Contribution short abstract

This paper addresses the theoretical and methodological contribution of the ontological turn to the study of HWI. We highlight how these frameworks unsettle long-standing conservation assumptions, provide new insights and contribute to methodological innovation and interdisciplinary collaborations.

Contribution long abstract

Responding to recent calls from within conservation science and the growing interdisciplinary field of coexistence studies, there is increasing recognition of the need to fundamentally rethink our relationships with nonhuman natures. This includes moving beyond conventional Eurocentric conservation and resource management paradigms, in ways that prioritise, rather than merely accommodate, local and Indigenous onto-epistemologies. This rethinking requires more sustained engagement with insights from the humanities and critical social sciences. To this end, this paper illustrates how recent theoretical propositions within the humanities can inform the emerging field of coexistence studies and mainstream critical approaches in conservation social sciences, such as political ecology, enhancing analyses and critiques of environmental inequalities and injustices. Specifically, we concentrate on more-than-human and political ontology frameworks. We focus on human-elephant coexistence, combining a review of interdisciplinary literature with ethnographic fieldwork to illustrate how these frameworks might inform research and our understanding of coexistence. We emphasise the value of foregrounding relationality, acknowledging nonhuman agency and autonomy, and recognising the multiplicity of worlds and ways of knowing in the way we approach human-wildlife coexistence. We provide insights into what relationality might look like in the field and how such orientations can reconfigure the questions we ask, the methods we employ, and the interpretations we make when studying human–wildlife coexistence. We propose that ethnographers conducting research in post-colonial contexts, particularly when collaborating with Indigenous peoples, reorient their approach through these lenses to engage meaningfully with local ways of knowing, practices, and relations with wildlife without imposing a Western onto-epistemology