- 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.