Paper short abstract:

In this more-than-human account of colonial warfare, we draw upon posthumanism and animal studies to account for an alliance of sorts among Gĩkũyũ insurgents, the terrain of Royal Aberdare National Park, and the park’s wildlife population during the Mau Mau Uprising in colonial Kenya.

Paper long abstract:

Conceptions of terrain have been influenced by posthuman studies, recasting nonhumans, animate and not, as actors that are vital to outcomes. This approach has influenced the literature on military insurgencies, including our study of the Mau Mau Uprising in colonial Kenya. The fighting took place mainly between 1952 and 1956 in the challenging terrain of two mountainous areas of Central Kenya, which prior to the war had been designated as national parks: Royal Aberdare National Park and Mt. Kenya National Park. Focusing on the former, we recount relations between the Gikũyũ insurgents and the wildlife that shared the park space during the war. Characterize this forced co-habitation, we draw connections between discourse on representations of Gĩkũyũ fighters and the posthumanist perspectives on animal studies. Thousands of fighters in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, as they were formally known, depended on the park’s terrain for protection and as a base of operations, including its steep mountains, continuous cloud cover, dense tree canopy and undergrowth, icy rivers and streams, and constantly cold and wet conditions. The park’s wildlife presented a constant concern, including its water buffalo, rhinoceros, elephants and many more. The Royal Aberdare National Park was ostensibly created to protect these nonhuman animals, but the war in the forest brought British aerial bombing campaigns and foot patrols, which endangered its wildlife as well as the Gĩkũyũ insurgents. Developing a truce of sorts among them, the more-than-human partnerships of terrain, insurgency, and wildlife invites an expanded conception of allied forces.

Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic paper explores sensory expressions of colonial power in the occupied Palestinian Jordan Valley. Analyzing the landscape materiality and as text, I show how traces left by actants reflect and reproduce power relations in a contested colonial space.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores sensory expressions of colonial power in the Palestinian Jordan Valley (JV), home to Palestinian pastoralists and Jewish settlers, who also keep and graze livestock.

Palestinian pastoral communities of the JV have been challenged by gradual shrinkage of their grazing lands due to climate change and pressures from Israeli settlers. The JV is part of the occupied West Bank, a space that has no official national borders. Yet, the dwellers of the area "share" a land full of alternative border markers, a meshwork of entwined lines produced by human and non-human actants (following Tim Ingold).

Drawing on 4 years of environmental ethnography conducted on Palestinian grazing lands, I characterize the border markings by their salience, deliberateness, and by their temporal qualities (temporary, permanent, and seasonal borders). Garbage carried by the wind to a gully bed, animal feces, fences, vegetation and other markings tell a story of climate change, weaponized environment, political violence and resistance.

By adding a layer of political analysis to the Ingoldian perspective, and by analyzing landscape as a text - as suggested by Lefebvre, Harvey and Duncan - I show how the traces left by Palestinian vs Israeli actants both reflect and reproduce the power structure of a contested colonial space.

Paper short abstract:

After two decades of ecological reparation for industrial damage, the Cruces River estuary is the scene of an unexpected predatory interaction between sea lions and black-necked swans. The case presents the erratic institutional attempts to intervene in this complex interspecies interaction.

Paper long abstract:

The Cruces River estuary that extends through extensive wetlands in Los Ríos Region in southern Chile, has transitioned in recent decades from events of high environmental conflict to reparatory processes that seek to give rise to interspecific modes of coexistence. A pollution event caused by discharges from a pulp mill in 2004, dramatically affected the population of black-necked swans, turning it into an emblematic species and one of the icons of local social movements and environmental protection against the dangers of the forestry industry. Almost 20 years later the swan is once again threatened, but this time by the unexpected predation of another protected species: the sea lion. After years of a sustained recovery of swans and other estuarine birds, a series of sea lion-swan predation attacks, unprecedented for riverside inhabitants, are reported, recorded and spread through social networks. The alarm of human communities generates erratic attempts at institutional responses, exposing the conflicting visions of scientists and government experts on how to regulate interspecific coexistence in a protected and repairing ecology. The case calls for a posthumanist reflection: what possible responses emerge from the interspecific controversies that develop in complex ecologies and in repairing processes?

Paper short abstract:

From an inquiry into the political, ethical, technological, and vital modes emerging from the interaction between bovine and human societies, I propose reflecting on how we produce a more concerned science in multispecies relationships under political ethology.

Paper long abstract:

Research on the coexistence between cows and humans raises the opportunity to reconsider how we create the world, transcending human centrality in our understanding and acting. Based on a study examining various dimensions of this relationship, focusing on the role of cows in shaping Uruguayan society and the state, I propose an epistemological reflection on the configuration of a situated field that emerges by considering rumination as a method. This field is political ethology: an epistemic space that not only allows the convergence of traditions such as Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies, biopolitical studies, critical animal studies, and multispecies studies, among others but also facilitates the creation of new starting points without the intention of consolidating an autonomous disciplinary field. Political ethology represents the modern way knowledge about animal behavior has developed, addressing their psychological and social behaviors about human behavior. Contrary to the ontological notion that separates humanity from animality, the study of various species' social behavior has suggested animal politics within their existential communities. These analyzed political and social behaviors allow us to outline non-human politics based not on language and reason but on an affective and corporeal regime. Despite the marked distinction between human and animal politics, this difference does not act as a divider but as a key to placing the political sphere on a symmetrical plane.

Paper short abstract:

In the context of a newly started research project, called DSooE (Dialoguing Species: Designing Common Worlds through Ethnography) we are entering a dialogue between design and social science, supported by STS research practices, aiming developing a protocol for more-than-human inclusive design.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution aims to report some initial results of a newly started research project, titled DSooE (Dialoguing Species: Designing Common Worlds through Ethnography), in which we are involved as social scientists and designers. Through the dialogue between design and social sciences, fostered by STS research practices, DSooE aims at developing a protocol for more-than-human inclusive design, i. e. the design of technologies enabling various species to share habitats in non-competitive ways, thus allowing ecosystem preservation and restoration. A multi-sited and multi-species ethnographic fieldwork, aimed at understanding how fish and wolves relate, adapt to or reject technologies designed to allow them thriving, is combined with a case studies analysis of cutting-edge more-than-human design projects around Europe from engineering to service design. The fieldwork looks at a fluvial laboratory and alpine pasture livestock protection in two Italian areas. The design of technologies aiming at the animals’ thriving is based on knowledge gained by engineers and biologists through their technological equipment. We will analyze the techno-scientific devices used by engineers for their experiments while studying how small fish swim in North-West Italian rivers, as well as the technical devices used by wildlife biologist in monitoring wolves’ population in the Eastern Alps. We are interested in analyzing how engineers and biologists, with and through their – high or low tech – equipment and experimental methods, actually produce specific versions of wolves and fish and how, in turn, these react to – or resist – these specific ways of questioning them.

Paper short abstract:

This work was an effect of an ethological-ethnographical approach that allowed me to think on some aspects of the interspecies relationship between humans & street dogs in Chilean cities. Thus, the purpose here is to reflect about this relationship through some concepts and an interspecies manifesto

Paper long abstract:

The spinozian question (what are bodies able to do?) can be translated by some contemporary authors, such as Vinciane Despret and Donna Haraway: 1) What would animals be capable of if we changed their conditions? 2) What would animals say if we proposed good questions? An interesting way to explore these questions can be seen in Chilean cities with a quite peculiar actor: street dogs (quiltros). In this case, I worked on a blended ethological-ethnographical approach that allowed me to reflect on some aspects of this singular antropozoogenesis blending dogs-and-humans-in-the-cities. The aim of this work is to reflect about this collective experience through some concepts. In this sense, I would like to sustain that: 1) this experience produces a new kind of citizenship because it doesnot only happen in different cities, but also involves rights and laws. 2) it creates a kind of reciprocal care and domestication that involves feeding, playing and occupying different public spaces (as public protests); 3) it produces a type of domestic cosmopolitism because it brings the possibility of relationships based on open trust without any priority of some groups or territories (homes). In short, it is possible to say that it creates a kind of an interspecies socialism that is present during different political scenarios and especially now with the popular uprising in Chile (since 2019). The quiltros presence here was active in a shared and articulated political action, especially in demonstrations. Nevertheless, our objective is to explore the post uprising scenario, especially after 2021.