Format/Structure

Dialogic campfire format, where presenters will share five-minute lightning talks producing a key question for discussion between and among presenters

Long Abstract

More-than-human political ecology is an evolving interdisciplinary field that explores the hidden dimensions of human-environmental relations and entanglements by emphasising the agency of nonhuman beings and inanimate materials in shaping power relations and environmental conflicts. One key strength of such a field lies in its methodological pluralism. There is a need to bridge disciplinary and epistemological gaps, not solely through theories but also through interdisciplinary methods. By contrast, one key shortcoming of the emerging field is a lack of clarity on how to operationalise this vantage point for political action and social change, and how to overcome tensions between human and more-than-human political ecologies.

In a world of accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss and decreased spaces for political action to tackle this, how can focusing on more-than-human political ecologies serve wider purposes of effecting social change towards justice and sustainability, for humans and other-than-humans? And how can we produce 'transboundary' collaborations that transcend disciplinary boundaries and present diverse realities and speculative futures through diverse methods and types of knowledge? For instance, in addition to ethnographic methods, how can ecological methods inform about nonhuman agency and interspecies intersubjectivity in shared/ co-created landscapes?

This panel invites questions such as, but not limited to:

- How are more-than-human political ecologies connected to wider aspirations for social change, conceptually, methodologically, empirically?

- What has the field of more-than-human political ecologies achieved so far, and where does it need to go next?

- What methods in research and communication are needed to illuminate more-than-human political ecologies, and connect them to humans' and nonhumans’ lived experiences? In particular, what role does data triangulation play that transcends typical social science/natural science/humanities distinctions?

- What field insights, stories, and experiences of relational and unconventional methods can help expand the conceptual, methodological and social horizons of political ecology?

This Roundtable has 15 pending paper proposals.
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