Short abstract

Based on walking interviews with amateur gardeners, this paper uses framing theory, theories of the stranger, and a more-than-human lens to explore how situated affective practices shape which species, from slugs to ground elder, are made killable, grievable, or tolerable in domestic gardens.

Long abstract

Invasive species are increasingly present in domestic gardens. Yet how amateur gardeners affectively and morally negotiate the species’ status remains underexplored in STS and environmental sociology. Although invasion biology provides classificatory frameworks, these do not account for the visceral, reflexive, and often contradictory ways gardeners construct organisms as belonging or not belonging (Shackleton et al., 2019). This paper addresses the gap between institutional species classifications and situated affective practices through which non-belonging is produced and contested in everyday garden life. Our aim is to consider the affective and classificatory processes through which certain species are rendered killable, grievable, or tolerable.

The analysis is based on in-depth walking interviews with 26 amateur gardeners in southern Sweden, examined using reflexive thematic analysis and a more-than-human lens. Our tentative findings reveal that gardeners co-construct a layered moral hierarchy shaped by disgust, dread, and aesthetic ambivalence in interactions with nonhumans. While species like Spanish slugs, box tree moths, and ground elder are rendered “killable” (Haraway, 2008) through visceral distaste and escalating, routinised violence, other creatures’ statuses are more muddled and inconclusive. Statuses are shaped by boundary work involving both humans and nonhumans. The paper draws parallels between invasive species and patterns of social exclusion, questioning the arbitrariness of classification categories (Coates, 2006; Ginn, 2014; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017).

These findings suggest that invasion management in domestic settings operates not only through ecological rationality, but also through affective framing practices whose structure mirrors broader social inclusion, exclusion, and the production of the stranger.