Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores the potential synergies between more-than-human and degrowth scholarship through the lens of hybrid labor between humans and non-humans. We argue that further engagement among these perspectives can facilitate futures of conviviality and reciprocity.

Presentation long abstract

The increased focus on relational ontologies across fields has shifted perspectives on the dynamic between humans and nature, including in ecological economics. Degrowth has emerged as a political and theoretical movement critical of the growth imperatives that are foundational to capitalism and its impacts on humans and non-humans alike. Meanwhile more-than-human scholars explore expanded notions of agency as assemblages of humans with non-human materials, entities, and beings, therefore interrogating the foundations of political and economic theory.

This presentation examines the potential integration of ecological economic theory, particularly degrowth, with more-than-human scholarship across disciplines through reconceptualizing labor as emerging from assemblages. In other words, labor is defined as a hybrid process involving humans and non-humans. Literature in ecological economics has stressed the need to dismantle the nature-cultural dualism, however, the field inherits unresolved ontological tensions from disciplines like economics and ecology. We suggest that degrowth can benefit from greater engagement with fields that take seriously the role of nonhuman agency and the deep entanglements of the human and nonhuman, including new materialism, post-humanism, feminist theories, anthropology, and multispecies ethnography.

We explore the idea of hybrid labor as an avenue for this further engagement, acknowledging the centrality of work in human-nature relations. We ask: How is labor conceptualized if the economy is understood not as solely the result of human actions but emerging from more-than-human assemblages? How can this engagement contribute to the goals of degrowth such as conviviality and reciprocity as well as align more-than-human scholarship with a broader political movement?