Send message to Author

Presentation short abstract

By using sensory and multimodal ethnography, I explore how the human-plant encounters are perceived and positioned in environment, and to critically reflect on relationality, connection to environment, and emotions to rethink form being and presence in urban setting.

Presentation long abstract

Grounded in the circulation, accumulation, and reconfiguration of emotions and affects, this paper explores the entanglement of humans and plants in London’s public green spaces. By focusing on how human–plant relations and the idea of “nature” are positioned and understood within a broader environmental context, I conceptualise public green spaces not merely as backdrops for human activity, but as dynamic sites where emotions accumulate and circulate, entangling human presence with that of other beings sharing the same space. Here, the “environment” acts as a medium that holds emotions and mediates a sense of being deeply intertwined with non-human agencies.

Through sensory and multimodal ethnography, I investigate how human–plant relationships are understood through their placement within environmental textures of relation, and examine how interactions are embedded within circulating affective flows that gather and accumulate in London’s public parks and gardens. Engaging feminist and decolonial political ecologies of relationality, the paper situates these encounters within broader critiques of urban temporalities structured by accelerationism, productivity, and extraction. I argue that centring ambient affective circulations offers insight into relational modes of thinking and practice, repositioning everyday experience as situated multispecies co-becoming. Attending to these emotive currents reveals how emotions orient bodies and relations, opening alternative ethical orientations and more reciprocal futures for living-with urban environments.