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Short abstract:

The paper deals with the challenges and effects of implementing an environmental restoration project (rewilding) in Portugal.

Long abstract:

The presentation will cover some aspects of the rewilding project along the Côa River Valley (Portugal). While we situate rewilding projects as a political effort, but also a techno-scientific one to face the environmental crisis associated with the advent of the Anthropocene, we intend to demonstrate how planning for the reintroduction of animal and plant species needs to dialogue with local perceptions about these animals and about the natural landscape. Likewise, practices, accentuated by scientific humanism, that aim to reverse the harmful action of the human occupation of the Planet need to consider coexistence with previously ignored non-human agencies.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Long abstract:

Understating cities as more-than-human assemblages (Griffiths et al., 2000; Franklin, 2016), this 20-minute talk delves into an almost unexplored urban scenario for multispecies interaction and cohabitation: the animal enclosures. Urban animal enclosure is a critical conceptual framework created to refer to those public places in the city where —mainly farm— animals are displayed and kept in captivity for human educational and recreational purposes. Those scenarios are known, among other names, as animal parks, children’s farms, and petting zoos. Structured under a traditional format, and divided into three parts, this presentation introduces the preliminary findings of an ethnographic examination of human-animal encounters carried out in two of those scenarios: the Tierpark Neukölln and the Kinderbauernhof in Görtlizer Park. The first part of this talk will take care of introducing both places, situating them in a local context, and presenting the different types of enclosures around Berlin. This part will pay particular attention to the infrastructures and animal-managerial logic behind the enclosures. After that, the focus will be on the interactions between humans, particularly visitors, and animals. Through a brief state of the art on encountering, the idea of partial encounters will be discussed as a critical device to analyze the inequality in multispecies relationships in urban spaces. The last part of this presentation will offer a bunch of ethical considerations and extend some dilemmas on captivity hoping to provoke a collective reflection on the urban as a more-than-human construction.

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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.

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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?