Presentation short abstract

Alpine ecologies shape transboundary mobilities and multispecies relations. Using photo-ethnography, this paper shows how verticality, climate shifts, and animal geographies reconfigure borders, generating ontological frictions and situated forms of care and resistance.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how Alpine ecologies act as political forces shaping transboundary mobilities and multispecies relations across the French–Italian–Swiss borderlands. Building on photo-ethnographic fieldwork in the Val d’Aoste, Haute-Savoie, and Valais, it explores how vertical spatialities—central to pastoral practices—generate forms of bordering that exceed national demarcations. These vertical bordering practices operate across multiple temporalities: seasonal movements between valley floors and high pastures, intergenerational livestock pathways, and the expanding geographies of wild species such as wolves.

Far from being passive landscapes, Alpine mountains emerge as active agents co-shaping alpine spaces. Recent ecological transformations—including glacier collapses, intensified avalanches, and landslides—have reconfigured relations among human communities, domestic animals, wildlife, and the mountains themselves.

These shifting multispecies entanglements reveal ontological frictions at the heart of contemporary environmental governance in the Alps. Policies targeting wildlife and climate change often impose teleological representations of Alpine space that silence alternative modes of knowing and relating.

By mobilizing photo-ethnography as a method for accessing sensory and experiential dimensions of interspecies encounters, this paper contributes to political ecology debates that seek to move beyond politicize border ecologies. It argues that the Alps constitute a vertical borderland where care, kinship, and resistance are continuously negotiated across species and elevations. In doing so, it demonstrates how more-than-human agencies co-produce spatial negotiations that unsettle fixed territorial, ecological, and epistemological boundaries.