Format/Structure

This will be a standard paper presentation format and a double session panel.

Long Abstract

Human lives and societies are bound together with the other-than-human in processes of living, dying, eating, and decomposing. Nowhere is this continuous correspondence between beings more entangled than in agriculture and food production. This session contributes to growing scholarship on agriculture and multispecies relations by exploring the wealth of ways of knowing and relating to other-than-human life within agri-food contexts through sensory, experimental, and participatory forms of knowledge production. Together, these approaches have foregrounded the ethical and onto-epistemological dimensions of working-with, caring-for, and relating-to more-than-human worlds. But merely acknowledging these relationalities—sprinkling “agency dust"—without attending to the specificities of multispecies relations risks remaining symbolic rather than actively shaping more just, caring and ethical worlds.

Instead, we call for contributions that make present multispecies specificities, asking what modes of perception, thought, and collaboration emerge from these encounters? How do specific nonhuman subjectivities, agencies, and ecologies shape agricultural and ecological work, and how does storying these in turn shape us? We welcome explorations drawing from political ecology in conversation with political ontology, STS, new materialisms, and Deleuzian and posthumanist thought. What kinds of futures do these frameworks open for a political ecology of agri-food, and why are scholars drawn to them? Is the appeal aesthetic, affective, spiritual, political, or ontological? None of these? Or all of these at once?

We encourage contributions that engage with:

* Empirical and ethnographic research

* Issues of care, justice and/or companionship in agricultural settings

* Spiritual, affective, or psychedelic perspectives to knowing non-humans

* More-than-representational approaches to storying including participatory, experimental, embodied, and artistic interventions

We particularly welcome presentations in interactive, creative, or performative formats that actively engage multispecies specificities, making space for the concrete, situated, and more-than-human textures of agri-environmental life.

This Panel has 8 pending paper proposals.
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