Format/Structure

This panel will follow a standard format.

Long Abstract

Grazing, trampling, rooting, wallowing, seed-carrying, tree-felling, damming: herbivores are increasingly imagined as ecological engineers capable of disturbing, diversifying, and regenerating landscapes. Across Europe, their (re)appearance- whether through deliberate reintroductions or spontaneous recolonisation- is often bound up with hopeful visions of post-productivist, ecologically resilient, multispecies futures. Yet these utopian imaginaries sit uneasily alongside more anxious narratives of overabundance, agricultural damage, pathogenic risk, or biodiversity decline. Inhabiting complex biocultural landscapes, herbivores occupy multiple and sometimes conflicting ontologies- at once engineers, pests, food, game, companions, and disease vectors.

This panel explores the ambiguous bio- and necro-politics of herbivores, including omnivores whose diets and ecologies are closely associated with herbivory. From wild boar and bison to beavers, deer, domesticated surrogates or rodents, we examine how herbivores not only engineer ecosystems, but also reshape governance regimes, social worlds and infrastructures of care and control. All this unfolds within a European landscape undergoing environmental, economic, and socio-political transformation.

We are particularly interested in how differing forms of knowledge, affect, memory and perceptibility influence the possibilities of coexistence, both human and nonhuman. We invite contributions that explore how sociotechnological mediations- such as trail cameras, thermal imaging, GPS tracking, genomic databases, or computer models- configure how herbivores are sensed, known and governed. We also welcome reflections on how herbivore bodies become sites of intervention- whether through selective breeding, genetic engineering, or by securing their microbial entanglements.

We invite traditional papers and creative contributions that broadly engage with:

• Multispecies coexistence

• Rewilding and conservation infrastructures and interventions

• Sociotechnologies and embodied knowledge practices

• Disease ecologies and biosecurity

• Memory, multispecies justice, and more-than-human governance

Together, the panel will explore how herbivores rework boundaries between wildness and domestication, bodies and environments, health and harm- and raise questions about governance and coexistence amidst uncertain socioecological futures.

This Panel has 4 pending paper proposals.
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