Presentation short abstract

How do soundscapes intersect with diverse forms of environmental justice? This contribution articulates different notions of “sonic environmental justice”. It explores how the acoustic environment may mediate power, politics and privilege as a key dimension within sensorial political ecologies.

Presentation long abstract

How do soundscapes intersect with diverse forms of justice? This contribution articulates different notions of sonic environmental (in)justice and explores how the acoustic environment constitutes a critical factor in social-ecological relations. By attuning to key analytical axes in environmental justice scholarship—recognition, representation, distribution, regeneration, and resistance—this contribution interrogates the diverse ways in which soundscapes, sonic practices and sonic environmental change may intersect with power, politics and privilege. Methodologically, the contribution echoes diverse stories that reveal the roles of sounds in shaping environmental justice. Theoretically, it develops the concept of sonic environmental justice beyond distributional concerns to encompass plural forms of environmental justice. It also explores how struggles for socially just worlds mobilize sonic practices of resistances, challenging dominant paradigms and worldviews while amplifying multisensory relations of diverse human and more-than-human natures. By listening to soundscapes and sound as sites of struggles and dynamic sources of power and contestation, this contribution explores the role of the acoustic environment as a key dimension within sensorial political ecologies.

Presentation short abstract

A participatory session using contact mics, phones, and sensors to explore listening as eco-political sensing. Together we test illusions, patterns, and vibration to show how bodies and environments create meaning.

Presentation long abstract

Drawing on concepts of pareidolia, phantom words (Deutsch), and historical accounts of voice-hearing in resonance with church bells (Schafer; Truax), this exercise proposes transception as a method for sensing: the co-production of meaning through transmission and reception. Participants will engage in a series of playful, critical exercises that reveal how listening is not passive detection, but a dialectical, collective, and imaginative process in which gradual and convulsive ecological transformations become audible. “Eco-sensing” is a way of acting, be that hands-on games or workshops for neighborhood youth, it exposes, rather than distracts from, contemporary ecological challenges, including the politics of social media, and invites collaborative reflection on how embodied listening can reclaim technologies from enclosure and inspire new forms of kinship and ecological understanding.

Presentation short abstract

This paper addresses the changing meaning and experience of smells in the making and unmaking of oil-based industrial sensescapes. It suggests the relevance of the Gramscian notion of common sense for a possible sensorial political ecology.

Presentation long abstract

This paper addresses the changing meaning and experience of smells in the making and unmaking of industrial sensescapes as a social and political process. Building on extensive ethnographic research in two industrial regions in Italy (Brindisi) and Portugal (Sines), the paper examines a broad range of accounts, experiences and sensorial representations of noxiousness and pollution, within and outside the factories. Over several decades of entanglement with oil-based production, smells emerge as ambiguous traces of socioenvironmental transformation, controversially embedded in dominant narratives of development and modernization. Smells surface as corporeal memories of noxiousness, triggers of conflict, and idioms for expressing otherwise unspoken or muted stories of dispossession. Smells imbue the social experience of places, becoming intimate reminiscences of social reproduction, shaping sensorial habits in the workplace. They are also experienced as painful symptoms of illness and toxicity.

Moving beyond the immediacy and spontaneity of sensory reactions, the paper argues for considering sensorial experience as a fertile ground to explore the sedimentation of controversial histories of socioecological change. It suggests bringing in conversation a possible sensorial political ecology with the Gramscian notion of common sense. Despite common sense often being understood as a “mindset”, this paper emphasizes its practical and corporeal dimensions, which invite us to address the political relevance of non-verbalized, implicit, naturalized sensorial experience as an (un)contested ground of socioecological injustice.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how NatureCulture learning practices at Floating (University) Berlin unsettle anthropocentric, visual-centric epistemologies and cultivate alternative more-than-human sensibilities, opening new pathways for ecological relations and knowing.

Presentation long abstract

“Enacting Sensibility“ examines how learning practices that move beyond the nature-culture divide configure multisensorial political ecologies. Drawing on feminist and ecological pedagogies, sensibility here foregrounds embodiment, affect, attunement and care, over disembodied, purely cognitive modes of knowledge transmission. This aligns with Anna Tsing’s “arts of noticing”, van Dooren et al.’s “arts of attentiveness” and Nancy Tuana’s articulation of an “anthropocenean sensibility”, all of which invite practices that trouble dominant epistemologies.

The paper analyzes how NatureCulture learning cultivates ecosomatic practices, such as becoming-animal, becoming-soil, or becoming-water that aim to attune participants to more-than-human beings and planetary processes. These practices probe how anthropocentric forms of sensing, particularly the visual primacy embedded in Western epistemologies, are unsettled and how alternative more-than-human sensibilities emerge, asking: How are sensorial engagements rendered pedagogical and how do they open pathways toward new ecological relations and modes of knowing?

The research is situated at the NatureCulture Learning Site Floating (University) Berlin and draws on ethnographic methods tracing specific learning formats developed within the “Climate Care Festival“. Although these formats remained within the realm of human activities, they generated sensorially complex encounters that challenged anthropocentric frames, revealed tensions inherent in “sensing otherwise” and fostered awareness of how knowledge, power and environments are produced and contested through the full sensorium.

Presentation short abstract

Urban greening often assumes normative sensory experiences, excluding neurodivergent publics. Based on research with autistic children in Barcelona, we show how multisensory co-creation of nature-based playgrounds challenges visual-centric planning and advances sensory justice in urban design.

Presentation long abstract

Urban greening is widely promoted as a pathway to healthier cities, yet these interventions often assume normative ways of sensing and navigating space, excluding communities whose perceptual worlds differ from dominant expectations. This paper explores how neurodivergent publics—specifically autistic children and their families—experience urban environments through multisensory engagements that challenge conventional planning paradigms.

Drawing on research in Barcelona, we present insights from a participatory design process reimagining public playgrounds as neuro-inclusive green spaces. Using shadowing and performative co-creation workshops, children expressed preferences through embodied interaction rather than conventional verbal or graphic tools. These engagements reveal how sensory dimensions—sound, touch, smell, and movement—shape feelings of safety, autonomy, and belonging.

We argue that sensory experience is not merely aesthetic but deeply political. Decisions about what feels calm or overwhelming, navigable or disorienting, reveal power relations embedded in urban design. Recognizing these dynamics calls for co-creating spaces that respect diverse sensory ecologies. Our work introduces sensorial urbanism as a lens for political ecology—foregrounding embodied perception in struggles over access, inclusion, and the right to nature. How might integrating sensory diversity into design reshape ecological and social outcomes? What creative possibilities emerge when autistic publics shape urban green infrastructures? These questions open pathways toward cities that are not only greener but more just, attuned to multiple ways of inhabiting and sensing the urban.

Presentation short abstract

This contribution explores how analysing the sensations of participants in food systems transformation experiments in France reveals the existence of multiple, often unrecognised sensitive ecologies, as well as tensions between justice and ecology in transition narratives.

Presentation long abstract

Agricultural and food initiatives that promote transformative narratives articulating both ecological and social objectives have rarely been studied in terms of people's perceptions, even though farming and eating practices involve many different sensations. Our contribution highlights and discusses the value of research methods inspired by sensory anthropology in exploring the links between food systems’ ecological transformation and the integration of justice issues for humans and more-than-humans.

We conducted qualitative research on 12 Social Security for Food Initiatives (SSFI) in France, which are food democracy experiments designed to achieve more ecological food systems. Based on an analytical framework combining environmental justice, food justice and multispecies justice, our analysis reveals multiple sensitive ecologies experienced by often largely invisible participants in food systems, such as vulnerable rural dwellers and smallholder farmers.

Analysing ways in which taste, touch and smell experiences are or are not encountered and valued allows us to identify how ecologisation and justice meet or compete in food systems transitions: despite a contribution to distributive food justice for people suffering from food insecurity, SSFI might exclude specific food knowledges, preferences and participation, thereby exacerbating the marginalisation of smallholder farmers.

Analysing sensations reveals the complexity and contradictions of socio-ecological transition narratives, even ones claiming to be transformative. As political ecologists, exploring the intimate and sensory experiences of marginalised groups provides a better understanding of underrepresented ecological narratives based on specific relationships between humans and non-humans, thus countering reductionist, normative and standardised approaches to food system ecologisation.

Presentation short abstract

Amazonian Shipibo healing practices take place in a sensorial terrain, unfolding through plant-human entwinements that blur boundaries between self and other and destabilize hierarchies of knowing. Through these embodied relations, healing can become a form of ontological resistance.

Presentation long abstract

Healing with medicinal plants is a sensory experience that unfolds within interspecies entwinements that blur boundaries between human and plant, self and other. My understanding of healing emerges from Amazonian Shipibo healing practices in which plants, spirits, and human bodies co-produce more-than-human worlds through song, psychedelic perception, dreams, and relational entwinement. Indigenous practices for learning from plants rely on periods of sensory deprivation to come into relationship with medicinal plants in a way that can permanently alter the human, opening the body to connections that traverse and destabilize colonial hierarchies of animacy and knowing. Yet, Shipibo healing rituals have become commodified and enfolded into global capitalism with the rise of ayahuasca tourism, an industry that increasingly extracts plant vitality and Indigenous knowledge from the Amazon to serve foreigners from the Global North.

I explore the ways in which the embodied, sensory, and psychoactive aspects of knowing plants continually make and unmake both myself as researcher and the more-than-human communities with whom I work. Capitalist ideologies tend to reduce plants to commodities and humans to laboring bodies. However, I argue that interspecies entwinements can create a sensorial terrain through which healing can become a form of political and ontological resistance, generating openings for mobilizing emergent more-than-human collectives and collaborations. This depends on what I call an ethic of healing. Healing, as an ethical and transformative engagement with more-than-human worlds, becomes a mode of relational worldmaking oriented toward reparation and accountable relations within an animate pluriverse.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores the "taste" of power in the global almond sector. Comparing California's bland, irrigated monocultures with Spain's bitter, rainfed refugia, we show how food’s organoleptic qualities are not mere consumer preferences or biological attributes but active political ecological agents

Presentation long abstract

While work on the political ecology of food and agriculture has long illuminated visible landscapes of power, this paper turns to the visceral terrain of taste. We offer a sensory political ecology of almond agriculture, illustrating how organoleptic qualities both shape and are shaped by agrarian worlds. We examine California’s irrigated monocultures aside Spain’s rainfed polycultures. In California, the industry has perfected a hegemonic plantation taste—bland, consistent, crunchy—which relies on ecological simplification, intensive irrigation, and the erasure of biological difference. In Spain, diverse and occasionally bitter almond varieties are cultivated in polyculture landscapes that resist industrial capture, enabling the persistence of rural livelihoods on the margins. Over the past decade, Spain’s almond industry has rapidly embraced irrigated monocultures in a rush to ‘modernize’ the sector in pursuit of the standardized almond taste that global markets have come to expect. Yet, rainfed orchards persist, bolstered by local markets that tolerate diverse tastes and artisanal markets that celebrate them. We argue that food’s organoleptic qualities are not merely consumer preferences but lively forces that recruit labor, capital, and nonhumans into specific political ecological configurations, with implications for environmental sustainability and justice. Analyzing the political ecologies of food and agriculture through the palate reveals how the standardization of sensory experience underpins extractive regimes, and how cultivating a taste for difference offers a pathway for multispecies resistance.

Presentation short abstract

This study examines Maoist China's prospecting movement through sensory politics, showing how touching, tasting, smelling, and walking helped constitute a socialist geobody and shaped subsurface knowledge, extractive power, and environmental governance.

Presentation long abstract

This study examines the national mineral prospecting movement in Maoist China as a project of making a socialist geobody and as a multisensory political ecology of resource extraction. Following Winichakul's notion of the geobody as a national body imagined and sustained through mapping and scientific ways of knowing, the study extends the concept beyond its original territorial focus to include the subsurface. Drawing on archival documents, propaganda reports, geological handbooks, and personal memoirs, it demonstrates that embodied and multisensory knowledge was central to geological science and practice in Maoist China. Between the 1950s and 1970s, millions of farmers, students, and workers were mobilised to walk mountain slopes, handle rocks, taste spring water, smell sulphurous vapours, and scan the land for mineral clues. These sensory practices incorporated their bodies into the state's extractive apparatus and rendered them the "sensory organs" of a geobody that linked subsurface resources to state power. Their observations extended state knowledge into strata and fissures, while the patriotic sentiment attached to "discovering treasures for the nation" reinforced identification with the socialist project. Through bodily labour, sensory training, and political feeling, the geobody took shape in ways aligned with Maoist revolutionary ideals. The national prospecting movement thus reveals that the occupation of resources and authority was also an occupation of perception and the senses. This sensory political ecology shaped forms of environmental governance and extractive power and continues to influence contemporary understandings of resources, territory, and the state in China.

Presentation short abstract

Milk is an important pastoral food for the Maasai of East Africa. This paper will offer an ethnographic account of how changes in the taste of milk reflect wider political-ecological dynamics as well as how these dynamics are embodied in everyday Maasai sensorial experience and worries about health.

Presentation long abstract

Milk is an important pastoral food for Maasai (Århem 1989; Talle 1990). Research carried out among Maasai communities in Loita (Kenya) and Terrat (Tanzania) over 2024 and 2025, revealed two different stories of a change in the taste of milk. Inspired by a human and more-than-human relational approach and the concept of cuerpo-territorio, this paper will offer an ethnographic account of how this reflects wider political-ecological changes as well as how these changes are embodied in everyday Maasai sensorial experience and worries about health.

To develop the first argument, we draw on an emerging more-than-human perspective within the anthropology of milk (Ahearn 2021), food studies (Elton 2019, Reynolds et al. 2024) and the political ecology of food (Moragues-Faus & Marsden 2017). Using the Terrat story and exploring Maasai-livestock-grass relations we will explore what a changed taste of milk can tell us about wider political-ecological changes and struggles.

The second argument builds on the first. It combines insights from the literature on cuerpo-territorio (Zaragocin & Caretta 2021) and food and body (Counihan 2000), and derives from both the Terrat and the Loita stories. Here, the changed taste of milk is linked to health concerns about toxicities associated with environmental changes and the introduction of modern veterinary care that find its way to human bodies through milk.

This paper contributes to a sensorial political ecology by showing that a relational approach helps to connect the dots between the underexplored sensory aspect of changing food taste (Sutton 2010) and wider political ecological dynamics.

Presentation short abstract

This is a study of people's everyday engagements with wild elephants in northeast India. It argues that sensory engagement is central to their knowledge of elephants and their sense of place amidst rapid ecological transformations.

Presentation long abstract

Sensory engagement is indispensable for people who must constantly interpret wild elephants’ behaviour and intentions, respond to their movements, and maintain distance from the potentially dangerous megafauna. The study draws on fieldwork in an agrarian village in Assam, Northeastern India, with people who are predominantly farmers. While elephants have long inhabited these landscapes, their presence outside the protected forests and into the adjacent villages has intensified over time. This has led to inventive ways in which people negotiate the uncertainty and precarity of living alongside elephants, which primarily includes routinely protecting their farmlands from crop-devouring elephants.

In this paper, I look at the repertoire of sensory practices through which my interlocutors not only protect their farmlands but also carry out other everyday activities, amidst the looming prospect of encountering elephants. I focus on heightened forms of sensory attunement, such as waiting for the arrival of elephants every evening, as well as more mundane embodied alertness, such as during walking through alleys that are also elephant pathways or sleeping at night. Based on the analysis of these practices, I foreground the centrality of the ‘sensory’ to how people claim to communicate with and know elephants, and how they describe their sense of place as being shaped by animals’ presence.