- Convenors:
-
Julia Sachseder
(University of Vienna)
Franziska Müller (University of Vienna)
- Format:
- Panel
Format/Structure
This contribution is intended as a panel bringing together scholars with a focus on degrowth and more-than-human approaches
Long Abstract
This panel explores the synergies and tensions between degrowth and more-than-human scholarship within political ecology. Though these traditions have largely developed in parallel, we argue that placing them in dialogue offers crucial insights into the ecological crisis, the politics of growth, and the relational entanglements of more-than-human life.
Degrowth critiques the ideological and material centrality of economic growth in capitalist societies. It calls for a deliberate downscaling of production and consumption—especially in the Global North—to achieve a more just and desirable future. Rejecting extractivism, accumulation, and technocratic "green growth" solutions, degrowth challenges colonial and patriarchal hierarchies and offers a radical rethinking of our futures centered on care, autonomy, and conviviality.
More-than-human thought, rooted in feminist, decolonial, and STS traditions, questions human exceptionalism and highlights the entangled agencies of humans, more-than-humans, technologies, and ecologies. It unsettles anthropocentric assumptions in political thought and foregrounds ontologies and epistemologies that center multispecies life and interdependence, i.e. a worlding that exists beyond growth and greed.
Bringing these approaches together allows understanding the structural, epistemological and ontological dimensions of the multiple crises in an existential way. Degrowth provides a needed political economy lens to more-than-human debates through a focus on unequal and historically grounded distribution of violence, wealth, and resource use, and the brutalities against multispecies life that arise precisely from capitalist greed. More-than-human perspectives, in turn, enrich degrowth by decentering the human subject and emphasizing multispecies care, nonhuman agency, and ontological pluralism in envisioning post-growth futures.
We invite contributions that critically and creatively engage with the intersection of degrowth and more-than-human thought. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Theoretical integration of degrowth and more-than-human approaches
Empirical studies of multispecies resistance to extractivism or infrastructure
Feminist, queer, and decolonial perspectives on post-growth ecologies
Alternative ontologies and epistemologies from Indigenous or more-than-human worlds
Accepted papers
Presentation short abstract
This talk gives an agricultural perspective on more-than-human approaches and degrowth and is proposing that animals would be part of a care-revolution. It will give hard facts on agricultural growth and how the paradigm of growth influenced agricultural Sciences. I invites participants to envision.
Presentation long abstract
In agriculture, the prevailing paradigm is “grow or die.” Farms are expected to expand—with more land, more animals, and more technology—or face decline and disappearance. This slogan reflects not only agricultural practice but also the capitalist logic embedded in agricultural science, where economic growth forms the foundation of the discipline.
Growth, however, is not only economic. As Cary E. Bennett et al. (2018) have shown, domesticated chickens have at least doubled in body size since the late medieval period, and their body mass has increased up to fivefold since the mid-twentieth century. These chickens can no longer survive independently; they rely on continuous human, technical, and pharmaceutical support. Their disproportionately enlarged breast muscles—bred to meet human dietary preferences—often prevent them from standing upright.
From this perspective, it is easy to conclude that animals would vote for degrowth. But what if we not only counteract the destructive, extractivist notions of growth, but established an entirely new paradigm? What if care became our guiding principle—in agriculture, in human–nature relations, and in life more broadly? What forms of investment, agency, or activist practices might animals embody within the care-revolution? What can we learn?
I will not answering this questions, but perhaps we can begin together—human and more-than-human participants on this panel—to envision a world in which human life is no longer defined by overbred broiler bones. Let us imagine a future in which the geological traces we, humans and more-than-humans, leave behind signal radical solidarity and care—markers of a –cene not yet named.
Presentation short abstract
What do town people when they try to help amphibians’ migration across the city’s roads ? They do a voluntary “work of subsistence” that resists mass deaths and creates multispecies wordling on the margins of modern techno-fix cultures.
Presentation long abstract
Each year, in unexpected corners of Brussels, several thousand toads, frogs, and newts migrate to reach the water bodies where they breed. While this city was still dotted with marshes just over a century ago, these amphibians must now cross streets, even wide avenues, in order to reach their destination and then return to their terrestrial shelter. Their migration and their seasonal mass deaths under the wheels remain largely unknown, apart from a handful of urban dwellers who spend their winter evenings, month after month, helping them to cross traffic infrastructure.
I will present my study of this case in dialogue with the research of sociologist G. Pruvost on the “work of subsistence” (2021). The connections she draws between subsistence feminism (inspired by Marxism and anarchism), the politicization of everyday life, and vernacular societies (Y. Illich) enable me to describe the efforts of my interlocutors as more than a naturalist leisure activity, and as more than commitments in solidarity with amphibian life ; it is also, above all, lots of voluntary care work. It consists of repeated watches and interactions in the cold and dark nights. It generates vernacular knowledge about these animals and the surrounding territory. And it weaves interdependent life cycles. Whereas infrastructure projects (road accessories, toad tunnels) never suffice to halt the massacre during those migrations, the invisible and obstinate work of town people not only ensures the possibility of urban amphibian life, but it also creates multispecies wordling on the margins of modern techno-fix cultures.
Presentation short abstract
The presentation contributes to the agenda of spatialising and urbanising degrowth in the global South by showing how more-than-human centered approaches to resisting large-scale infrastructure projects can help to situate UPE research and articulate alternative urban futures.
Presentation long abstract
Recent scholarship has suggested that there is a need for degrowth research to engage with the substantial Global North/South dialogue that has emerged in critical urban studies over the past decade. However, much of this literature to date has not engaged significantly with more-than-human approaches or insights. Nonetheless, more-than-human scholarship is well equipped to offer unique and situated approaches to addressing current interconnected planetary crises such as extreme weather (climate change) impacts, the biodiversity crisis and the politics of growth by highlighting the relational entanglements of more-than-human life. As such, both strands of research have in common the aim of exposing and confronting the metabolic demands and implications of large-scale urbanisation, which often take on different meanings and spatial forms when examined in a global South context.
In this presentation, I argue that understanding more-than-human centered approaches to degrowth in cities of the Global South requires a situated urban political ecology (UPE) approach focused on grassroots practices and environmental activism. It draws on two cases of grassroots efforts in Malaysia and Singapore which have used more-than-human discourses and approaches to resist large-scale infrastructure projects. These spatially and socially distinct efforts are framed as interconnected critiques of state-led capitalist urban development that offer alternatives to growth-centered infrastructure. The presentation thereby contributes to the agenda of urbanising degrowth by showing how grassroots practices in southern cities can help to provincialise UPE research and articulate alternative urban futures grounded in environmental justice, commons, and care.
Presentation short abstract
This presentation explores the potential synergies between more-than-human and degrowth scholarship through the lens of hybrid labor between humans and non-humans. We argue that further engagement among these perspectives can facilitate futures of conviviality and reciprocity.
Presentation long abstract
The increased focus on relational ontologies across fields has shifted perspectives on the dynamic between humans and nature, including in ecological economics. Degrowth has emerged as a political and theoretical movement critical of the growth imperatives that are foundational to capitalism and its impacts on humans and non-humans alike. Meanwhile more-than-human scholars explore expanded notions of agency as assemblages of humans with non-human materials, entities, and beings, therefore interrogating the foundations of political and economic theory.
This presentation examines the potential integration of ecological economic theory, particularly degrowth, with more-than-human scholarship across disciplines through reconceptualizing labor as emerging from assemblages. In other words, labor is defined as a hybrid process involving humans and non-humans. Literature in ecological economics has stressed the need to dismantle the nature-cultural dualism, however, the field inherits unresolved ontological tensions from disciplines like economics and ecology. We suggest that degrowth can benefit from greater engagement with fields that take seriously the role of nonhuman agency and the deep entanglements of the human and nonhuman, including new materialism, post-humanism, feminist theories, anthropology, and multispecies ethnography.
We explore the idea of hybrid labor as an avenue for this further engagement, acknowledging the centrality of work in human-nature relations. We ask: How is labor conceptualized if the economy is understood not as solely the result of human actions but emerging from more-than-human assemblages? How can this engagement contribute to the goals of degrowth such as conviviality and reciprocity as well as align more-than-human scholarship with a broader political movement?
Presentation short abstract
This paper proposes animals’ ecological politics that honours and takes seriously the stakes of preserving animals’ sovereign relations with nature - and each other - specifically from human interference, as a form of multispecies degrowth praxis.
Presentation long abstract
This paper proposes an animals’ ecological politics that honours and takes seriously the stakes of preserving animals’ sovereign relations with nature - and each other - specifically from human interference, as a form of multispecies degrowth praxis. To this end, it suggests that we must be guided a central question: what exactly do animals want when they seek sovereignty? Recognising animal subjectivities and agencies as core to environmentalism as a social justice movement, it foregrounds anti-anthropocentrism as foundational liberatory ethics that demands a radical unsettling and reimagining of growth, degrowth and post-growth. Ultimately, the paper speculates on alternative degrowth futures that are shaped by concrete emancipatory imaginaries of the afterlives of animal exploitation, commodification, and coercion, however fleeting or frail.