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This paper explores how embodied expertise emerges through human–glacier relations in the Swiss Alps. Drawing on multisensory ethnography, it shows how glaciers circulate as intimate companions and political symbols, generating contested ecologies of expertise across local and global scales.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how environmental expertise is produced, negotiated, and unevenly contested through human–glacier relationships in the Swiss Alps, in contexts marked by glacier retreat, symbolic mobility, climate activism, and polarising narratives. Drawing on multisensory ethnography in Switzerland, alongside participant observation of glacier commemorations and funerary rituals, I explore how glaciers circulate as objects of knowledge, affect, and political mobilisation across local and global scales.

I develop the concept of glacial intimacy to analyse contrasting yet coexisting ways of knowing glaciers. For local inhabitants, glaciers are intimate, more-than-human companions embedded in everyday practices and livelihoods; for urban climate activists, they become mobile emblems of planetary crisis, climate justice, and moral urgency. These divergent engagements generate distinct forms of ecological expertise—experiential, scientific, activist, and spiritual—that intersect during mediatised events such as glacier funerals and commemorations. Rather than producing open conflict or epistemic consensus, these encounters reveal parallel environmental imaginaries shaped by different temporalities, mobilities, and regimes of attachment.

By tracing how glaciers move between proximity and distance, intimacy and abstraction, the paper contributes to debates on multispecies mobility and polarisation as epistemic processes. It shows how knowledge about land, climate, and biodiversity is produced not only through data or policy but also through ritual, emotion, sensory engagement, and strategic circulation. The Alps emerge as a site where living with environmental change involves negotiating fragmented ecologies of expertise, in which local lifeworlds and global climate discourses remain relationally connected yet resistant to alignment, with uneven implications for authority.

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Mobile blue crabs, called 'invasive' and blamed for reshaping Italian lagoons, are here to stay. Through experiments in living together, from catching to cooking, fishers and cooks develop situated expertise that reworks coexistence, value, and belonging in changing ecologies.

Paper long abstract

With the arrival and proliferation of the blue crab, a famously voracious crustacean from the western Atlantic, the lagoonscapes of northeast Italy have been altered. The Manila clam monoculture which defined region is crumbling, while the artisanally fished smaller green crab is increasingly hard to find; blue crabs take the blame and are labeled ‘invasive’. Those who make a living in these lagoons say, despite their anger at the blue crab, dobbiamo convivere: we have to live together. This living together entails killing, selling, and letting-alone, but it also implies learning this new species intimately.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Italy, this paper examines how fishers’ and cooks’ experiments in catching and valuing the crab differently generate knowledge and authority about a hypermobile species that is not reducible to institutionalized science or dominant forms of capitalist production. For example, re-creating a typical Venetian dish, moeche, to use the blue crab instead of the traditional (native) green crab requires both inventing new modes of fishing and constructing a deep understanding of the blue crabs’ habits, physiology, and flesh. In the process, marginal actors make moral, political, and economic claims. There is often tension here: between mourning previous multispecies alliances and opening towards new ones, and between drawing on images of idealized socioecological pasts and constructing futures which risk reproducing the same vulnerable monocultural logics as before. I argue that the knowledges that arise from these experiments are neither innocent nor harmonious, but rework what it means to live together.

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What does it mean to know a landscape in the final stages of degradation? Taking the case of a long-studied permafrost polygon in the Canadian Arctic, this paper asks how scientific sensing comes to terms with change and degradation in meaningful landscapes.

Paper long abstract

Inuvik, in Canada’s Western Arctic, has been a place of environmental scientific attention since the 1960s. Research on permafrost landscapes happens at sites in the nearby Mackenzie Delta and beyond. One such research site, only a short drive south of town, has been the subject of various projects for decades and hosts a plethora of active and abandoned sensors. Drawing on recent ethnographic fieldwork with researchers in Inuvik, I take the example of this particular permafrost polygon feature to discuss how scientific expertise recons with the change, and more specifically, degradation of a landscape.

In a series of experiments that have been ongoing at this site for decades, the near total degradation of the permafrost has been monitored and experienced by researchers, both as a set of data points and as visible, experienced change in the landscape. As buried thermo-probes and makeshift bridges fashioned from weathered shipping pallets have rendered this site into a sort of field-laboratory (Latour 1999), it also holds the memories of generations of scientists whose accumulated efforts helped make it into the place it is today. In this place, climate catastrophe is made real, both in terms of data (which can be used to model change in other locations) and in the experience of the melting and degrading permafrost.

As the more-than-human entanglement of permafrost, water, sensors, peat, and others melt into something else, what does it mean for environmental scientists to sense, measure, and document this change?

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An analysis of tensions in knowledge production among Australian invertebrate keepers, particularly the risk that democratised knowledge can enable poaching and the strategic use of ignorance to similar effect. Indigenous modes of knowing the land further complicate these dynamics.

Paper long abstract

The global community of pet invertebrate keepers is geographically dispersed but connected through international trade and social media. New species, and, in the case of taxa difficult to breed in captivity, new individuals, enter the hobby largely through collectors and poachers extracting animals from the wild.

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research in Australia, Poland, Thailand, and Singapore, this paper examines how knowledge about species, habitats, and care practices is produced, circulated, withheld, and contested within Australian invertebrate keeping. Terraristic expertise emerges from heterogeneous regimes of knowledge, combining fragments of scientific literature with experimentation and embodied practice. Knowledge is actively managed—sometimes treated as a collective good, sometimes guarded as private property. At the same time, ignorance is strategically cultivated, for example through claims that poaching rare endemic species is justified because their restricted distribution cannot be conclusively proven.

The paper focuses on citizen science platforms such as iNaturalist and the Atlas of Living Australia. While designed to democratize ecological knowledge, these tools are increasingly used by poachers to locate rare and valuable species, making the democratised knowledge a source of ecological harm. In response, some actors refuse to publish precise locality data.

Analysis incorporating Indigenous epistemologies further complicates these dynamics, revealing knowledge as relational, situated, and contingent on gender and social positionality. I argue that these tensions expose competing models of environmental expertise and reframe polarisation as negotiation over responsibility, epistemic authority, and multispecies coexistence.

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As climate change drives West Nile virus into Europe via migratory birds, this paper examines how epidemic threat is constituted through contested knowledge-making. It reveals how expertise about multispecies hypermobility reconfigures across virological, clinical, veterinary, and policy domains.

Paper long abstract

As West Nile virus (WNV) becomes the most significant mosquito-borne pathogen in Europe (Rudolf et al. 2017), its establishment as an epidemic threat reveals how knowledge of climate, biodiversity, and multispecies health is made, lost, and negotiated. This paper examines how WNV transitions from scientific presence to public concern in the Czech Republic, where autochtonous cases have been reported since 2018.

Drawing on document analysis of national and European surveillance reports, media discourse, and policy frameworks, combined with interviews with virologists, epidemiologists, veterinarians, and public health officials, the paper traces how epidemic threat emerges through competing forms of expertise. As migratory birds carry WNV to Europe and climate change accelerates mosquito development and viral transmission, questions arise: whose knowledge counts in determining risk? How is multispecies hypermobility—of viruses, vectors, and hosts—made knowable or remains invisible? What futures are anticipated when monitoring "sleeps" between outbreaks?

The research reveals how knowledge is negotiated between: virologists' laboratory findings and general practitioners' clinical observations; systematic European monitoring frameworks and fragmented Czech implementation; scientific assessments of more-than-human vulnerabilities and political prioritization of human health. These polarizations shape divergent imaginaries of living with climate-driven epidemic emergence—from systematic One Health surveillance to reactive crisis management.

By examining how epidemic threat is constituted across institutional, disciplinary, and species boundaries, this paper demonstrates how (non-)human hypermobility generates contested grounds for environmental health expertise, revealing possibilities for more inclusive and ecologically sensitive approaches to infectious disease preparedness.

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Thinking political ecologies of restoration in Pakistan's capital Islamabad through settler-colonial theory, I investigate in which ways the politicized vocabulary of indigeneity is appropriated by different actors to multiple species to negotiate polarizing visions of Islamabad's future.

Paper long abstract

The Margallah Hills, a chain of the lower Himalayas that is thickly forested with both conifers and semi-deciduous subtropical forest, and Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, are intertwined components of an urban frontier. Islamabad was constructed in the 1960s on “wastelands” by displacing indigenous villagers. Subject to technocratic-scientific administration, the former British herding grounds of the Margallah Hills were restored through introduced seeds, and the declaration of a National Park in 1979.

Polarizing conflicts between different societal sections over the park's future meander between “development” and “protection”: the indigenous population seeks to use forest resources for sustenance, while government institutions, armed forces and entrepreneurs aim to grab land for entertainment, tourism, and real estate development. In 2017, the Islamabad Wildlife Management Board was created to restore and rewild the national park. Reflecting transnational “planetary consciousness”, it is informed by urban environmental activism that emphasizes care for the multiple species living in capital territory, among others for the leopard, a recently “discovered” signature species.

This presentation critically debates political ecologies of restoration by through the lens of settler-colonial theory. In Islamabad, bureaucratic planning and environmental activism are infused with settler-colonial elements constructing the Margallah Hills as a biodiversity hotspot that is commoditized for nature enjoyment and as a carbon sink, while disregarding the rights of the indigenous population to land and livelihood. Here, the politicized vocabulary of indigeneity, and the contentious dichotomy between "invasive" and "indigenous" species, is appropriated by different actors in order to negotiate conflicting visions of Islamabad’s future.

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The Eastern flyway moves migratory birds along a route from Eastern Europe to Eastern Africa. This paper explores struggles around the meaning and nature of expertise as shaped by continuities and fractures between human borders, uncertain and precarious data, and the wayfaring of migrant birds.

Paper long abstract

The Eastern Flyway--stretching from Northern and Eastern Europe through the Balkans, East Mediteranean to East Africa--is a landscape of intense multispecies mobility affected by borders, climate change, agricultural expansion, energy infrastructure projects, and the aftermath of war. While the Western Flyway is mapped through a robust, well funded, and integrated knowledge infrastructure, the Eastern route remains an epistemic blind spot, where human understanding is as fragmented and precarious as the habitats it crosses.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with biologists along the flyway (with a focus on Romania), this paper explores how environmental expertise is negotiated under conditions of data precarity. I organize my argument around several sets of contrasts. First, the scalar clash between the vastness of avian migration and the puncturing methology of scientific knowledge, relying on small scientific projects (bird ringing and tracking), hunter-collected rings, citizen science, and industry-mandated monitoring. Second, between the localized, partial knowledge of biologists and, drawing on Tim Ingold’s concept of wayfaring, the lived and diffused intelligence of the migrant birds. And third, between the uneven distribution of research resources and attention between the West and the East (both European and African).

I show how these contrasts and fractures shape what natures are deemed worthy of protection. I argue for an ethics of conservation that makes room for both human data precarity and uncertainty and the continuous, lived expertise of the migrant birds.

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This paper explores mainland migrants and stray animals on the Japanese Miyako Islands. As a case of multispecies mobility, I introduce the concept “ecologies of care” to argue that care is a political mechanism shaping inclusion and exclusion through the renegotiation of social identities.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I explore relationships between mainland migrants and stray animals on the Miyako Islands, Japan. Since 2015, Miyako has become a migration destination for Japanese city dwellers who come to be healed (iyashi) by the islands' natural world. As a way of “doing something in return” (ongaeshi suru), the migrant community on these remote islands is greatly involved in caring for Miyako's environments. This reciprocity, however, is selective: environmental projects center on three particular ecological issues—marine debris, agricultural chemicals, and stray cats and dogs—while ignoring others. In the postcolonial context of Miyako, these concerns rest on the widespread belief that locals do not care about nature and that mainlanders possess the moral authority to speak for Miyako's non-human world. Focusing on three migrant-led animal shelters, I explore how stray animals “migrate in reverse” as they are shipped to foster families in metropoles across Japan. I introduce the concept “ecologies of care” to discuss care as a semiotic-material practice that operates across time and space. Drawing on hybrid ethnography, my main argument is that care becomes a political mechanism in the context of multispecies mobility, shaping dynamics of inclusion and exclusion through the ongoing renegotiation of social identities and hierarchies. By providing a case from the Japanese context, I aim to deepen debates within environmental anthropology and beyond on the situatedness of environmental care, its ambiguity, and its complexity in a polarized world.

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Restoration ecologies of fire in the Pyrenees challenge traditional conservation by blending historical ideals with novel, resilient landscapes. Ethnographic accounts reveal contested ecological knowledge and political tensions that shape future imaginaries amid climate change and wildfire anxieties

Paper long abstract

Restoration ecologies of fire are pivoting between attempts to recreate past ecosystems and efforts to design novel, resilient landscapes, challenging traditional conservation paradigms. Amid fears of unprecedented and devastating wildfires that threaten to disrupt rural landscapes, new negotiations are emerging to imagine and project alternative visions of resilient ecosystems. Drawing on co-constructed memories and idealizations of former countrysides shaped by specific productive needs, new projects are taking shape that contest official and institutional conservation policies. In this presentation, we explore how ecological knowledge is being produced and disputed among different social actors, based on our ethnographic research in a Southern European mountain range. Competing narratives arise from anxieties about climate change, landscape degradation, and the abandonment of marginalized areas, reframing novel interventions as spaces of ecological opportunity.

In the Pyrenees, the reintroduction of fire for landscape management and the restoration of fire-resilient mosaics are opening new strategies for reappropriating the landscape and reclaiming local sovereignty. These approaches challenge core ecological concepts—native vs. invasive species, baselines, and historical fidelity—while generating new imaginaries of nature and futures no one has seen yet. Restoration ecologies of fire are not only ecological—they are deeply political, shaping governance, property regimes, and cultural identities, and producing tensions between global conservation agendas and local communities.

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Drawing on a multispecies ethnography of a Mexican national park, this paper proposes disruptive hybridity as a tool for examining how lagoon inhabitants negotiate conservation authority, racialised belonging, and multispecies care under conditions of ecological change.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on an audiovisual multispecies ethnography of the Chacahua-Pastoría lagoons, one of Mexico’s oldest national parks. It proposes disruptive hybridity as an analytic tool for examining how a history of forced movement and belonging are negotiated across species divisions. The lagoon is inhabited by a variety of species and by an Afromexican human community, all affected by ecological degradation and increasing tourism. As a national park, Chacahua is the site of community-led conservation projects. While participating in crocodile-monitoring patrols, I learned about the lagoon’s hybrid crocodiles: members of a species from the Gulf of Mexico escaped from the local cocodrilario and reproduced with the lagoon’s native crocodiles. The hybrid crocodiles now populating the lagoon reveal ontological claims about species purity and what nature worthy of protection is within a conservation framework, sites of creation of knowledge about the lagoon as a protected environment. At the same time, the hybrid crocodiles prompt comparisons among Afromexican inhabitants, who relate the crocodiles’ in-between status and histories of forced movement to Afrodescendant experiences of slavery, resettlement, and mestizaje. This self-attributed hybridity challenges racialised imaginaries that frame Afromexicans as either foreign and less capable of environmental care or as ‘close to nature,’ instead foregrounding Afromexican environmental knowledge based in sensory perception, embodied knowledge and multispecies communication. Being tonal, sharing life with an animal – a bond humans have to a particular animal in the lagoon – is one expression of this knowledge and offers a counterpoint to the national park's conservation practices.

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In the Polish Carpathians, transhumant pastoralism has been reframed as environmental conservation work. This paper examines the tensions this has generated between shepherds and conservationists, their competing agendas of protection and production, and their scientific and experiential expertise.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how competing ideas and practices of sustainability have become sites of contestation between transhumant shepherds, foresters, and government officials in the Polish Carpathians amid competing conservation paradigms and rural abandonment. Transhumant pastoralism is a communal practice which relies on the pooling of livestock and pasture, as well as the mobility of humans and animals across land insides national parks, or which is protected. It produces uniquely biodiverse mountain ecologies which are sustained by repeated, seasonal practices of mowing and grazing. These ecologies are simultaneously natural and cultural: centuries of grazing and mowing have created the open meadows that support endemic species and prevent forest succession. Yet rural depopulation and agricultural abandonment have rendered much of this landscape "barren" from pastoral perspectives - overgrown with invasive species and "closed" by encroaching forest. To combat such environmental degradation, shepherds have begun to collaborate with regional and park authorities to create new programmes which support traditional grazing practices. However, conservation policies create new tensions. They often translate communal pastoral practice into individualized property rights incompatible with shepherds' mobile land use. Meanwhile, policies like retention forestry and Natura 2000 protections exclude shepherds from forest resources, privileging scientific expertise over pastoral knowledge. Given these difficulties, I ask what forms of coexistence are possible - or impossible - when pastoral practice itself is reframed as conservation work.

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I explore culling as an expertise of the Anthropocene, discussing how the labour, infrastructure, and knowledges of lethal control enact ecologies. This draws from ethnographic work with goat cullers in Aotearoa (New Zealand), who work to manage feral goats as a problematic species.

Paper long abstract

Culling has become an increasingly standard expertise of the Anthropocene. As a form of lethal intervention aimed at reducing animal populations (both domestic and wild) toward a management goal, it purports to intercede into non-human formations and alter them. Projects of such violence toward unwanted, invasive, or ‘surplus’ animals come with ambivalences and controversies but also vitally rearticulate who knows environments, who cares, and who has the capacities to alter their emergence.

I draw from ethnographic engagement with goat cullers in Aotearoa (New Zealand). These animals have been subjected to official culls to halt their expansion and suppress their populations for about a century now, nurturing a community of experts in lethal ungulate control that has since been exported to other global contexts. I will explore culling as a practice and still-emergent expertise, where through lethal interventions into ecologies, expertise and particular knowledges of these spaces are furnished, and how through the development of management plans and infrastructural interventions for culling, imaginaries of the environment are altered. I argue that through goat culling, previously dislocated, vulnerable spaces are connected to broader conceptions of a manageable environment. I also explore the practical and political ambivalences of their labour, the repertories that have been developed, and how this expertise in environments articulates privileged claims over them in defining these spaces and how they ought to be cared for.

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This paper explores mountain grazing practices in the Italian Alps since the 19th century as a situs of interplay between scientific expertise and vernacular experience. It mobilises an historical perspective for critically reflecting on the vanishing of environmental knowledge in the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract

Confrontations and fractures between diverse ecological knowledges have long shaped European countrysides. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, early 19th century scientists were involved in governementalizing efforts to reform mountain grazing practices, turning more-than-human entanglements of Alpine pastures into a "battlefield of knowledge" (Long and Long 1992). Considering this, this paper examines how science and local experience can be mediated in situated knowledge production processes in the Alps, also exploring how past expert junctions might inform responses to today’s severe ecological crisis.

Drawing on environmental anthropology and STS, the talk combines historical analysis of a farming handbook produced under the Napoleonic domination with ethnographic explorations of environmental knowledge in nowadays Southwestern Italian Alps. In particular, it engages empirically and theoretically with the transnational work of an Alpine botanist (1753-1827), whose writings sought to bridge scientific reasoning with vernacular expertise about Alpine pastures. The paper, thus, interrogates past and present forms of environmental knowledge, considering how people can individually and collectively be capable of recomposing different ecological know-hows in generative ways.

Ethnographic explorations have shown that this scientific endeavour remains relevant today. As this part of the Alpine region faces accelerating climate changes and rewilding processes, the 19th-century botanical handbook serves as a field device for critically reflecting on the vanishing of ecological knowledge in the Anthropocene. Moreover, the paper considers rural, peripheral areas as sitii where - by overcoming fractures and polarizations - anthropology can participate in constructing of new universalisms by recomposing diverse, situated knowledges (Bečka et al. 2024).