Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

An ethnography of urban tree climbers reveals how pruning practices activate interspecies attunement, challenging modern views of plants as passive resources and instead recognizing vegetal subjectivity and agency.

Paper long abstract

his paper explores multispecies relations between humans and plants through an ethnography of urban tree climbers—specialists engaged in pruning, assessing, and caring for city trees. Their work reveals forms of attunement (Tsing 2024) that challenge modern conceptions of plants as natural “objects” or mere resources (Sullivan 2010). In this context, trees emerge as relational beings with their own temporalities, materialities, and agencies (Hall 2011).

Rooted in the field of multispecies anthropology, the paper highlights how these practices involve a perceptual and epistemic decentering (Danowski & Viveiros de Castro 2017), fostering a sympoietic mode of coexistence (Haraway 2019). Tree climbers engage in a close reading of vegetal structures and signs, co-constructing interspecies communication that speaks to past encounters and future trajectories. Far from being a neutral technique, pruning becomes a space of multispecies negotiation, ethical tension, and situated knowledge.

By focusing on the lived experience of those who work intimately with urban trees, this contribution aligns with the panel’s aim to rethink plant agency and interspecies entanglements. It proposes that urban trees are not static elements of infrastructure or landscape, but active participants in shaping ecological and social futures. In doing so, it contributes to the broader “plant turn” by foregrounding the role of embodied human-plant relations in cultivating more-than-human communities.