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.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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