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- Convenors:
-
Franz Krause
(University of Cologne)
Tanya Richardson (Wilfrid Laurier University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
How can multispecies practices of commoning - beyond oppositions of conservation, subsistence, stewardship and use - sustain shared worlds? Exploring these practices amid intensifying political and ecological polarisation, we discuss possibilities for coexistence and repair in a fractured world.
Long Abstract
This panel explores how multispecies worlds are made, protected, and contested through practices of commoning—ongoing, situated efforts to sustain shared life in ways that exceed ownership, resource management, and rigid divisions between humans and nonhumans. In many contexts, relationships with animals, plants, and landscapes are grounded in forms of responsibility and reciprocity that blur distinctions between conservation and subsistence, care and extraction, or use and protection. Yet these practices increasingly unfold within political and ecological conditions characterised by intensifying polarisation: between market and community, scientific authority and lived knowledge, state-managed conservation and local forms of stewardship, as well as between competing visions of how to ensure the future of more-than-human worlds.
Bringing together multispecies ethnographies from diverse regions, this panel examines how shared life is enacted through spatial, ethical, and material practices that both respond to and reshape contested environments. We ask how stewardship is distributed across species, how ecological relations form the basis for political and moral claims, and how commoning practices are challenged or reconfigured by war, colonial and imperial legacies, conservation regimes, capitalist economies, and climate change. Rather than framing polarisation as simply conflict or breakdown, the panel considers how it also generates new grounds for negotiation, transformation, and repair. We argue that attending to multispecies commoning can reveal possibilities for reimagining coexistence—where life is sustained not as a bounded possession but as a shared and continually re-made condition.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
I examine how contemporary efforts to revitalize endangered silk plantations in Assam–through technoscientific interventions, land reforms, and sustainability schemes–reshape multispecies landscapes, producing new forms of (im)mobility and sovereignty while unevenly sustaining agrarian commons.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research across plantation and agricultural landscapes, laboratories, and governmental institutions in Northeast India, this paper examines contemporary efforts to revitalize Muga silk production in the state of Assam as projects of sustaining agrarian commons under conditions of ecological, economic, and political polarization in the region. I show how technoscientific interventions, land reforms, and sustainability schemes rework nineteenth-century plantation expertise into new regimes of environmental governance that alternately enclose and sustain fragile multispecies landscapes.
Rather than treating Muga silk as an emblem of regional heritage or peasant tradition, the paper traces the life of a biotic resource—silkworms, host trees, soils, and human labor—whose survival depends on precarious relations of care, access, and mobility. In agrarian zones in these eastern Himalayan borderlands, where agricultural commons and forest land continue to shrink despite formal land reforms, silk landscapes emerge as contested sites where indigenous communities negotiate the conditions under which human and nonhuman lives can endure. Attending to the everyday struggles of farmers and their interface with plantation managers, and state institutions, I argue plantations are continually reterritorialized through conservation regimes and development projects that recast land as a site of ecological risk and regulatory intervention. These processes often produce uneven possibilities for multispecies survival while also generating practices of repair that partially reconfigure agrarian commons without resolving the structural inequalities that threaten them. The paper argues that silkworm plantations function less as stable infrastructures of extraction than as unstable assemblages through which life is collectively maintained, contested, and remade.
Paper short abstract
Tracing how urban theory and planning polarise animal life, the city of Delhi is explored as a contested multispecies commons, it shows how animals disrupt the imagination of the anthropocentric planning, revealing commoning as fraught, negotiated, and unfinished.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the city as a contested multispecies commons by foregrounding the polarisation between urban planning and theory and how animals are imagined, governed, and lived with in contemporary cities. Drawing on a critical genealogy of urban thought, from nineteenth-century planning and modernist urbanism to posthuman urbanisation and sustainability frameworks, the paper shows how dominant imaginaries of the urban have persistently produced an anthropocentric city, defined by the exclusion, regulation, or instrumentalisation of nonhuman life. Animals appear as economic inputs, sanitary threats, ecological indicators, or abstract metabolic flows, but rarely as co-inhabitants or political subjects.
Against this theoretical backdrop, the paper situates contemporary urban animal discourses in Delhi, such as the regulation of stray dogs or the labouring horse at the informal construction sites, within the panel’s concern with multispecies commoning under conditions of intensifying polarisation. Here, commoning emerges not as a harmonious coexistence but as a deeply fraught practice, shaped by tensions between state-managed expertise and lived urban knowledge, legality and care, public order and multispecies responsibility. These examples reveal a sharp divide between urban theory’s growing posthuman sensibilities and planning praxis that continues to reproduce human-exclusive norms of order, safety, and productivity.
By reading urban animals as both products and disruptors of planning rationalities, the paper contributes to multispecies urbanism by reframing the city itself as an unfinished commons, continuously becoming through uneven practices of care, exclusion, and shared life.
Paper short abstract
This talk examines the extent to which using the English-language terms “commoning” and “commons” to describe efforts to conserve a Carpathian honeybee type in Western Ukraine’s Kolochava Territorial Hromada illuminates and obscures participants’ practices, relations, intentions & desired outcomes.
Paper long abstract
Carpathian bees, one of three “aboriginal breeds and populations” according to Ukraine’s beekeeping law, are conserved in Transcarpathia Oblast by underpaid and unfunded researchers from the Prokopovych Beekeeping Institute. Because queens mate in the air with many drones from other colonies several kilometers from their nests, complex more-than-human “voluminous socialities” (Richardson 2025) are involved in arranging three-dimensional breeding spaces in order to maintain evolutionarily distinct types and “improve” them so that that commercial beekeepers will buy them. The unfunded Kolochava Territorial Hromada conservation project arose out of researchers’ and mountain beekeepers’ disputes with a prominent commercial beekeeper about how to breed Carpathian honeybees, and their recognition that they needed to collaborate to “dehybridize” bees and re-establish a type of Carpathian lost the 1990s.
Drawing on ethnographic research with these researchers and beekeepers between 2019 and 2025, I describe specific moments in the three-dimensional practices of rearing, mating, sampling, measuring, sharing, and circulating queens, worker bees and drones to specify what is being “commoned” in the KTH project, and where and when commoning occurs. While concepts of “more-than-human commoning” (Bresnihan 2016) and “common pool resource” (Ostrom 1990) capture certain elements of this process, their meanings, politics and affective charges do not map precisely onto Ukrainian terms used locally for “commons.” Some researchers and beekeepers, meanwhile, dream of greater state support (funding, law enforcement) and market demand for queens, both of which could undermine the fragile successes achieved thus far amidst a global pandemic and russia’s imperialistic war against Ukraine.
Paper short abstract
This paper combines multispecies ethnographic research with political ecology to examine ambivalent human-pigeon relations as historically situated practices of commoning. I argue that through artistic design practices complexities of urban coexistence and urban possibilities can be explored.
Paper long abstract
The feral pigeon is a polarizing species in urban areas. While often dismissed as a nuisance, the bird shares a deep history of entanglement with humans: serving as a messenger, food source, and even military asset. Although their direct economically utility has faded, feral pigeons continue to generate labour through urban design adaptions, population control, and infrastructure maintenance. This paper investigates these ambivalences and interactions as historically situated practices of commoning and as negotiated efforts towards urban coexistence.
Based on ongoing research in Klagenfurt (Austria), this contribution combines interviews, multisensory walks, and hands-on eco-design workshops with citizens. These methods reveal how commoning practices are enacted and experienced through “storying” with the feral pigeon, facilitating a making and re-making of embodied relational meaning.
Interventions via artistic design create spaces of friction, prompting reflection on scientific knowledge, embodied perception and affective responses. Challenges of commoning, like competing values, shape human-pigeon relations. Rather than idealizing multispecies coexistence these stories created embrace existing ambivalences. This paper explores how design-based methods can be a tool to reimagining multispecies coexistence in the city.
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnography in a Kichwa forest commons, this paper examines human–jaguar conviviality that sustains life in the forest based on mutual respect, despite ongoing discrimination of indigenous practices by conserveration actors.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines human–jaguar conviviality in a Kichwa forest commons in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Drawing on ethnographic research with Kichwa families, hunters, and forest elders, I explore how jaguars are not framed primarily as wildlife to be conserved or managed, but as powerful co-inhabitants whose presence shapes everyday practices, moral obligations, and territorial relations. Within this commons, forest life is sustained through established and continually negotiated rules of conviviality that govern hunting, movement, reciprocity, and restraint across species.
Rather than positioning jaguars as either threats to subsistence or symbols of conservation value, Kichwa engagements with jaguars articulate a mode of shared life that exceeds the conservation–use binary. Jaguars are understood as sentient beings with their own perspectives, territorial claims, and capacities for response. Encounters with them generate questions about excess, respect, and accountability, often read through signs, dreams, and changes in animal behaviour. These relations distribute stewardship beyond the human: jaguars are seen as regulators of forest life, enforcers of balance, and co-creators of the commons.
The paper situates these practices within broader contexts of ecological and political polarisation, including conservation regimes that criminalise Indigenous subsistence, and competing perspectives of wildlife management. I argue that Kichwa multispecies commoning does not seek harmony or stability but sustains shared worlds through mutual respect and pragmatic behaviour. By attending to human–jaguar conviviality as a lived practice of commoning, the paper contributes to rethinking coexistence as a fragile, relational achievement: one that offers alternative imaginaries of shared life amid intensifying ecological and political fracture.
Paper short abstract
This presentation argues that Dinjii Zhuh and Inuvialuit practices of respectful killing enact forms of sharing between humans, animals and land that unsettle conservation biology’s assumptions and offer an alternative to the entrenched divide between using and protecting environments.
Paper long abstract
This presentation examines how Dinjii Zhuh and Inuvialuit hunters in the Mackenzie Delta enact practices of killing, sharing and care that challenge dominant conservationist framings of life and multispecies relations. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, I show that respecting animals and taking their lives are not construed as oppositional acts but intertwined obligations within a relational universe premised on sharing. In this context, commoning is not limited to human cooperation or resource governance but extends to the animal persons who offer their lives for human thriving, and to a land understood to provide so long as it is approached with respect. Going out to hunt is therefore foremost not an extractive act but a crucial modality of maintaining relations with the land, reaffirming responsibilities that sustain more-than-human communities.
By foregrounding Indigenous practices of respectful killing and multispecies sharing, the paper argues that current conservation biology—often eager to mobilise Indigenous concepts while filtering them through its own assumptions about species, life and ecology—remains poorly equipped to recognise these forms of commoning. In tracing how hunters, animals and land co-produce conditions of subsistence and repair, the presentation offers an alternative to the prevailing polarity between use and protection. It invites a rethinking of conservation beyond the dualisms that dominate Euro-American environmental thought, toward frameworks that take relational ontologies seriously.
Paper short abstract
This paper develops an ethics of failed care to examine pastoral multispecies commoning in Inner Mongolia. Through sheep deaths and veterinary responses, it shows how shared life is sustained and repaired amid ecological uncertainty and market-state pressures.
Paper long abstract
This paper introduces the concept of an ethics of failed care as a lens for examining how multispecies commoning is sustained, contested, and reconfigured when care does not achieve its intended outcomes. Based on long-term ethnographic research with herding households and local veterinarians in a pastoral community in Inner Mongolia (2021–2022), it explores two episodes involving the deaths of sheep within the same herd: a ewe that died during prolonged labor and another sheep dissected after a diagnosis of parasitic infection associated with “dead” water.
Rather than treating failure as the end of care, the paper argues that breakdowns in more-than-human relations become ethical ruptures through which responsibility, reciprocity, and shared life are renegotiated. Practices such as burial, refusal of payment, diagnostic dissection, and shared consumption operate as forms of stewardship that redirect care toward what remains possible. These responses reveal how multispecies commoning is enacted not through stable harmony but through moments of loss, reflection, and repair.
Situating these events within constrained pastoral ecologies shaped by limited mobility, intensifying market demands, and tightening governance, the paper highlights how everyday efforts to sustain shared life unfold amid contested environments. Failed care thus becomes a generative ethical node, illuminating how herders and veterinarians strive to live well with their animals under conditions where multispecies futures are increasingly uncertain. In doing so, the paper extends multispecies and care scholarship beyond ideals of “good care” to attend to rupture, redistribution, and the ongoing labor of commoning.
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnographic research among rare poultry farmers in Italy and Australia, this paper explores multispecies commoning as a practice that sustains shared life, showing how care, use, and repair are entangled in everyday human–animal relations.
Paper long abstract
Based on twelve months of multisited ethnographic fieldwork among farmers of native, heritage, and rare poultry breeds in Italy and Australia, this paper explores multispecies commoning as a situated practice that unfolds beyond the polarised oppositions of conservation versus subsistence, protection versus use, and care versus extraction.
Drawing on participant observation and multispecies ethnography, I examine how farmers maintain endangered poultry breeds through practices including selective breeding, exchange of reproductive animals, informal networks of knowledge sharing, and small-scale slaughter for consumption and sale. These practices challenge dominant conservation paradigms that seek to preserve life by isolating it from use, revealing instead a form of commoning grounded in responsibility, reciprocity, and interdependence across species.
I argue that rare poultry breeds are not treated as bounded property or abstract genetic resources, but as shared, living commons whose survival depends on continuous relational work. This form of multispecies commoning does not resolve ethical tensions around animal death and exploitation; rather, it renders them explicit and subject to negotiation. Violence is not erased but redistributed, slowed down, and embedded within moral economies prioritising continuity of life over maximisation of productivity.
Situated within contexts marked by ecological crisis, capitalist agriculture, and regulatory constraints, these practices of commoning operate as forms of repair—partial, fragile, and always unfinished. By attending to how humans and poultry co-produce shared worlds under conditions of polarisation, this paper contributes to debates on multispecies coexistence, conservation, and alternative futures.
Paper short abstract
Based on a year of ethnography with the Duha of northern Mongolia, this paper examines reindeer–human relations as a cooperative, relational practice. It argues that companionship, not pastoral ownership, sustains shared worlds and resilience amid social and ecological change.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the adaptation strategies of the Duha reindeer-keeping community in northern Mongolia in the context of rapid socioeconomic and environmental change. Drawing on ethnographic data collected through a year of living and working with the community, it focuses on transformations in economic practices and subsistence strategies.
I argue that the Duha have not historically been pastoralists but hunter-gatherers, and that their relationship with reindeer exemplifies a cooperative and relational mode of subsistence. This challenges prevailing representations of the Duha as nomadic herders and unsettles simplified binaries between use and care, production and stewardship. Rather than treating reindeer as livestock and the Duha as pastoralists, the paper frames reindeer–human companionship as a flexible strategy that sustains shared life and resilience in the face of environmental and social pressures. In this light, their interactions can be seen as a form of everyday commoning, where shared access and mutual responsibility help maintain human–animal networks.
This relational mode of subsistence unfolds within political and ecological contexts shaped by conservation frameworks, tourism, and climate change. By emphasizing cooperation and mutual dependence, the paper highlights how reindeer–human relations produce both practical outcomes and ethical claims to land, mobility, and continuity, while remaining adaptable to shifting circumstances.
By situating Duha subsistence practices within broader discussions of relationality, shared worlds, and more-than-human resilience, the paper contributes to anthropological debates on domestication, sustainability, and multispecies coexistence, and shows how attention to everyday practices can reveal ways of sustaining life beyond rigid ownership or management frameworks.
Paper short abstract
Across Italy and Spain, truffle ecologies materialize as multispecies assemblages where human, animal, and fungal agencies co-produce emergent forms of mycorrhizal commoning. These entanglements expose shifting regimes of value, care, and ecological reciprocity in more-than-human rural worlds.
Paper long abstract
In the intertwined landscapes of northwestern Italy and northeastern Spain, truffle hunting and cultivation unfold as multispecies practices of coexistence.
This paper explores how truffle hunters in Piedmont’s Langhe hills and cultivators on Aragon’s highlands enact forms of commoning that cross species boundaries and temporal rhythms.
White truffles (Tuber magnatum) and black truffles (Tuber melanosporum) thrive through fragile ecologies of soil, trees, animals, and humans whose lives become entangled in acts of care, speculations, and extractions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and more-than-human anthropology (Tsing, 2015; Kohn, 2013; Haraway, 2016), the paper examines how truffle ecologies both sustain and destabilize local economies, moral landscapes, and senses of place. In Piedmont, truffle hunters and their dogs cultivate intimate, embodied relations of attentiveness that resist commodification yet operate within global luxury markets. In Aragon, black truffle “plantations” transform marginal lands into experimental commons where human labor mediates microbial and arboreal relations.
Across both sites, truffles operate as agents of negotiation between market and community, cultivation and foraging, human ambition and ecological contingency. By tracing these multispecies collaborations, it can be argued that truffle practices exemplify emergent forms of “mycorrhizal commoning”: shared life rooted in mutual dependence rather than ownership. These fungal encounters invite us to reconsider the politics of more-than-human stewardship in contested European ruralities.
Paper short abstract
Humans must adapt to climate change in relation with other species. Fishers compete with seals and invasive species for declining fish stocks. Changes in foodweb dynamics reverberate through fishers’ social networks, necessitating commons thinking and relational understandings of food sovereignty.
Paper long abstract
In the face of multiple social and ecological crises, rural communities pursue food sovereignty to secure livelihoods. In an era of climate change, however, humans must navigate livable futures in relation to all other species with whom they co-inhabit the landscape. I bring into conversation insights from my work with organic farmers in Latvia and Costa Rica with my current research with small scale coastal fishers on the Baltic Sea coast. While farmers negotiate new relationships with their land, seeds, and each other, often in cooperation with other species in the landscape, the move from land to sea illuminates crucial tensions that arise in the more-than-human dimensions of our understandings of food sovereignty. Fishers are differently entwined in webs of interspecies relationships. They find themselves competing for declining fish stocks with growing populations of grey seals and invasive fish species like the round goby, who are also seeking new territories as they adapt to climate change. Each shift in food web dynamics reverberates through fishers’ social networks as they navigate EU fishing quotas, new technologies, markets, and marine conservation rules. In addition, coastal fishers are increasingly at odds with proposed new marine conservation areas and offshore wind parks. Relational understandings of adaptation may reveal opportunities to redefine practices through shared responsibilities and reciprocity. I contemplate possibilities for common understandings of adaption, interdependence, and multispecies food sovereignty in a polarized world and increasingly divided sea.
Paper short abstract
Oyster farming aims the production of oysters’ flesh. Domestication is a process through which humans tend to include other beings to their close and anthropized environment, the domus, creating a common time and space for humans, oysters and their environment: the domus ostrearia.
Paper long abstract
Oyster farming in France is one of the most recent domestication, dated from around 150 years from now. It aims the breeding (often labelled as cultivating) of oysters for their meet/flesh. Domestication is a process through which humans tend to integer other beings to their close and anthropized environment, the domus. This process impacts both the domesticated and the domesticators, humans. Their lives (humans and non-humans) are mostly impacted by the new calendar that emerge from this artificial co-habitation: conjugating the restraints of both (biological, economical, social, …) to achieve the exploitation of the domesticated non-humans. Oyster farmers so organized a sum of steps – rooted on their knowledge of oysters’ life cycle and the socio-economical calendar – to produce fresh oysters ready to be consumed by humans, mostly raw and alive. Although this division between exploiters/domesticators and exploited/domesticated seems to draw a line, the reality is far more blur… specially in oyster farms where oysters and humans are balanced between land and sea. To analyse this way of co-living, and the common time and space that emerge from it, I suggest to use the concept of domus ostrearia, combining the domus with the specificities of oyster farming, a domestication and breeding taking place in an open environment. This communication, based on a year-long ethnographical fieldwork in Etang de Diane in Corsica, New-Caledonia lagoon and Etang de Thau in South of France, wish to discuss this analysing-tool and the way it helps to (re)think domestication in a fast-changing world.