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This paper examines online videos of invasive species torture on Chinese platforms, where extermination becomes spectacle and pleasure. It traces a grammar of violence that frames cruelty as ecological responsibility, rendering certain lives ungrievable and violence ordinary.

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This paper develops the concept of a grammar of violence to analyze the proliferation of online videos depicting the torture and extermination of invasive species on Chinese social media platforms. These videos present cruelty as routine, instructional, and pleasurable, circulating through formats that emphasize immersion, repetition, and sensory satisfaction.

By grammar of violence, I refer to a structured set of rules through which harm becomes intelligible, legitimate, and repeatable. This grammar operates through three interlinked mechanisms. First, certain forms of life are named as invasive, positioning them as excessive, out of place, and inherently destructive. Second, material ecological damage is translated into moral threat, allowing violence to be framed as defense, responsibility, or care. Third, affective orientations such as disgust, satisfaction, and righteous pleasure are cultivated, training subjects to experience cruelty as emotionally appropriate and ethically coherent.

Within this framework, torture appears as management, hygiene, and environmental duty. Suffering remains visible, yet it is rendered ethically inconsequential through the prior removal of grievability.

The paper argues that this grammar is portable. Once established, it circulates across domains of governance, from environmental regulation to everyday digital practice, without requiring constant justification. Through the figure of the invasive species, violence is rehearsed in dispersed, individualized forms while retaining moral coherence. The normalization of cruelty toward nonhuman life provides insight into how exclusion, expendability, and justified harm are structured and sustained in everyday nationalism.

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This paper reframes rewilding as “rewriting”: a political ecology of multispecies life shaped by infrastructure and compensation. Using a Wadden Sea case, it shows how plants, animals, and sediments are mobilised in restoration, stabilising extractive regimes while also producing friction.

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Drawing on the Horizon Europe project REWRITE (Rewilding and Restoration of Intertidal Sediment Ecosystems), this paper brings multispecies ethnography into dialogue with political ecology to examine rewilding not as a return to nature but as a contested practice of environmental governance. I argue that coastal rewilding operates as a process of “rewriting”: a reconfiguration of human–nonhuman relations through infrastructures, legal frameworks, and sedimentary ecologies that materialise new regimes of value, responsibility, and legitimacy.

The analysis is grounded in a case study of Langenwarder Groden (Jade Bay, Wadden Sea), a tidal compensation area created in the context of large-scale port expansion. Here, dikes, dredged sediments, pioneer vegetation, invertebrates, and bird populations are mobilised to produce “new nature” that offsets industrial damage elsewhere. Rather than treating multispecies relations as inherently ethical or resistant, the paper traces how plants, animals, and sediments both stabilise extractive logics and generate frictions within them.

Building on the concept of sedimented narratives, I show how ecological processes, historical memories, and governance rationalities accumulate across temporal and material scales, shaping what kinds of futures become thinkable. Rewilding appears not simply as care for damaged environments but as a political ecology of slow violence, compensation, and infrastructural continuity—one in which multispecies life is enrolled in projects of mitigation and legitimation, yet also produces unexpected forms of contestation.

By moving beyond empathetic or celebratory multispecies accounts, the paper contributes a critical, place-based perspective on how power, value, and ecological transformation are materially enacted in contemporary restoration regimes.

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This paper reads post-wildfire landscapes in Central Portugal as political-ecological archives. Forest parcellation, eucalyptus monocultures and uneven regrowth trace extractive histories, while revealing how multispecies relations shape fire afterlives and possibilities for collaborative survival.

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Wildfires have become a cyclical and structuring condition of life in Central Portugal. Repeated fires shape patterns of regrowth, collective memory, and everyday relations with land, rather than appearing as isolated moments of crisis. This paper introduces the concept of burned landscapes as political-ecological archives, approaching post-fire environments not only as sites of ecological loss but as terrains where colonial legacies, state-making, extractive forestry, and rural abandonment are materially imprinted, alongside emergent forms of multispecies life.

Based on ethnographic engagement with post-wildfire landscapes, I attend to forest parcellation, eucalyptus monocultures, abandoned agricultural terraces, and uneven regrowth as traces of land ownership regimes, forest policies, and fire governance. These features do not merely reflect past interventions; they actively shape how responsibility, risk, and care are distributed and lived across human and more-than-human actors.

Bringing multispecies ethnography into dialogue with political ecology, the paper follows how plants, animals, and infrastructures participate in the afterlives of fire. Some multispecies configurations reproduce fire-prone, extractive ecologies, while others, such as community agroforestry projects or the use of animals in fuel management, open more tentative possibilities for regenerative care and collaborative survival.

Treating burned landscapes as both archive and method, the paper argues that ecological transformation cannot be separated from political economy and governance. It asks how multispecies politics take form in landscapes repeatedly shaped by fire, extraction, and uneven state intervention.

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This paper traces 19th century Donghak Peasant Revolution, Saemangeum Seawall Opposition Movement, and the 2025 Bird and People's March as a shared activist heritage in which cosmology and political struggle enact an ontological refusal of extraction through interspecies relations.

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This paper examines multispecies politics on Korea's west coast through bird-human relations shaped by land reclamation, military occupation, and developmental planning. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Jeolla Province, it traces continuities across three moments rooted in the same landscape: the late nineteenth-century Donghak Peasant Revolution, opposition to the Saemangeum seawall in the 2000s, and the 2025 Bird-and-People's March against a proposed airport on militarised coastal wetlands. Attention to daily protests shows how standing with birds becomes inseparable from histories of resistance to exploitation. Rather than treating these as discrete environmental protests, the paper approaches them as recursive activist heritage through which cosmology and political struggle enact an ontological refusal of extraction, while remaining entangled in competing temporalities of regional survival and interspecies relations.

Donghak's principle of revering all beings as heaven emerged alongside demands against caste hierarchy and agrarian exploitation. Contemporary activists selectively inhabit this ethical inheritance, through which godwits emerge as both symbolic and juridical actors: their documented migratory dependence on the wetlands played a decisive role in the court ruling that halted the airport development. Initial participation—wearing and making bird hats, singing bird songs, marching —did not reflect a uniform standing point. Many were united by opposition to extractive logic, though their entry points ranged from anti-militarisation and environmental commitments to labour rights. Embodied protest often preceded detailed knowledge of avian species. Drawing on audiovisual documentation, the paper shows how inherited activist traditions rooted in distinct cosmological understanding continue to shape contemporary forms of more-than-human solidarities under extraction.

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This paper compares lived experiences of human–wildlife interactions in Wayanad,kerala,india with media narratives, showing how public framings shape actions, policy responses, and unequal benefits across shared landscapes

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Wayanad, Kerala, is a dynamic mosaic of protected forests, agricultural lands, and densely populated settlements where humans and wild animals have coexisted for centuries. In recent years, however, it has emerged as a hotspot of human–wildlife conflict in the Western Ghats. Encounters with elephants, tigers, wild boar, leopards, gaur, monkeys, and other species increasingly affect farming livelihoods through crop loss, livestock depredation, property damage, everyday fear, and at times the loss of human and animal life.

While these realities are deeply felt at the household and community level, public discussions of conflict are increasingly shaped by news media and social media narratives. These representations often simplify complex and uneven relations into dramatic and polarised stories, where particular incidents receive intense attention while broader patterns of coexistence, adaptation, and local knowledge remain under-represented. The paper argues that although loss is real, the public story of conflict is frequently amplified beyond lived experience and shaped by political, institutional, and economic agendas.

Drawing on ethnographic insights from agricultural villages and forest-edge settlements in Wayanad, this paper examines the gap between everyday encounters and their mediated portrayals. It shows how “human–wildlife conflict” functions not only as an ecological event but also as a socially produced category shaped by selective visibility, emotional framing, and governance responses. By tracing how certain narratives circulate and gain authority, the paper highlights how media framings influence blame, compensation expectations, mitigation priorities, and ultimately who benefits within shared landscapes

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Drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork with nomadic beekeepers in northern Greece, this paper shows how their long-standing, adaptive practices of multispecies care and embodied knowledge become precarious as overlapping political, economic, and ecological crises converge.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on three months of ethnographic fieldwork with nomadic beekeepers in northern Greece to explore how overlapping political, economic, and ecological crises influence multispecies relations. Greek nomadic beekeepers continue a long-standing practice of seasonal mobility in search of favourable foraging and overwintering sites for their apiaries; however, today they operate under conditions of “polycrisis” (Henig and Knight 2023). State neglect and market pressures converge in environments affected by climate change, including droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and floods, disrupting the traditional beekeeping calendar and the social reproduction of nomadic beekeepers. Using multispecies ethnography alongside a political ecology framework allows for an examination of how their embodied, situated knowledge gets devalued within bureaucratic systems of neoliberal governance. The adaptive practices of nomadic beekeepers, grounded in centuries of mobility, sensory apprenticeship, and artisanal passion, known as the local value of meraki, are now under threat. Those who remain in the profession do so by taking risks, creating solidarity networks among themselves and actively resisting exploitative notions of capitalist efficiency. Here, multispecies care becomes inherently political. Nomadic beekeeping in Greece promotes ecological sustainability and supports multispecies livelihoods through transportable pollination services and demanding labour, but lacks political and economic backing and protection. Meanwhile, current economic systems enable the extraction of surplus value from both human and more-than-human bodies through commodification processes. Thus, I argue that although Greek honey is internationally valued, the nomadic beekeepers who produce the honey in collaboration with honeybees and landscapes remain socio-politically and economically marginalized.

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In light of antibiotic resistance, this paper examines how poultry care in Tanzania unfolds within fractured ecologies shaped by extractive food systems. It traces how medicinal plants are mobilized as ambivalent actors in relational and affective practices that negotiate the limits of Cheap Nature.

Paper long abstract

Chickens represent paradigmatic symbols of the Capitolocene as their bodies and lives have been profoundly modified and cheapened in the pursuit of affordable protein within a system of power, profit and re/production (Moore 2017). Antibiotics have played a central role in this process by compensating for inadequate care and temporarily stabilizing productivity (Denyer Willis and Chandler 2019). The rise of antibiotic resistance, however, emerges as a material sign of the limits of this cheapening strategy: biological life can no longer reliably absorb the ecological costs displaced onto it. This raises the question of how poultry care is reworked at the multispecies margins of extractive food systems when the conditions for Cheap Nature begin to fray.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with poultry keepers in rural Tanzania, this paper investigates how human-animal interactions unfold within fractured health ecologies. Within this landscape, medicinal plants are increasingly re-incorporated into poultry healthcare practices, emerging as ambivalent yet transformative actors. While such practices cannot escape capitalism’s extractive logics, they recall the importance of the intimate, relational forms of knowledge and attentiveness required for more-than-human care. By critically attending to the multispecies labor that sustains poultry farming, the paper explores how the affective and practical engagements through which humans, chickens, and plants are entangled can be understood as situated endeavors of repair. In doing so, it examines how healing and care are redefined through a ‘politics of habitability’ (Langwick 2018) amid precarious lifeworlds.

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Uneven exchanges within human, vegetal, infrastructural, and economic relations define our food systems, and therefore our agricultural landscapes. This study uses multispecies ethnographic and arts-based fieldwork to imagine plant-human relations otherwise, taking asparagus as an explorative lens.

Paper long abstract

This paper brings multispecies ethnography into dialogue with political ecology by using the concept of socialities as a guiding analytical tool to examine how a cultivated plant and its environment become entangled in extractive agricultural processes. Based on multispecies ethnographic and arts-based fieldwork on asparagus farms in South Tyrol (Northern Italy), the paper traces the socialities of asparagus - the assemblages and relations through which the plant acts and is acted upon.

The ambivalence of these assemblages is revealed by mobilising drawing, experimental cartography and material experimentation: the plant’s biological form resists full automation and demands careful human labour, creating moments of attentiveness and interdependence, while simultaneously reinforcing unequal labour relations and high-value consumption logics. Through these methods, the roles this vegetable takes on and are enacted through plant–human relations are traced. The arts-based methods also assist in confronting extractive practices while remaining attentive to fragile possibilities for attunement and care within our food systems.

Asparagus cultivation emerges as symptomatic of longer trajectories of landscape transformation. Although practiced on relatively small plots and often framed as a side activity to apple growing, asparagus is locally celebrated as Edelgemüse (noble vegetable), embedded in narratives of care, seasonality, and regional identity. At the same time, its cultivation relies on extractive land-use regimes established over the past century, characterised by increasing human control over edible plants. These include soil compaction and exhaustion, the bodily effects of picking and sorting work, and ecological vulnerabilities due to pesticide and fertilizer use.

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In urban China state development displaces humans and animals into shared precarity. Marginalised animal rescuers enact care that simultaneously upholds extractive logics, revealing how broader power logics continue to operate through multispecies relations constraining possibilities for coexistence

Paper long abstract

Rapid development and urbanisation are reconfiguring animal-human relations in contemporary China through histories of dispossession. Urban development displaces villagers and labourers, creating both human precarity and animal abandonment. Free-roaming village dogs become urban scavengers; pets are discarded by precarious workers; stray cats are poisoned by management committees. Dog lovers clash with those who fear rabies. "Dog beating" squads kill unregistered dogs. Cities impose registration laws and breed bans, yet lack funds to manage stray populations effectively.

Into spaces where the state manages animals through elimination, rescue has emerged, performed by marginalized older women ('aunties') without official funding or legal status. Though companion animals were historically seen as luxuries, it is often the most precarious who step forward to care - yet that care is complex. Rescuers' affective relations with animals open possibilities for different coexistence, but also constrain animal agency. While fighting for survival rights, they simultaneously enact caging and confinement, reproducing state logics of control. Whilse rescuers celebrate official companion animal status granted in 2020; it risks categorising any unowned or unsuitable animals as problematic.

Through 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how rescue bases become sites where development, precarity, and care are ambivalently entangled. Rather than viewing rescue as benevolent or failed, I trace how power operates through the affective and material labour of the marginalised, asking: what forms of multispecies politics does rescue make possible, and for whom? How do the structures marginalising rescuers also shape the animals they seek to save?

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This paper explores the skills generally identified as 'good herding' in Lebanese pastoralism, how they compare with other livestock systems and the different ways animals can be said to 'labour' in various production regimes. It thus aims to nuance multispecies notions of care, control and labour.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I explore the skills generally associated with being a 'good herder' in the context of Lebanese pastoralism namely observation, care and control. How do these skills and values identified by herders compare with other livestock systems? Does it make sense to apply the concept of 'labour' to animals in the context of food production and if so how are animals seen to 'labour' differently in various production regimes? I argue that more than a difference in kind, such skills differ in degree in various food producing systems. I thus attempt to nuance views of industrial agriculture as 'disembedded' and 'exploitative' compared to a 'caring' and 'harmonious' pastoralism, exploring instead some of the specificities of human-animal relations in different production regimes. Good herders in Lebanon are expected to 'control' their herd and kill when the time is right and workers in factory farms do also develop caring relationships with the animals they tend (Blanchette 2020). I argue that one specificity of human-animal relations in this form of Lebanese pastoralism revolved around its use of trained non-human labour to reduce the amount of human labour, as opposed to coercive physical instrustructures (race, hurdes, parlours) in other regimes, thus conferring it more flexibility and independence from capital. The research is based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Mount Lebanon, working and living with one family of semi-nomadic herders from 2023-2024 and a year of part time work with an extensive sheep farmer in the UK from 2025-2026.

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Based on long-term ethnographic research (2021–2026) in East Austria’s high-tech greenhouse sector, I critically examine how technologies of plant care can deepen and naturalize social inequities for racialized workers who care for those plants.

Paper long abstract

This contribution explores how AgTech systems designed to protect and optimize plant life can create harmful conditions for the people who care for those plants. Based on long-term ethnographic research (2021–2026) in East Austria’s high-tech greenhouse sector, I examine how climate-control technologies—such as ventilation computers and thermal screens—are calibrated to accelerate plant growth, manage heat stress, and meet supermarket standards. These innovations are critical for growers facing volatile weather, tight margins, and the pressures of market competition. Yet while greenhouses are engineered to safeguard plant health, they often expose workers—primarily Romanian and Roma migrants—to long hours in sealed, hot, and humid environments. During heatwaves, these conditions intensify, contributing to exhaustion, dehydration, heat stress, and long-term bodily strain. Despite these risks, workers’ heat-related strains frequently go unrecognized in both medical and legal frameworks.

Bringing together anthropological debates on biopolitics - such as "ecobiopolitics" (Saxton 2015) and "agribiopolitics" (Hetherington 2020), and disability and debility (Puar 2018) - this paper asks what forms of life are made to thrive, and at what cost. Rather than assuming cooperation between human and plant wellbeing, I explore how greenhouse technologies can deepen and normalize social inequality—making plant care possible through the slow exhaustion of racialized labor. In doing so, this research seeks to contribute to a political ecology of labor that attends to more-than-human entanglements.

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This paper examines how multispecies relations operate as quiet forms of discipline in industrial agriculture, producing agricultural subjectivities aligned with the demands of agro-industrial value chains.

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This paper examines how multispecies relations are mobilised to stabilise agro-industrial value chains and produce agricultural subjectivities adapted to industrial requirements. Drawing on ethnographic research on the industrial potato sector in Belgium, I analyse how relations between firms, farmers, potatoes, and soils operate as quiet registers of power and dispossession.

Rather than approaching multispecies relations through empathy or care, the paper foregrounds their disciplinary dimensions. For example, potato varieties selected for industrial efficiency function as socio-material devices that preconfigure agricultural practices, temporalities, and investments. In an industrial farming context, these varietal demands intersect with other constraining arrangements, including contractual relationships. Taken together, these overlapping demands limit farmers’ control over their labour and land, intensifying experiences of estrangement or alienation, while paradoxically leaving the bulk of ecological and agronomic risks under farmers’ responsibility.

At the same time, the paper shows how the capacities of potato producers to cross geographical and biophysical frontiers – their ability to cultivate fragmented, distant, and often degraded soils – become valued competences. This detachment from specific soils and places contributes to the process of subject formation, serving the industry’s need for expandable supply chains. In this configuration, the material responses of soils and plants – such as accelerated nutrient depletion associated with industrial potato varieties – undermine long-term land attachments, facilitating producer mobility and shaping extractivist effects alongside human practices.

By analysing these dynamics, the paper shows how multispecies relations are deeply implicated in the organisation and stabilisation of industrial agro-food systems.

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What do multispecies alliances look like beyond metaphors? Through a multimodal, collaborative anthropology approach, I’m looking at how bees brought together various actors to imagine concrete forms of resistance against fascism around the world, while imagining socialist beekeeping practices.

Paper long abstract

Bees have been used as metaphors throughout history to support various political ideologies—from monarchy to communism, anarchism to feudalism (Tavoillot 2015), and nowadays democracy (Seeley 2010). In recent years, they also become a mascot for the environment. But one metaphor never faded away: bees would be indefatigable and industrious workers – a damaging metaphor that brought bees to the brink of collapse. But can we build multispecies alliances beyond metaphors, hivebound to socialist practices? More than a decade ago, I created Apian, a self-proclaimed Ministry of Bees. Based on my background as an artist, beekeeper, and multispecies and multimodal anthropologist, the Ministry is responsible for the relationship between humans and all bee species. It is tasked by bees with safeguarding the history of this age-old relationship and does so by producing polymorphous ethnographies. These ethnographies/artworks combine media such as video, sound, photography, and writing to imagine and promote Socialist Beekeeping practices. The Ministry aims to establish a framework for the future of this relationship in the context of climate breakdown – a future free from extractive practices and grounded in ancestral knowledge. My ongoing PhD has led me to collaborate with a few different bee resistance groups, which have allied with bees to fight fascism around the world, from occupied territories in Palestine to a farm in Kent (UK). Brought together by their love for bees, these groups promote Mutual Aid at the local and planetary levels, not as a metaphor but as concrete resistance.

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This paper examines Turkey’s live cattle imports to discuss the significance of nonhuman animal bodies and their metabolic capacities not only as nodes in more-than-human entanglements but as entities subsumed under capitalist relations of production for their value-generating labor.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I propose that in order to critically analyze interspecies relations and acknowledge often violent and exploitative implications of economies of scale for nonhuman animals, we need to turn to the nonhuman animal body not only as a node in more-than-human entanglements, but as an entity subsumed under relations of production for their value-generating capacity. To unpack the specific value production processes in which nonhuman animals are involved, I focus on Turkey’s ‘cheap meat policy’ and live cattle imports. Using my ethnographic fieldwork on live cattle imports in Turkey, I document the significance of bodily, particularly metabolic, capacities of nonhuman animals in both catering to and challenging the organization of live trade. I argue that the viability and profitability of the live trade, hence the production of ‘cheap meat’ as the expected output of the live trade, is possible in relation to the unaccounted-for form of labor, metabolic labor (Beldo 2017; Wadiwel 2023), that the living bodies of animals generate. Acknowledgement of this usurped and unaccounted-for labor is essential not only for critiquing exploitative economies of scale, but also for rethinking multispecies ethnography in a critical way attuned to the operations of the Animal Industrial Complex (Noske 1989; Twine 2012).

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Dogs enact power in Poznań's urban space. This multispecies ethnography examines human-dog dyads as sites where power is enacted through sensory, affective entanglements. Dogs are co-agents reshaping contested territories, challenging anthropocentric orderings and enabling more-than-human futures.

Paper long abstract

Dogs occupy a paradoxical position in contemporary urban space, both privileged and subversive. In a country where roughly eight million dogs live in every second household, rapid, west-oriented, urbanization has intensified contestations over who (human and non-human alike) belongs to the city and how space should be inhabited. This paper treats dogs not as passive objects of human design but as co-producers of polarized urban worlds.

By focusing on human–dog dyads walking through Poznań, the research examines how urban space is negotiated and reimagined through embodied multispecies encounters that unsettle anthropocentric orderings of the city. Drawing on multispecies ethnography and mixed methods (including a survey of 315 respondents, focus groups, ethnographic observation and eight walk-along interviews) the study traces how walking emerges as the primary practice through which human–dog dyads encounter and co-create the city.

Conceptualizing the dyad as a hybrid unit of analysis, the paper mobilizes posthumanist approaches to show how humans, dogs and urban materialities are mutually constituted through different entanglements – sensory, affective as well as regulatory. It identifies distinct spatial formations (leashed zones, off-leash areas, transition spaces) that enable different modes of canine–human interaction and sociality, shaped by weather, equipment, norms and affective atmospheres.

By centring dogs as co-agents in urban life, the paper challenges anthropocentric visions of the city and rethinks urban polarizations between nature and culture, humans and non-humans, public and private as productive sites for imagining more-than-human urban futures.

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Drawing on ethnographic research during the Greek economic crisis, this paper expands Bauman’s concept of wasted lives beyond the human. It introduces politi-canis to examine how relations with stray dogs shape exclusion, disposability, and belonging across species.

Paper long abstract

Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of wasted lives has illuminated how modern and late-modern regimes of order produce human populations rendered disposable under conditions of crisis and inequality. Yet this framework remains largely anthropocentric, leaving unexplored how logics of waste extend to more-than-human animals. This paper expands the concept of wasted lives beyond the human, developing a multispecies analytic attentive to the production and management of surplus life across species.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research conducted during the economic crisis in Greece, the paper examines relations between humans and stray dogs on a Greek island. I develop the concept of politi-canis to conceptualize political practices enacted with and through dogs, shaped by species-level capacities shared by dogs and by the dispositions of particular canine individuals within specific relational contexts. Within these practices, stray dogs emerge as wasted lives—abandoned, regulated, rescued, and revalorized—while human groups are positioned differently in relation to waste and belonging; foreign women are pushed to the social margins, whereas Muslim refugees are rendered disposable, framed as surplus populations whose removal from the island is desired.

Following everyday practices of feeding, disciplining, rescuing, and re-homing stray dogs, the paper shows how more-than-human animals are implicated in the organization of social boundaries. Dogs are not merely symbolic figures; their bodies, affects, and mobilities shape how care and value circulate across bodies and spaces. By foregrounding wasted lives and politi-canis, this paper argues for a critical multispecies ethnography that situates humans and dogs within extractive worlds shaped by crisis.

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This paper examines how conservation infrastructures and caste hierarchies co-constitute more-than-human worlds. Moving beyond empathetic accounts of coexistence, it traces how multispecies relations are materially enacted through dispossession and the "slow violence" of forest governance.

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In the non-protected "margins" of Central India’s tiger reserves, multispecies entanglements are less an exercise in celebratory empathy and more a site of sedimented structural harm. This paper brings multispecies ethnography into dialogue with political ecology to examine how the Indian state's conservation infrastructure functions as a form of slow violence that unevenly impacts marginalized communities. Drawing on year-long ethnographic fieldwork in Madhya Pradesh, I analyze how the materiality of land ownership and social identity dictate the nature of dispossession. I argue that Dalit communities, often holding precarious or marginal land parcels, are frequently the first to accept compensation and relocate—a process of forced mobility driven by land-poverty. Conversely, I examine the Pal community’s struggle to maintain traditional livestock grazing. For them, the forest represents a site of autonomy and refusal against wage-labor dependence, even as conservation restrictions and predator presence render their future impossible. I trace the lives of Indian wolves and tigers alongside these divergent labor and livelihood struggles, to demonstrate that multispecies relations are inseparable from the political economies of caste. I attend to exhaustion as a material state shared by both human bodies and the landscape under the weight of restricted resource access. In this paper, I move after empathy to propose a politics of refusal, where "ecologies of the margins" rupture dominant environmental imaginaries. These gatherings offer possibilities for a more-than-human justice that accounts for the stark material realities of social hierarchy in a polarized world.

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Through what I call the ‘Oily Lifeworlds’ this paper demonstrates how beyond being a source of toxic pollution, people in the extractive landscape of the Niger Delta perceive, live with and reimagine oil as a material, socio-cultural and spiritual resource for both human and more than human entities

Paper long abstract

As extractivism continues to produce environmental toxicity in the Global South, indigenous populations disproportionately impacted by pollution have responded in different ways, particularly in several resource endowed localities that play host to extractive activities in Africa. The Niger Delta, where decades of crude oil extraction have led to persistent hydrocarbon pollution affecting millions of inhabitants, provides a lens through which the diverse and unique ways indigenous people respond to pollution can be observed and understood. This paper deviates from widely recognized approaches of environmental protests and resistance which objectifies crude oil as a toxic pollutant responsible for the region’s environmental crisis. Instead, it focuses on the rather uncommon and subtle entanglements with oil, which has enabled the people to live with oil pollution. Drawing from ethnographic analysis of the ‘Oily Lifeworlds’ in the Niger Delta, I argue that oil is embedded in everyday life and reanimated as a symbol of geo-cultural identity, as well as reimagined as a resource for economic, medicinal and spiritual utility for communities. Through accumulated experiential knowledge systems associated with decades of oil entanglements, residents of host communities have learned to co-exist with oil and the associated extractive activities as part of their everyday life. This approach of reimagining pollution as a source of utility foregrounds one of the unique and numerous ways in which indigenous people respond to pollution. Beyond this, it offers new insights into the intersection between extractivism and geo-cultural knowledge production in localities of resource extraction.