist I have been participating in tree different botanic courses, to comprehend non-human participants of my study more profoundly. Therefore, in my work I combine hybrid research methods and methods of analysis, including theories from semiotics, ethnobotany, pharmacology, embedding them in ethnographic methods and anthropological analysis. As a theoretical framework I adopt current non-anthropocentric approach (e.g. posthumanism, new materialism), although I notice frequent incompatibility of these to field realities. Drawing on ethnographic findings, I perceive a possibility to use idea of quantum superposition for analyzing plants' ontological instability.
Paper short abstract
This paper proposes the para-pastoralist method of following situated yak rhythms in Tibet while embracing epistemic opacity to productively generate multispecies knowledge, addressing debates over animal subjectivity between scientific validity and local knowledge in field-based research.
Paper long abstract
Apprenticeship to human interlocutors and sensorial attunement have become two primary epistemic gateways for engaging animal subjectivity in multispecies ethnography. Yet much of the everyday life of yaks in Tibet, as with many animals, unfolds within autonomous forms of animal sociality that remain largely beyond human participation. Moreover, many local interlocutors do not frame animal lives through sustained inquisitive engagement across time and space, as researchers do. As a result, prevailing approaches risk producing knowledge mediated through shared interspecies temporalities, narrative authority and sensory knowledge derived from brief field encounters, while struggling to account for animal-led asynchronous rhythms, opacity and refusal.
Drawing on twenty-one months of fieldwork among Tibetans and yaks, this paper proposes the para-pastoralist as a methodological positioning that situates the researcher alongside multispecies practices without collapsing into either human-centred apprenticeship models or speculative becoming-animal approaches. It develops three complementary methodological shifts: first, treating asynchronicity as constitutive of human–animal organisation rather than as a failure of interspecies encounter; second, constructing an animal-led ethogram through rhythm-following, strategic behavioural interventions and mobile video practices; and third, tracing interspecies histories by combining human narratives with corresponding animal behaviours that carry imprints of past human–animal social memory across time and space.
The para-pastoralist inhabits fractured epistemic spaces between anthropology and ethology, human and animal, and researcher and interlocutors. It foregrounds field-based anthropologists as ethical cross-disciplinary contributors to collaborative multispecies knowledge, where animal subjectivity is not extracted at once but emerges as a relational presence and absence, perceptible only when it can be.
Paper short abstract
Long-time ethnography in the Danube Delta shows how anthropologists become entangled in polarisation through immersive research practices, producing ethical drift across competing moral, ecological, and tourism regimes in a fragile socio-ecological landscape.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in the Danube Delta, observing diachronic transformations in a fragile socio-ecological environment, I examine how anthropological practice becomes entangled in processes of polarization through expectations of positioning, representation, and advocacy. Rather than a circumscribed “field site,” the delta emerges as a processual and relational landscape in which tension and coexistence are continually co-produced across human and more-than-human worlds. This paper reflects on the anthropologist’s position within a polarized delta shaped by overlapping regimes of environmental protection, tourism development, and adaptive livelihoods. Tourism can be both a buffer and an amplifier of precarity, simplifying complex delta lives into consumable moral polarities such as unspoiled/damaged or authentic/corrupt.
Polarization is not simply an ideological condition but a form of differential vulnerability that governance and tourism seek to manage or “fix” in landscapes that thrive on ambiguity. State actors, conservation organizations, tourism entrepreneurs, and local communities mobilize dissimilar moral and ecological narratives, positioning the anthropologist as intermediary, witness, expert, or supporter. These positionings generate an ethical drift: a gradual, inadvertent movement across alignments produced through everyday research practices such as participating, listening, eavesdropping, translating, recording, and circulating knowledge.
Methodologically, the paper reflects on ethnographic work across contested knowledge regimes (conservationism, policy-making, activism, informal economies). It proposes strategies of partial rejection, strategic ambiguity, and relational accountability that enable engagement without fully reproducing polarized frameworks. Situating the anthropologist “in the net” rather than above the dispute permits cultivating forms of attentiveness that acknowledge entanglement while resisting imposed alignments.
Paper short abstract
The relationship between the Skolt Sami people’s nature-based livelihood activities and the natural environment is the starting point for research in this paper. New requirements and methods emerge to the anthropological study of indigenous culture. The keyword is collaboration.
Paper long abstract
This presentation is based on the polarization between the indigenous culture and the aspirations of the global political-economic system. The culture of the Skolt Sami in Finland, or more precisely their nature-based livelihood activities, are in danger of being subsumed by the dominant culture in the struggle for natural resources. I believe that transforming this conflict into a resource for the Indigenous people offers suitable challenges for anthropological research. In practice, since Finland joined the EU in 1995, reindeer husbandry has adapted to the agricultural principles of the European Union in such a way that the state has supported the growth of unit size, i.e., the number of reindeer per person. The number of reindeer owners has declined significantly over the past 30 years, and the importance of reindeer husbandry as a builder of broader community spirit has declined. The traditional way of life of the Skolt Sami Indigenous people combines the use of natural resources with the protection of nature. When we talk about nature conservation, we usually ignore the possible survival of the community and its culture. I argue that, for the Skolt Sami people, it is not enough to save nature; attention must also be paid to the community and its culture. The paper presents new requirements for the research of indigenous culture. The keyword is cooperation. Recent developments in research ethics point in the same direction. In addition, new research methods and tools are presented, as well as anthropologists’ collaboration with representatives of other disciplines.
Paper short abstract
Immersive eco-art can ecologize public pedagogy; this project analyzes Diatomic States as a digitally mediated “parliament of things,” rendering diatoms sensory and political; using field notes, video, and photographs to examine representation, multispecies democracy, and public appearance.
Paper long abstract
Sparked by concerns over declines in Diatom populations across the northern hemisphere, my research investigates the pedagogical and political affordances of immersive, digitally mediated Diatom eco-art. Diatoms are microscopic phytoplankton found in aquatic ecosystems and they are essential to carbon capture and climate regulation. I reflect on an art installation Diatomic States created by myself for Nuit Blanches arts festival in October 2025. The show was sponsored by Toronto, attracting 6,000 visitors over the 12-hour festival. My conference presentation reflects on observational data (field notes, videos, and photographs) gathered during the event. In an era of environmental crisis, we ask: how microscopic life be represented, and how can they they reconfigure human-environment relationships in largely unseen ways?
I will discuss representations foundational role in political ecology (Latour, 2004). Ecological crises in this sense are both crises of ecological changes and also crises of (mis)representation in which life and ecological processes are excluded from human-centered politics. Following Latour’s (2024) call to “ecologize”, I frame Diatomic States as public-pedagogical experiment seeking to make microscopic aquatic life sensory, thereby political, a type of “parliament of things” (Latour, 2004). This invites reflection on affordances of digital pedagogical representations as political maneuvers; as ways of rendering diatoms as co-actors in common worlds. In response to a growing educational interest in Arendtian (1958) politics, we extend these discussions to explore how digital representative praxes can mediate and constitute forms of public “appearance” in “shared public spaces” and thereby moments in solidarity and political co-becoming.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines composite curating as a transdisciplinary research methodology in the politically polarised Rhenish lignite mining area. It asks how research co-creation with water can hold conflicting knowledges in tension and foster response-ability beyond dominant post-mining futures.
Paper long abstract
The Rhenish lignite mining area in western Germany constitutes a politically charged and epistemically fragmented field, where extractivist infrastructures, climate activism, scientific expertise, bureaucratic governance, and local lifeworlds collide. At the centre of these conflicts are water bodies that trigger divergent visions of (deep-time) futures of (post-)mining landscapes. Water emerges as an underlying vital force structuring hydro-relational imaginaries of environmental transformation.
This paper introduces composite curating as a transdisciplinary methodology for knowledge co-creation. Developed at the intersection of anthropology (Hetherington 2025), curatorial studies (Bismarck 2021), posthuman feminism (Neimanis 2017), and artistic research, composite curating operates as a research intervention grounded in four methodological principles: relationality (foregrounding situated relations between human/more-than-human actors), constellation (assembling heterogeneous perspectives without resolving their tensions), translation (mediating between disciplinary, political, and affective registers), and transposition (creating ecotones of meaning across domains).
Empirically, the paper draws on the case study Walking with Water Ghosts, a collective walking-based intervention that brought together different stakeholders to engage with troubled waters in the mining region. Addressing these “water ghosts” through artistic and participatory activations on site aimed to negotiate conflicting enactments of water and to open affective and epistemic spaces beyond entrenched positions.
The paper discusses the potentials and pitfalls of composite curating as a methodological approach that enables anthropological research to inhabit interstitial spaces where different knowledges can be held in tension. It asks whether co-creating with water on site—taking seriously its transtemporal and transspatial circulations—offers methodological cues for generating new forms of response-ability.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how spiritual water activists in Cambridge flatten usual hierarchies of knowledge production and evidence in ways that both enable new modes of working together and reinforce polarities between industry, academy, and activism, sometimes impeding the very work they seek to drive.
Paper long abstract
In Cambridge (UK), a group of spiritual water activists are building a case for extractivist orientations as drivers of water degradation, recognizing water’s spiritual dimensions, and calling for alternative human-water relations. These activities involve a complex of evidences rooted in diverse modes of knowledge (co)production, including stats on water quality, performances of grief over loss of intimacy with local waters, eclectic rituals around water bodies and framing certain characteristics of those bodies as mystical, and excavating pre-Christian Iron Age sites near contemporary waters. Not only does their work dehierarchize these radically distinct evidentiary streams, it collapses the ususal binary categories of scientific/spiritual or religious, and knowledge/belief that drives – and limits – most water conservation work. At the same time, the processes by which they produce evidence also tend to (re)produce existing polarities between activism and industry. As an anthropologist working on/with/via Cambridge’s rivers and their enmeshments in spiritual networks, my own position and research is drawn into this eddy of evidence in ways that similarly enable novel modes for working together towards riverine justice and reiterate existing divides between academy and practice. Drawing on ongoing fieldwork, this paper examines how spiritually-motivated activists produce evidence to demonstrate the more-than-human nature of water and move people to new actions, including new collaborations. I argue that the same knowledge co-creation and evidentiary practices used to support truth claims about expanded relationalities and care may also inadvertently bolster existing binaries in ways that sometimes impede those same regenerative efforts.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the methodological and epistemological challenges in studying how illegal African sandalwood extraction in northern Kenya interweaves with local governance and value systems.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the illegal extraction of African sandalwood (Osyris lanceolata) in northern Kenya. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork with Samburu communities and along the commodity chain, I trace how global value chains generate local extractive regimes, in which state, market, criminal, and community actors renegotiate legal, cultural, and ecological meanings.
At least since the 2000s, African sandalwood connects remote pastoralist communities to the global luxury scent market, shifting local economic boundaries and generating long‑term ecological risks. Under conditions of limited state presence, communities assume gatekeeper roles, locally conferring harvesting rights to smugglers. Smuggling networks intersect with law enforcement through practices of facilitation and selective enforcement, producing a field of blurred roles, porous jurisdictions, and structural mistrust. Community members are routinely solicited by both sides to become informants.
At the same time, sandalwood, locally revered as a "Rainmaker Tree", holds significant ecological and spiritual value. Rising climate pressures intensify both its commodification and the revitalisation of cultural meanings, producing frictious regimes of value.
The paper argues that these dynamics fundamentally shape the conditions of ethnographic knowledge production. Research encounters become stages of strategic performance, often intelligible only retrospectively. By tracing how (il-)legality, economic and ecological value are distributed across sites (rural extraction zones, elder councils, courtrooms, smuggling and processing nodes), the paper reflects on the methodological consequences of researching such fractured fields. Partial access and selective disclosure are not treated as shortcomings, but data through which environmental governance and frontier economies can be explored.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines migrant Berom youths in uncontrolled lithium mining in Igbeti, Nigeria, highlighting how ethnographic fieldwork navigates political tension, ethical dilemmas, and competing local and global narratives in green transition contexts.
Paper long abstract
Lithium mining occupies a contradictory position within contemporary environmental politics: it is promoted globally as essential to green energy transitions, yet locally experienced through extractive labour, environmental disruption, and social precarity. Drawing on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in Igbeti, Southwestern Nigeria, this paper will examine how these tensions shape the mobility of migrant Berom youths working in largely uncontrolled lithium mining operations with Chinese actors and minimal government oversight.
Using youth mobility as an analytical lens, the paper will show how migrant workers engage lithium mining as both a source of income and a site of ecological and social risk. For these youths, lithium extraction will be examined not as an abstract climate solution but as a daily reality shaped by degraded land, insecure labour arrangements, and uncertain prospects. Their movements across regions, worksites, and social networks will show how global green transition narratives translate unevenly into local livelihoods and environmental knowledge.
The paper will also address the challenges of conducting ethnography in a politically sensitive and loosely regulated extractive context marked by competing claims from mining actors, state authorities, host communities, and migrant workers. Lithium’s designation as a “green” resource will unsettle distinctions between ethical and harmful extraction, raising questions of researcher position, access, and interpretation. By examining youth mobility within these contested environmental and political conditions, the paper will argue for treating fieldwork as a practice shaped by conflicting scales, knowledge, and moral claims.