Short Abstract

Bringing multispecies ethnography into dialogue with political ecology, this panel seeks to move beyond empathetic or celebratory accounts of more-than-human entanglements to examine how power, value, and ecological transformation are materially enacted through multispecies relations.

Long Abstract

This panel aims to collectively rework multispecies ethnography as a critical project: one that confronts, rather than retreats from, the operations of power that shape more-than-human worlds.

Instead of leaning toward celebratory or empathetic accounts of more-than-human entanglements, we put multispecies ethnography into dialogue with political ecology to ground it more firmly in histories of labour, capital accumulation, and dispossession.

We ask how life persists—unevenly, precariously, and defiantly—amid the slow violence of industrial infrastructures (military, economic, and reproductive) and extractive worlds. We focus on the incremental damages that seep through soils, bodies - human or otherwise-, and infrastructures, accumulating as drought, toxicity, or exhaustion. By tracing how these harms sediment across temporal and material scales, we aim to explore the political economies and environmental imaginaries that sustain them—and the forms of refusal that rupture them.

At the same time, we attend to the ambivalent, transformative potential of interspecies gatherings, where plants, fungi, and animals can uphold extractive logics just as they can open possibilities for coexistence, care, or resistance. We ask what kinds of politics such gatherings make thinkable, and for whom, examining how power, value, and ecological transformation are materially enacted through multispecies relations.

Inspired by feminist, new materialist, decolonial, and post-representational approaches, we invite contributions that experiment with ethnographic, sensory, and artistic methods to trace the affective and material dimensions of multispecies life within industrial and extractive worlds.

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