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Drawing on multispecies ethnography with street dogs in India’s central Himalayas, this paper explores the relations, lifeways, and possible futures that are foreclosed for dogs and humans when pethood and ownership become normative frameworks shaping multispecies health interventions.

Paper long abstract

Street dog rescue and adoption in contemporary India is widely promoted as a means to improve human-animal health: dogs are “saved” from suffering in the streets, while humans gain companionship and enhanced wellbeing. In this paper, I interrogate the mutualist promise of this health paradigm by centring the harms inflicted on dog bodies and emotions through the practices of ‘homing’ them in human-centric households. Drawing on ethnographic research in the central Himalayas of India, I examine the lives of twelve street dogs whose individual stories and trajectories complicate celebratory narratives of dog rescue and adoption. I explore the relations, lifeways, and possible futures that are devalued and foreclosed when pethood and ownership become the normative frameworks shaping multispecies health interventions.

I show how knowledge and practices framed as animal care and welfare reconfigure canine social worlds to align with particular human-norms of domesticity and kinship. ‘Homing’ street dogs inside human-households can paradoxically render them ‘homeless’ by severing dog-dog kinship bonds, curtailing their reproductive projects, and normalising confinement as care. These findings unsettle increasingly hegemonic cultural assumptions in urbanising India that equate a dog’s proper home and health with a place in human-households. Attending to the fluidity and plurality of street dog-human cohabitations in India reveal alternative, less harmful modes for dogs and humans to live and “become with” each other as individuals and species. Making such alternative versions of human-animal ‘homes’ more visible and viable might be necessary for pursuing more just, healthy, and genuinely mutual multispecies futures.

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This paper draws engages with a case study of human-dog-wildlife conflict in a nature reserve of Special Scientific Interest to interrogate conceptions of multispecies relationships as mutualistic partnerships, in doing so it asks how centring antagonisms might advance more-than-human thought.

Paper long abstract

In recent years there has been a dramatic surge in claims that particular human-animal relationships offer win-win wellbeing benefits. Such claims are made both in popular media and sociological research, which routinely draws on frameworks from feminist STS to depict particular human-animal relations as mutually beneficial collaborations. This paper draws upon the case study of hypoallergenic dogs to interrogate conceptions of multispecies relationships as mutualistic partnerships and co-becomings. Drawing on ethnographic observation of a nature reserve and Site of Special Scientific Interest, in which human-dog-wildlife conflicts have come to the fore, alongside documentary analysis of materials from pet-focused NGOs, the paper focuses on two interrelated social challenges, which bring the broader socio-technical contexts of multispecies relationships into relief. Firstly, it focuses on an emerging set of tensions surrounding labour practices associated with the contemporary pet industry, pertaining to dog-walking gig-work and the growth of informal markets to supply popular breeds. Secondly, the paper reflects on how competing understandings of wellbeing (between different groups of people, dogs, and other species) generate social tensions about access to green space. By centring these tensions, and elucidating how competing understandings of wellbeing become (un)resolved in practice, the paper offers a wider intervention into how feminist STS conceives of more-than-human collaboration. In particular, the paper illustrates the need to rethink the relationship between agentic encounters between species and their institutional contexts, by interrogating the socio-economic forces that are implicated in these relations.

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The study of sanctuaries brings us to consider mutualism as a political issue, with humans and animals both operating in the constraints of intricated power relations. In these spaces, an idealised concept of mutualism is put into practice and confronted with the reality of communal living.

Paper long abstract

My ethnographic fieldwork consists in exploring, as a volunteer, how humans and animals live together in three animal farm sanctuaries. Sanctuaries are places where domestic animals from farms or laboratories are taken in. The idea is to offer them a living space and a status as ‘people’ that will no longer be questioned. However, this ideal of a harmonious environment for animals confronts itself to a harsh fact: cohabitation is difficult. Access to food is a source of violence and exclusion, and certain personalities cannot get along. The humans, at the sanctuaries I observed, devote much of their time to creating an environment as egalitarian as possible. Thus, the sanctuary space is constantly changing: the kitchen is transformed into a dormitory for the most fragile chickens, pastures are divided because of conflicts regarding shelters. The living space becomes more complex and is divided into a multitude of small living spaces.

This framework, which aims to guarantee equality and well-being for all, is imposed on animals, sometimes violently, particularly when it comes to care. Moreover, humans themselves are also subjected to this framework. Faced with the reliance of animals, an exhausting workload, and the responsibility of keeping them alive but also accompanying them in death, they find themselves overwhelmed by the enormous task imposed by their ideal. I was told, ‘When you're here, you no longer have a life’. A study of sanctuaries brings the issue of communal living into sharp focus, turning mutualism from an ideal into a political issue.

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In this paper we give an account of an ongoing design-research project developing prototypes and new modes of engagement for multispecies encounters on Redmires Reservoir; a nature reserve in Sheffield (UK) owned by an unpopular water company and managed by a local Wildlife Trust.

Paper long abstract

Redmires Reservoirs provides a particularly thorny illustration to complicate claims that human-animal relationships can offer win-win health benefits. We have found during our research that the leisure practices of human (and dog) visitors championed for providing both physical and mental wellbeing benefits is in many cases threatening those of the often rare and in some cases endangered species such as water vole, ground nesting, and wading birds that reside and visit here.

Our engagement with this site has brought about several challenges that we unpack in this paper: We find a set of protagonists and non-innocent relations that appear irreconcilable; unable to 'make house' and live well together. We also find conservation practices that require upholding nature-culture bifurcations materially by way of signs, fences and trenches. As designers and design-researchers, the site challenges typical expectations of us; that we may be able 'solve problems', foster behaviour changes, or provide some kind of techno-fix. Rather, there appear to be no ‘right’ answers, or easy fixes. We also find that the site challenges the multispecies, more-than-human and care literature, that we find often privileges beautiful descriptions of entangled relationships and co-becomings that in our view can neutralise antagonistic multi-species entanglements, their politics and forms of agency. We have found ourselves asking what new stories, and ways of relaying these stories might be fostered (or required) that helps us better understand, make sense of, and design in, with, and for this place and its inhabitants.

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Probes the multispecies mutualisms that structure multispecies coercive labour in Indian brick kilns, this paper argues that animals are made co-constitutive of the impoverishment that produces capitalist efficiencies in the peripheries of global supply chains for global construction.

Paper long abstract

This paper probes the multispecies mutualisms that structure coercive labour, human and non, in Indian brick kilns. It argues that animals are made co-constitutive of the impoverishment that produces capitalist efficiencies in the peripheries for development, in this case, global construction. India is among the globally-leading producer of bricks, and Indian brickmaking, located in the peripheries of global construction, remains largely manual – and animal. The “core” of global supply chains is subsidised by violent labour relations in its “peripheries,” frontiers of severe poverty and ecological devastation. This is not accidental. “Global poverty” is a structural requirement of development, including urbanisation, sustaining a permanent reserve army of impoverished multispecies surplus labour. Indian brick kilns achieve low-cost, high-output production because humans and animals are systematically impoverished, indebted, underfed, and expendable. These conditions are paradoxically maintained by the “basic needs” framework of human poverty alleviation. Development discourses recast animals as livelihood pathways to meet basic needs in the Global South, yet this misdiagnoses how accumulation operates in peripheral sites, obscures how surplus value is extracted from depleted animal bodies through “low-value” human–animal labour relations driven by human precarity, and naturalises multispecies suffering as livelihood strategy, resilience, or opportunity. Yet amid these conditions, fragile but radical visions of alternative worlds emerge. The paper closes by imagining an animals’ ecological politics that safeguards sovereign animal-nature relations as integral to renewed urban infrastructural futures.

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This paper analyses the emergence of a “culture of care” in laboratory animal research as a form of affective work shaping multispecies relations in the lab. Drawing on interviews and ethnography, it examines affects in animal experimentation amid growing non-animal methods.

Paper long abstract

Discussions about a “culture of care” in laboratory animal research mark a shift away from framing the harm done to experimental animals as necessary “sacrifices” for advancing human health. Instead, they emphasize a mutualism connected to affective work, in which human and animal welfare are understood as interconnected.

In this paper, we identify and analyse a shift in policy advocacy, as well as in the education and training of researchers and animal care workers, toward explicitly harnessing the management of emotions, talked about by the researchers as a “culture of care.” Drawing on interviews and ethnographic research on scientific knowledge production conducted with both animal models and non-animal or alternative models, as well as interviews with animal rights experts and activists, this paper examines the introduction of explicit affective work in basic and translational bioscience research. This affective work is presented as mutually beneficial to both humans and non-human animals.

We situate these developments alongside a push toward developing non-animal or alternative models in laboratory research. The paper draws from STS scholarship on affects in scientific work and multispecies entanglements in the laboratory to theorize further the mobilization of the affective entanglements in the animal laboratory as tools to enact better more-than-human bioscience research. Nevertheless, this research still relies on the use of animal bodies, and can be seen as a justification for the continued use of animal experimentation at a time when non-animal models are on the rise.

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This paper examines the establishement of West Nile Virus epidemic thread in Central Europe. Starting from virus-mosquito mutualism to interrogate how human health threats create opportunities—and foreclose possibilities—for advancing multispecies environmental justice beyond One Health frameworks.

Paper long abstract

This paper departs from the mutualism between West Nile Virus and mosquitoes to interrogate what happens when such viral-vector partnerships threaten human health. As climate change drives WNV's spread into Central Europe, I ask whether threats posed by one form of multispecies mutualism can create openings for more just interspecies futures.

Drawing on the first phase of research examining WNV epidemic risk establishment in Central Europe, I analyze scholarly and public health discourse (including veterinary) and media coverage to unpack how knowledge and policy production practices travels across borders of Central European states. Despite sharing similar geographical and ecological realities, these countries often approach WNV threat, preventive measures, and research strikingly differently. I examine on what information and arguments decisions about what to monitor, whom to protect, and what constitutes risk are based as the virus and its vectors deliver infection also to its reservoirs and hosts such as birds, humans and horses.

While some species become sentinels to be monitored, others vectors to be eliminated, and still others remain invisible to protective infrastructures, human health endangerment mobilizes unprecedented resources and attention—potentially opening space for deeper engagement with multispecies environmental justice.

I argue that centering harm as the analytical starting point reveals both the limits of One Health approaches—which instrumentalize non-human health to protect humans—and unexpected political possibilities. When viral-vector mutualism threatens humans, it forces recognition of ecological interdependencies that might otherwise remain ignored, creating potential leverage for advancing multispecies justice claims even as current biosecurity practices foreclose such possibilities.

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In this paper, I draw on the idea of ‘more-than-human negotiation’ to research the possibility of building more responsive and adaptive human-microbial relationships. For this, I follow agricultural practices in Finland where the use of antimicrobial synthetic chemicals is limited or fully rejected.

Paper long abstract

Humans have established meaningful and varied relationships with microbes since the beginning of our existence. Since the development of the Germ Theory, we have adopted a Pasteurian ‘war-like’ perspective, based on control and eradication. However, this confrontational view of microbes faces unintended blowback in the shape of AMR, loss of soil fertility, vulnerability to epidemics, etc. The response has been a “probiotic turn” (Lorimer 2020), increasingly recognising the importance of microbial life for (more-than-)human survival. Although this represents a necessary departure from ‘war’ logics, an overly enthusiastic embracement of human-microbial mutualisms risks obscuring still-ongoing tensions, such as the uncertainty within human-microbial interactions or the role of socioeconomical contexts.

In this paper, I research how we could build more responsive and adaptive human-microbial relationships by following agricultural practices where the use of antimicrobial synthetic chemicals is limited or fully rejected. For this, I use the concept of ‘more-than-human negotiation’ (Palanco Lopez et al. 2025) to analyse the role of farmers within the farm ecosystems. Drawing on my fieldwork in eight Finnish farms during 2023-2025, I identify the specifics, affordances, and challenges that come with the idea of farming (with) microbes, exploring the potential of looking them through the lens of ‘microbial negotiation’. More specifically, I ask: what kind of human-microbial relationships are developed when farmers decide to put down the antimicrobial weapons – but still aim to achieve targets of profit and good enough yields? And what kind of material, ecological, and socioeconomical context facilitates or limits these relationships?

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In this talk, we encounter the human gut as site and substance through which to theorise symbiotic relations. Taking the gut mucosa as case study, I ask how descriptive attention to substance might enrich the granularity of STS vocabularies for multispecies relationality— and modes of care.

Paper long abstract

In this talk, I will invite you down into the scale of microscopic host-microbiota relations to ask how attention to material substance might contribute to STS vocabularies for relationality. The site we will attend to is the human gut mucosal wall: an environment for microbial lives which is simultaneously a layer separating host and microbiota. Drawing on biomedical discourse and scientific imagery, I re-imagine the gut wall as a multispecies interface — simultaneously separating and relating the symbiotic partners. In dialogue with Landecker's apart-together, Latimer's being alongside, and Haraway's becoming with, I argue that the human holobiont, approached at the materiality of the gut wall, emerges as a spatialised collectivity: a (dis)unity whose character shifts with the scale of the gaze. At the level of the human body, symbiotic togetherness predominates. At the granularity of the gut wall, host and microbiota come into focus as being alongside one another: held apart as a condition of healthy relations. This theorisation has consequences for considerations of right care in multispecies relations. Theorising the holobiont as spatialised collectivity foregrounds the matter of how to care for the substance and structure of the relation. Zooming back out to macroscopic relational interfaces, like farms or playgrounds, I ask: how many multispecies relations are sustained not by togetherness alone, but by various forms of alongsidedness? Attention to material structure and substance, I suggest, is one route through which STS might acquire the conceptual and descriptive granularity needed to better care for the multiplicity of multispecies relations.

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This paper explores ethical and epistemic issues arising from smart-hive technologies in honeybee colonies. Using an enactivist framework, it examines the human-bee-technology triad and asks how technological mediation may reshape multispecies mutualism and introduce new forms of asymmetry or harm.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the ethical and epistemic implications of introducing technological interventions –such as smart-hives, similar to those developed in the Hiveopolis project – into honeybee colonies (Apis mellifera). These systems, which combine robotic structures with artificial intelligence, promise to improve colony health, enhance monitoring of environmental stressors, and open new possibilities for sustainable apiculture. Under these conditions, technological mediation is expected to support the wellbeing of both species.

Drawing on enactivist approaches to cognition, the paper treats cognition and ethics as co-emergent within organism-environment relations. From this perspective, questions of care, responsibility, and intervention cannot be understood as external moral evaluations but are embedded in the very structure of multispecies interaction.

This paper investigates the potential for mistreatment of the actants (particularly bees) within a triadic relation which consists of humans, bees, and technology. It offers a contribution to STS debates on more-than-human care and multispecies entanglements, showing how technological mediation can shape mutualistic relations between humans and animals.

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This paper examines fisherfolks' coexistence with water-plants in North Bihar, India through a reflective political ecology of multispecies that examines practices of environmental care to probe theories of symbiosis and conviviality through concepts of inequality and environmental justice.

Paper long abstract

This paper looks into the praxis of coexistence and care between one of the most disadvantaged community in North Bihar, India, that of riverine fisher-people, and some of the water-plants they live with. The embodied ways in which fisherfolks interact with waterbodies and its leafy inhabitants while fencing off worsening disasters and communal violence cannot simply be understood through praise-worthy symbiosis, mutuality and conviviality, particularly if we juxtapose them to the community’s social-political aspirations and the consequent interpretations of change, social mobility, and future that constantly redefine them.

Those practices, examples of class consciousness against all odds, weapons of the weak, attempts to counter processes of hegemony, are also not the best examples of conservation and sustainability, particularly if we read them along the multispecies stories written in the water—tales of harmful algae blooms and omens of wastelands.

I propose a political ecology of multispecies that considers global ramifications of fisherfolks-waterplants interactions and comprises the observing researcher and scholarly practices of interpretation and judgement to argue that unpacking layers of inequality and related ecological practices requires probing multispecies approaches for how they intersect with environmental justice.

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This paper analyzes discourse around the Seneca white deer, a population of leucistic deer that live on a former military ammunitions depot in upstate New York. It argues for attention to the heritable, and necessarily entangled, ecologies that persist in the afterlives of containment.

Paper long abstract

In upstate New York, on land that stored nuclear weapons through the mid-twentieth century, lives the world’s largest known population of leucistic white-tailed deer. This strange, all-white deer's persistence within the former Seneca Army Depot is remarkable, but not accidental. Through settler-colonial dispossession and decades of militarized security, the Depot has long been shaped by its fencing and managed separation from surrounding ecologies. Outside such a bounded setting, gene flow and random mating would make a recessively inherited phenotype like leucism far less likely to be expressed. Within the Depot’s fenced landscape, however, the white deer population grew and flourished, selectively protected by Depot personnel.

Today, local advocates mobilize to "save" the Seneca white deer through ecotourism. But their conservation framing obscures the paradox beneath the deer's fur: these deer have never been "natural," and in fact have always been sustained through their entanglement with human militarization and securitization.

With the deer, I argue that containment is not a single event or static infrastructure, but a durable regime whose parameters continue to organize which forms of life can persist and become valued. Drawing on preliminary analysis of media coverage, tourism materials, and historical documents from the Seneca Depot, I consider the ambivalence of ecological care in the afterlives of containment, treating the deer as a living trace of governing logics that persist across institutional transformations. The Seneca deer thus illuminate how dispossession and enclosure produce not only human governance, but also selective forms of multispecies futurity in damaged landscapes.

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Human–pollinator relations have significant health interdependencies. Beyond agriculture, wild pollinators contribute to ecological stability and human wellbeing, while pesticides harm both insects and human health. This study explores links between non-monetary benefits of humans-insects mutualism.

Paper long abstract

Pollinating insects are recognized for their contribution to agriculture. However, Western European societies remain strongly oriented toward their economic value, prioritizing crop productivity and emblematic species, particularly the honey bee (Apis mellifera), while overlooking vast diversity of wild pollinating insects and their relationships with humans. Pollination is carried out by a wide range of taxa, including hundreds of wild bee species, flies, beetles, butterflies, and others. Moreover, the ecological mechanisms linking multispecies pollinator communities to plant productivity remain only partially understood, and the role of diverse pollinator assemblages is an important area of scientific uncertainty.

This presentation examines multispecies mutualism between humans and wild pollinating insects, with particular attention to non-monetary benefits, including cultural, experiential, and health-related dimensions. While insects are frequently associated with risks to human health—such as stings, allergies, or vectors of disease—their positive contributions to human wellbeing is underexplored.

Human–insect relations are also shaped by significant trade-offs. Insecticides used for pest control typically target insect nervous systems, making them harmful not only to pest species but also to non-target pollinators and potentially to human health. Existing mitigation measures, such as restrictions on spraying times, primarily protect managed honey bees while often overlooking wild pollinators.

The study combines a literature review on the non-monetary values of pollinators with in-depth interviews with actors engaged in cultural and ecological initiatives. Grounded in environmental sociology and social-ecological systems research, we seek insights from Science and Technology Studies to explore cultural practices that may foster greater recognition of human–pollinator mutualism.

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Based on multispecies ethnography in rural Kazakhstan, this paper explores children’s relations with animals and land, arguing that multispecies reciprocity emerges not as stable mutualism but as a fragile negotiation within landscapes shaped by colonial and ecological harm.

Paper long abstract

Across the social sciences, multispecies relations are increasingly framed as forms of mutualism grounded in interdependence and processes of becoming-with across species (Haraway 2008). Yet beginning analysis from the assumption of mutual benefit can obscure the historical and ecological conditions that shape such relations. This paper approaches multispecies relations from the opposite direction: starting with harm.

Drawing on multispecies ethnographic research in rural southeastern Kazakhstan, the paper examines how children learn with animals, land, and seasonal landscapes through everyday practices such as tending livestock, gathering berries, and caring for small animals. These interactions reflect relational cosmologies grounded in local philosophies of kut (blessing) and yrys (abundance), which frame relations with animals, land, and ancestors as reciprocal and ethically binding. Learning emerges through embodied engagements with more-than-human worlds: processes of becoming-with humans, animals, and environments (Barad 2007; Braidotti 2011; Ingold 2011). These orientations resonate with Kazakh nomadic ecological knowledge systems that historically structured reciprocal relations with land and animals (Kasabek & Kasabek 1998; Kaimuldinova et al. 2023).

At the same time, these relations unfold within landscapes profoundly shaped by colonial and industrial histories. Russian settler colonialism, Soviet collectivization, and contemporary resource extraction have disrupted pastoral lifeways and ecological relations across rural Kazakhstan. Attending to these tensions reveals the non-innocence of multispecies reciprocity. Rather than stable mutualisms, relations between humans, animals, and landscapes emerge as historically contingent negotiations within damaged environments. By foregrounding harm alongside care, the paper situates everyday practices of coexistence within broader histories of colonial transformation and ecological change.