Short Abstract

We explore shifting relations in environmental expertise, multispecies mobility, and discourses of difference. We examine how, in contexts of (non-)human hypermobility, knowledge of land, climate, and biodiversity is made, lost, or negotiated, shaping imaginaries of living with polarizing change.

Long Abstract

Across Europe and beyond, the politics of nature have become deeply polarised. Rural depopulation, ecological restoration, and multispecies mobility reveal fractures between expertise and experience, protection and production, and human and more-than-human worlds. As landscapes variously empty or fill with people and other forms of life (i.e. migrant agricultural workers, controversial wildlife reintroductions, or the spread of invasive species) questions of who knows, who cares, and who decides about the environment become increasingly contested.

This panel explores shifting relations among environmental expertise, multispecies mobility, and discourses of difference as they shape imaginaries of living with change. In what ways do different actors--farmers, migrants, scientists, activists, animals, and plants--participate in and contest local ecologies and practices? How do human and nonhuman mobilities, whether assisted, irregular, forced, voluntary or unmanaged, become politically charged, intersecting with conservation and rewilding initiatives, rural disenchantment, and populist politics? And how might anthropology, through attentiveness to situated knowledge and more-than-human entanglements, open possibilities for dialogue over polarising environmental futures?

We invite papers that examine how, in the context of hypermobility of humans and more-than-humans, knowledge about land, climate, and biodiversity is made, lost, and negotiated amid ecological transformation. Bringing together perspectives from environmental anthropology, mobilities studies, rural studies, and multispecies ethnography, this panel seeks to rethink polarisation not as fixed opposition but as a generative process through which new forms of coexistence and expertise emerge. We welcome contributions that engage conceptually, ethnographically, or experimentally with the challenges of living, working, and knowing in changing environments, foregrounding situated and creative practices that sustain coexistence in times of deepening divides.

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