Short abstract

This workshop inquires how to live with “invasive” species through the means of postcards. This medium invites us to question instances and visual tourist communication of conservation work where killing-as-caring becomes a mundane practice and ingrained part of eco-touristic landscapes.

Long abstract

The question how we may live with “alien invasive” species has been discussed in multispecies STS, particularly in the context of scientific research. What has received relatively less scholarly attention is how humans’ relationships with such negatively connoted species is conveyed and cultivated to tourists, particularly in areas with heavy eco-tourism like Aotearoa New Zealand. Some research identifies differing tourists’ perspectives from mainstream conservation narratives and argues for more targeted communication with tourists to increase management success and conservation awareness (Lovelock et al. 2022). Meanwhile, researchers have paid less attention to how tourist and public communication of “invasive” species normalize “killing as caring” (Kung 2026) to cultivate a specific kind of conservation awareness.

This workshop engages the question how to live with species cast as enemies by creating/writing postcards that communicate this ethos of killing-as-care. Rather than surveys or interviews, it engages a more visceral, visual scholarly inquiry by sending postcards from “invaded” environments. By offering postcards created from eco-tourist hotspots across Aotearoa, panelists are invited to submit images from their research fields that communicate invasiveness, traps on hikes, and other instances of public engagement in killing-as-care. Prior to the workshop, the organizers will create postcards with these images and play them back to participants to reflect on these moments and spaces of culling “invasive” species. The messages written on these postcards are intended to evoke lived, ethnographic moments in which killing becomes a mundane, unquestioned practice, and part of eco-touristic landscapes that underpin a conservation culture.