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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the methodological and ethical limits of more-than-human research through a French law regulating fences and wildlife mobility.

Paper long abstract

Who speaks for the wild boar? This paper critically engages with the methodological and ethical challenges of more-than-human research through an empirical case: a 2023 French law regulating fences, designed to limit their proliferation, facilitate wildlife movement, and potentially restrict human access to private land. Through interviews with human stakeholders (hunters, landowners, hikers, government officials, members of parliament) and planned fieldwork along fence lines, we examine how more-than-human actors (wild boar, deer, plants colonizing fence structures) are represented, enrolled, and sometimes instrumentalized in political processes that claim to act in their interest. Fences, we argue, are not merely infrastructures of separation: they materialize and transform relations between human and more-than-human actors, making them a productive site for studying how these relations are legally and politically constructed. Yet our research relies primarily on human accounts. We interrogate the heuristic value and limits of stakeholders’ narratives as a methodological device: what can they actually tell us about more-than-human experience, and what do they foreclose? Rather than treating this mediation as a methodological failure, we examine it as a constitutive feature of more-than-human research that deserves explicit analytical attention. We ultimately ask – including of our own research – whether frameworks that claim to go beyond the human can genuinely account for more-than-human agency or whether they merely repackage anthropocentric hierarchies of representation in environmental language.