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- Convenors:
-
Koreen Reece
(University of Bayreuth)
Magdalena Suerbaum (Bielefeld University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores regeneration as a relational practice of seeking change in multispecies contexts of injury, violence, and loss – and as a frame for bridging polarisations between generations, and between human and more-than-human worlds.
Long Abstract
How do families forge, recuperate or reorient kin relations with and through more-than-human worlds in times of upheaval? How do kin mobilise multispecies alliances to survive and thrive in the context of climate crisis, marginalization and oppression, or conflict? What experiments do they pursue, and what new relations and constellations do they produce, with what transformative potentials?
Following Ingold’s (2023) observation that generations are collaborative entwinements working to renew life, this panel explores kin relations in and with more-than-human worlds as key sites of socio-political experimentation and transformation in times of crisis. We propose to think these relations and practices together in terms of ‘regeneration’. Durham and Cole (2007) describe regeneration as a process of social reproduction that links the intimate and political. We suggest that the land, environment, and more-than-human worlds also have a crucial role to play (Khayyat 2023) – and invite us to reimagine regeneration as a practice that seeks regrowth and transformation in contexts of injury, loss, or death (Reece 2025). Regeneration captures simultaneous movement towards continuity and change, an attempt to reproduce selves, families, histories and nations without reproducing the inequalities, suffering, or violence to which they may have been subjected, and from which so much contemporary political and personal polarization springs. Regeneration thus allows us to think beyond the (re)production of oppositions between generations, and between the human and more-than-human, to creative, hopeful alternatives.
We invite contributions that use the concept of regeneration to explore intergenerational, multispecies attempts to create change in hyper-polarised times.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper examines canine adoption as a multispecies process of im/mobility and regeneration, showing how humans and dogs can co-create new relations while navigating regimes of mobility, care, and vulnerability.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores canine adoption as a process of multispecies regeneration at the intersection of mobility, care, and vulnerability. Drawing on an autoethnographic account of adopting a Romanian dog and my involvement in rescue networks in Switzerland, I show that adoption is not a linear or logistical transfer but a transformative relational and mobility practice. It brings together differently positioned beings—rescued dogs, adopters, volunteers—within selective and morally charged regimes of mobility that shape who can move, under what conditions, and with what consequences.
The paper examines how, through adoption, families and dogs can co-produce new forms of kinship and connection through everyday negotiations and movements, marked by trust-building and embodied, emotional adjustments. These practices constitute forms of socio-affective regeneration: through daily care, training, and shared routines, humans and dogs become-with each other, creating relationships that heal past traumas and foster security and connection.
By foregrounding dogs’ im/mobilities as both shaped by and shaping human worlds, the paper contributes to mobilities studies and anthropological debates on multispecies relations. It highlights how interspecies encounters generate transformative potentials in times of heightened moral and social polarization, offering a lens to rethink regeneration beyond the human.
Paper short abstract
Migrants in Finland explore ways to protect kin, both human and non-human, from ticks. This shows how regeneration happens through looking after each other, suffering harm, and working together with other species in the face of climate change and shifting ecologies.
Paper long abstract
Warming environments enable the spread of ticks and the microbes they carry (Laaksonen et al. 2017; Aivelo et al. 2019; Kukko-Liedes & Nykänen 2024), thereby introducing new health risks for families and their non-human companions. Drawing on ethnographic research I conducted between 2022 and 2024 in Finland, this paper explores how migrants engage in multispecies regenerative practices of care to protect themselves, their children, and animals from tick-borne diseases. These practices range from medical recommendations for tick removal (e.g. THL 2022) to techniques learned through family networks, such as intergenerational intimate body checks or plant coalitions around the house.
I propose reading these routines through the concept of regeneration as a relational, multispecies response to ecological crisis. Finnish nature is celebrated as spaces that support wellbeing, health, and national belonging (Bodström 2020), yet entry into these landscapes is nevertheless shaped by knowledge of risks and behavioural norms. However, regeneration is uneven. While the proliferation of ticks may signal ecological renewal for the ecosystem, it simultaneously exposes humans and companion species to harm. Care for human and non-human kin entails exclusions, affective violence, and the abjection of non-human beings whose presence disturbs bodily and moral order (Braidotti 2013; Creed 2017; Kristeva 1982/2024). While both human and tick bodies move, human and non-human forms of regeneration coexist, conflict, and inform each other. I show how regeneration emerges through both continuity (drawing on inherited knowledges) and transformation (experimenting with new alliances, imaginaries, and techniques) in the context of moving to a new country.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores the role of labour in constituting cross-species kinships within Slovak horse-logging communities, emphasizing the ecological relevance of the practice and its capacity to reframe understandings of human–horse collaboration and work.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on ongoing sensory ethnographic research among Slovak horse-logging communities, this paper explores multispecies kinship (Haraway, 2016) as a relational practice that takes shape through everyday human–horse collaboration in forest work, in landscapes marked by ecological injury and loss. Rather than approaching kinship as a symbolic framework, the paper traces how it is enacted materially and sensorially in the course of labour, through shared movement, touch, fatigue, and attention to terrain.
Horse-logging in Slovakia unfolds in forests shaped by irresponsible state policies and competing models of extraction and care. Within this context, the practice is often framed as a relic or folkloric reminiscence rather than as a contemporary, ecologically relevant form of forestry (Messingerová, Stanovský, 2009), even as it persists through cross-generational learning and the particular appeal of horse–human kinship. Horse-logging depends on fine-grained coordination between humans, horses, trees, tools, weather, and forest terrain. It is through these multispecies interactions that work is organised, and that questions of forest disturbance, animal welfare, and responsibility are negotiated in practice. The relationship between horses and horse-loggers thus emerges as both intimate and asymmetrical: formed through care, attentiveness, and sensory attunement, while simultaneously structured by ownership, economic constraint, and concrete material working conditions.
Against this background, the paper approaches regeneration ethnographically rather than as a policy-driven or abstract ecological goal. Regeneration emerges here as a situated practice that seeks regrowth and continuity within damaged environments, through attempts to sustain livelihoods and relations without reproducing the extractive logics that have contributed to environmental loss.
Paper short abstract
Olive groves in Sicily, Italy, are sites of more-than-human kin relations, describing a “mutuality of being” (Sahlins 2011). This more-than-human (re)generational constellation does work “to renew life”, not without embodied patterns of violence, in a context of economic and environmental crisis.
Paper long abstract
Coming out of 14 months of immersive ethnographic fieldwork and ten years of ongoing presence in the field, this paper aims to contribute to the panel with a case study of small- to medium-scale oliviculture, or the production of olives, and olive oil, from Sicily, Italy. Sicily has long been framed as a land rife with violence and loss, particularly vis a vis the political and intimate violence of the mafia and the state. Sicily, historically agricultural, also faces environmental degradation and ruination in the form of climate change and its impacts: prolonged drought and dramatic weather events, like that caused by the recent Cyclone Harry. Rather than focusing on loss, and inspired by the Convenors’ bringing together of “generations” (Ingold 2023) as “collaborative entwinements working to renew life” and “regeneration” (Durham and Cole 2007), I focus on what participants speak of and practice in what I call their praxis of care (Hilton 2022) of oliviculture, or why they choose not to abandon an increasingly precarious livelihood, and instead (for now), to stay on the land. As the convenors note, kin relations are central to interspecies relations. I argue that Sicilian oliviculturalists with whom I work are generational in that they work to renew life, but question if they are regenerational, or if, and how, their praxis reproduces certain violences. In doing so I frame oliviculture as more-than-human “interembodiment” (Bunkley 2022), and olive trees as sentient kin (Hilton 2025), with kinship implying a "mutuality of being” (Sahlins 2011).
Paper short abstract
Regenerative agriculture is a practice of regeneration that responds to socio-ecological crisis by building a multispecies alliance of soils, trees, humans, ancestors, and God. Patience and hope are crucial to this intergenerational project of change.
Paper long abstract
In western Kenya, in a context of deep socio-ecological crisis, regenerative agriculture is gaining prominence. While often framed as a set of techniques to restore soil fertility and improve yields, regenerative agriculture here is also understood as a broader transformative practice aimed at addressing legacies of extractivism, rural out-migration, and intergenerational conflict. In this paper, I analyse regenerative agriculture as a practice of regeneration: a relational effort to create “growth” (dongruok) under conditions of decline. I trace the everyday work involved in cultivating what local practitioners describe as central to regeneration: a multispecies alliance among soils, trees, animals, humans, ancestors, and God. Centring the hardships and uncertainties of this work, I highlight the temporal and ethical orientations through which regeneration is pursued. I show that patience and hope are key generative dispositions. Patience enables attunement to the rhythms and agencies of human and more-than-human others, making cooperation and joint becoming across difference possible. Hope, in turn, sustains regenerative efforts in the face of failure, delay, and disappointment. Together, patience and hope orient regenerative agriculture as an intergenerational project that works to renew kin relations with land and more-than-human worlds.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how more-than-human memory is used in the regeneration of kinship on Lord Howe Island. It examines how ‘taking the old path’ through historic palm seeding sites on the Island can recuperate kinship connections and orient Lord Howe Islanders’ identity amidst radical change.
Paper long abstract
Taking the ‘old path’ alongside a Lord Howe Islander to Grey Face, a historic palm seeding site on Lord Howe, this paper ethnographically explores how more-than-human memory regenerates kinship relations used in the formation of socio-political identities on the Island. I explore how Grey Face can be understood as an unlikely ruin, one that tells the story of the upheaval of the palm industry, formerly the Island’s main economy, the take-over of tourism, and the consequential increase of governmental control with its associated environmental regulation. This background of upheaval has beckoned unprecedented challenges to the identity of Lord Howe Islanders, leading to increased polarisation between Islanders and the government as well as Islanders and ‘non-Islanders’. Amidst this polarisation and change, this paper examines how Lord Howe Islanders’ engage with powerful memories that are materialised in the more-than-human to make claims of unique belonging forged in kin relations. I argue that memory is essential to identity on Lord Howe Island, and show that, in the face of changing relationships between people, the Island, and the past on Lord Howe, the more-than-human was doing much of the ‘memory work’. Drawing on affect theory and thinking about non-human temporalities, I examine the ways more-than-human memory can be understood. In exploring the socio-political regeneration of identity on Lord Howe through peoples’ engagement with more-than-human memory, this paper also challenges an overly sentimental view of this process by illustrating ways in which the more-than-human may also erase memory and therein certain identities and histories.
Paper short abstract
Environmentalists frequently engage their grief over lost landscapes, species or individual specimen in collective rituals. I show how such rituals render the intimate a site of political contestation and bridge the personal with the planetary in terms of seeking mutual regeneration.
Paper long abstract
Among contemporary environmentalists, mourning rituals have become increasingly popular. As part or direct-action tactics or, more often, during meetings or seminars, environmental activists across Europe collectively engage their grief over lost or threatened landscapes, species or individuals in dedicated rituals. In due course, environmentalists have enlarged the sphere of ‘grievable bodies’ (Butler 2006) so as to include non-human others and begun mobilizing ‘grief work’ as a vehicle for sustaining activism in times of polarization.
Based on fieldwork among European climate activists, in this paper I demonstrate how collective and ritualized mourning practices appear to be sites of striving for the regeneration of life against the background of darkening future prospects. I argue that such mourning practices are modalities of ‘alter-politics’ (Hage 2015), rendering the intimate a domain of political contestations and of bridging the personal with the planetary in terms of seeking mutual regeneration. Mourning here appears less as an individuum-centered mode of working through loss, than an attempt to retain and regenerate ties – within collectives, across entangled more-than-human worlds or across the life/death divide. I argue that mourning here is performed explicitly in order to shift the imagination and to make efforts towards societal transformation desirable, harnessing grief and anxieties to concrete political projects of regeneration.
Paper short abstract
My paper is an ethnographic account of my experience listening to a Kensiu cultural storyteller narrate our misadventures while lost in the ruinous forest landscape. His culturally woven account was regenerative in its ability to make sense of the logging-related ruins in his ancestral forest.
Paper long abstract
The resettlement village of Kampung Orang Asli Lubuk Legong has been home to a group of Malaysian Indigenous people (Orang Asli) of the Kensiu ethnicity since the 1970s. It sits on the fringes of the Ulu Muda Forest Complex, which was traditionally home to the Kensiu people before "development" intervened. Today, the Ulu Muda forest they once knew has been fragmented by logging activity. In light of this reality, cultural storytellers (bejorbang) now tell different tales to the young—tales inspired by, and deeply shaped by, the “disturbed” landscapes that surround them.
In the past, a bejorbang would share mystical narratives of the community, to appease cosmic spirits and to educate the young on community values. These stories often drew on the surrounding landscapes as starting points for recounting mytho-historical tales. Today, as these landscapes are rapidly destroyed, the validity of these myths is challenged by the absence of tangible, evidence-bearing placeholders. Community stories are still shared occasionally, but they now serve to deflect potential misfortunes arising from environmental destruction.
My paper recounts my ethnographic experience listening to a bejorbang who narrated our misadventures while lost in the ruinous forest. I argue that the bejobang regenerates a challenged community storytelling tradition by associating the aesthetics of ruins as evidence of their lightning-god's (Kaei's) disavowal of environmental destruction (i.e. "tempet cemam"). Inaction may lead one to be infected by an incurable disease known as "cemam". Bejobang stories, then, are essential to redress environmental degradation that would otherwise be beyond villagers' control.