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- Convenors:
-
Sana Chavoshian
(Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO))
Nasima Selim (University of Bremen)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores para-human formations across vegetal, elemental, and atmospheric worlds, tracing tensions between para-meters of normativity and para-matters of affect and excess to shed light on and intervene in disfigured ecologies.
Long Abstract
Anthropology as a discipline centers on the question of what it means to be human. Recent posthumanist theories venture into what it means not to be human. At this intersection, we propose a para-human turn, to engage the tension between the parameters, the disciplinary, methodological and normative thresholds that define the measurable; and para-matters, the affective, quasi-material and more than human forces that exceed such collaboration. This panel asks how these measures and excesses reconfigure what counts as knowledge, collectivities and relations.
The earth and the sky, scarred by capitalist extraction, militarization, and human ambition, bear irreversible damage. Yet regimes of repair—through reform, regulation, activism, and reparation—often separate harm from profit. The illusion of repairability masks catastrophe, turning loss into data and disaster into management. This panel explores how disfigured ecologies and injured webs of life (do not) regenerate, forming new collectives through atmospheric, elemental, and vegetal relations.
In a world filled with “negative ecologies” (Bond 2022), we seek para-human formations and practices that accompany anthropological and speculative imagination in the face of disfiguration and possible ir/reparability. Drawing on witnessing, experimentation and confabulation, we seek to bring ethnographic insights in conversation with current anthropological debates around the Anthropocene.
By foregrounding the agency of air, dust, and vegetal breathing companions, we ask the participants how the notion of the “para human” can possibly transform anthropocentric modes of research, representation, and engagement.
Through multimodal, poetic, and performative contribution, participants are invited to design and cultivate “para-human” methods. Attending both the measures and the matters, this panel seeks to imagine a para-human anthropology that breathes with the atmosphere, listens to roots, and learns from the extended intelligence of nonhuman life.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
The relativity and materiality of darkness opens thinking around sensation as a distributed form of atmospheric attunement. Drawing on papermaking and bioplastic techniques, and ethnographic attention to sense-making around darkness, the paper attends, in particular, to molecular scales.
Paper long abstract
In the Permian Basin, darkness emerges as a matter of care in a regime of 27/7 LED-lit oil and gas operations, as atmospheric qualities become subject to interpretations of toxicity and encroachment. Initiatives to designate the area as an International Dark Sky Zone include measuring darkness, hosting star parties, and workshops to demonstrate ‘good’ lighting techniques, change city ordinances, and educate about circadian rhythms. Yet, the relativity and materiality of darkness opens thinking around sensation as an unstable and distributed form of atmospheric attunement.
With ethnographic attention to modes of sense-making around light pollution, ham radio, star parties, darkness measurement, ghost lights, fireflies, the clouds of Venus, and UFOs, I argue that darkness creates ‘textures’ of knowing among tendencies of abstraction. Tracing, in particular, chemosynthetic microbes as they ‘drift’ through darkness ‘quietly metabolizing the sky,’ (Wilkins, nd) I focus 'para-matters' at molecular scales, where bacteria that do not need light point to both the origins and definitions of life and their potential to repair or aid in processes of decarbonization or methane removal. Attending to the ‘soft’ matter of darkness (Smalbegovic 2021), questions emerge around chemical and molecular affects, as well as how they come to matter as toxins, political points, scientific evidence or not at all.
Drawing on papermaking and bioplastic techniques as methods for thinking with deformations of the sensible, atmospheric milieus, and material substrates, the paper unfolds within a sequence of blurry images of extraterrestrial clouds and ignus fautus as a speculative poetics.
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnography in Brazil’s Jequitinhonha Valley, this paper examines how Indigenous actors mobilize para-human formations and technologies to endure colonial land usurpation and lithium mining expansion, making ecological damage visible while reaffirming their ancestral presence and endurance.
Paper long abstract
This paper analyses how Indigenous actors in the Jequitinhonha Valley, Brazil, have articulated different (para-)human formations and technologies to endure, resist, and look forward despite the difficult context of ongoing colonial land usurpation and environmental degradation. The Jequitinhonha Valley has long been home to different Indigenous and Afrodiasporic groups who have attempted to reclaim territorial rights and re-live ecosystems of life and survival. More recently, driven by energy transition discourses, the Jequitinhonha Valley has become a central arena for lithium mining expansion projects in Brazil, increasing pressure on land and further reshaping the already disfigured ecologies of the region. Such mining projects have not only seized new land but have also impacted water, air, soil, and diverse living beings.
Based on ethnographic research, I offer an analysis of how Indigenous and other actors have mobilized para-human formations and technologies not only to make these impacts visible but also to reaffirm their ancestral presence and consolidate their future and ongoing endurance in the region. I observe that while approaches of repair seem impossible in the face of the ecological degradation (fore)seen in the Jequitinhonha Valley, cosmopolitical and para-human formations of endurance are constantly (re)articulated by Indigenous actors. I argue that paying attention to these strategies of resilience is crucial for opening new political possibilities despite increasing pressures from environmental catastrophes.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how a Syrian community expelled during the Battle of al-Qusayr reengineers time through intimate engagement with nature amid the voids of war. Nature as temporal repair reveals how para-human formations exceed humanitarian victimhood and revolutionary afterlives.
Paper long abstract
Al-Qusayr, a region nestled between Homs and the Syria-Lebanon border, gained international prominence as the theatre of a ruthless counterinsurgency campaign led by Hezbollah and Assad regime forces against rebel factions controlling the region. Culminating in the Battle of al-Qusayr in spring 2013, this counterinsurgency led to the destruction of the region’s natural and built environment and the expulsion of the local population. Some members of the community found refuge in Lebanon, where they built an informal camp and school, confronting what I define as “the voids of war.” Produced by political violence interlocking with defeated revolution and Lebanon's humanitarian management of Syrian presence, these voids are temporal-spatial collapses that disrupt linear time, infiltrating the community’s social time and threatening social reproduction itself. Inhabiting the aftermath and its voids, Qusayris faced not only the impossibility of returning to al-Qusayr but also the fear that the aftermath would become a perennial liminal condition between wartime and postwar, home and exile.
This paper examines Qusayris’ efforts to reengineer time through intimate engagement with nature, cultivating para-human formations across generations. Adults transmitted sensory knowledge, artistic sensibilities, and agricultural skills to children, creating affective spaces through which they reinhabited intimate bonds with nature—as if the loss of land had never occurred. Nature became both a medium for regenerating temporal flow and a bearer of multitemporal family histories tying Qusayris to their land. By foregrounding nature as temporal repair, this paper reveals how para-human formations exceed humanitarian parameters of victimhood and revolutionary afterlives.
Paper short abstract
Allelopathic non/assemblages refer to the negative ways that plants, humans and the four elements open way for broader coexistence. Experiments with mulching, and “flora fortresses” to restore soils turns allelopathy into practical, adaptive strategies that merge science, myth, and local knowledge.
Paper long abstract
Had Social Darwinism drawn its metaphors from Mendel’s chickpea garden, it might have been named allelopathy, a biochemical, plant-based understanding of competition, conquest, and survival among vegetal and elemental beings. Long surrounded by myths, conspiracies, and popular misinterpretations, allelopathy is refashioned in social media gardening tips, prescribing which plants should not be grown together, often without empirical grounding. How then, does allelopathy, despite the difficulty of disentangling the effects of allelochemicals from light, water, soil, and microbial dynamics, turn into an experimental practice among farmers and conservationists navigating uncertainty in war-degraded landscapes of the Iran–Iraq southern borderlands?
This paper explores ethnographically practices of soil-conservation among farmers and engineers in the deserted parts of Mesopotamian Marshland that evolve around multi-layered planting, mulching, and the construction of “flora fortresses” to revive war-impoverished soils and rotate crops. These practices unfold in landscapes degraded by heavy-metal pollution, unexploded ordnance, erosion, and decades of mismanagement. While allelopathy is conventionally understood as a form of “interference competition”, where plants deploy allelochemicals to inhibit neighbouring species and establish territorial dominance, often enabling invasive “novel weapons”, local actors rework, resist, and sometimes instrumentalise these dynamics in collaborative and conflicting ways. I refer to these experiments through the trope of non/assemblage of multi-species: unstable constellations of plants, chemicals, soils, infrastructures, and security regimes that exceed both ecological engineering and agrarian tradition. The paper argues that soil conservation in war-scarred borderlands is not a project of ecological restoration alone, but a political reassembly of life, competition, and coexistence beyond monocultures.
Paper short abstract
What are the parameters of teaching and learning about GenAI, engaging AIpocalyptic imaginaries? How can we understand parahuman intelligence with ethnographic, pedagogic, and speculative methods to critically use and/or refuse "artificial" intelligence across planetary and localized contexts?
Paper long abstract
Refusal of hegemonic terms of life (Thomas 2024) embodied by big-tech GenAI (generative artificial intelligence) systems–serving the military-industrial complex (Dharmaraj 2024)–as political, strategic action must be taught and learned. What are the parameters of teaching and learning about GenAI as para-matter, engaging AIpocalyptic imaginaries (Mascareño 2024)? Pedagogies of refusal cannot be conflated with only learning how to say "no" (Eggert, Hagen, Turner 2025) or proactive resistance against (Mcgranahan 2016) hegemonic AI formations (Ricaurte 2022) that recursively inscribe themselves. Such framings risk reproducing the a priori supremacy of machine learning that privilege the epistemic processes of extractivist datafication, algorithmisation and automation vis-à-vis other possibilities of epistemic, relational, and datapolitical formations that we frame here as parahuman intelligence. Urban intelligence cannot be confined to the understanding of efficiency-based applications or critique-only approaches. This collaborative paper reflects on a capacious notion of intelligence by attuning to socioenvironmental entanglements in cities as conspirational spaces where humans learn to intra-act (Barad 2007) with non-humans, atmospheric affordances, ancestral techniques, machines and data infrastructures as parahuman forms. How can we understand parahuman intelligence across planetary and localized contexts? How might ethnographic refusal (Ortner 1984) become a method for pedagogic, speculative and collaborative engaging with and/or refusing androcentric intelligence? Amidst a global shift to the far right, tech oligarchs (Cohen 2025) and rapid socio-techno-environmental degradation, accelerated by the current AI hype (Mühlhoff 2025) it is crucial to address the discursive hegemony of intelligence around the "artificial" and move towards counter-hegemonic parahuman pedagogies.