Presentation short abstract

Speculative political ecology reframes the future as a site of political struggle, where un-equal socio-ecological futures are actively produced through present governance regimes and non-human relations. This paper examines Wade (2020) to analyse animated worlding as critical–creative SPE method.

Presentation long abstract

Political ecology has been foundational in showing how environments are socio-politically and epistemologically produced, yet its critiques of socio-ecological crises remain largely retrospective, often ceding questions of futurity to linear projections or technocratic scenarios. Speculative political ecology (SPE) addresses this lacuna by refiguring the future as an immanent terrain of socio-political struggle, where environmentally unequal futures are actively assembled in the present through infrastructural arrangements, governance practices, everyday dwelling and more-than-human relations (Rusca, Harris & Santos, 2024; Rusca et al., 2023).

Against this framework, this paper examines Wade (2020), an Indian animated short film set in a permanently inundated future Kolkata, through the lens of SPE. The film centres a community of environmental refugees -urban residents whose lives are unsettled by a hydro-apocalypse- while redistributing agency towards water, animals and built forms as co-constitutive forces in socio-ecological becoming. In doing so, Wade transcends conventional environmental storytelling to perform animated worlding as a critical–creative practice that merges speculative ethnography and transdisciplinary boundary work, visualising the affective and embodied dimensions of futures that elude empirical modelling while bringing together artistic, academic, and community knowledges. However, the short-film format risks compressing heterogeneous, contested realities into a single stylised narrative. The paper, therefore, interrogates how speculative political ecology, when grounded in such embodied and narrative methodologies, shifts from a discipline of critique toward a praxis of co-creation, offering not only a decolonial framework to analyse power relations but a participatory means to reimagine the actants, spaces, and temporalities of environmental justice.