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

By rooting in the circulation, accumulation, and reformation of how emotions and affects, this paper explores the entanglement of humans and plants in London’s public green spaces. By focusing on how these relationships between humans and plants and the "nature" are positioned and understood within the larger environment, I conceptualise the public green spaces not merely as a backdrop for human activity, but as a dynamic space of accumulation and circulation of emotions, entangling humans' own presences altogether with other beings within the same space. Here, the "environment" acts as a medium that holds emotions, mediating a sense of being that is deeply intertwined with non-human agencies.

Through sensory and multimodal ethnography, I investigate how the human-plant relationship is understood through its placement within this environmental texture, and discuss how the interactions and relations are embedded within flows of affect that gather in London's public parks and gardens. By engaging feminist and decolonial political ecologies of relationality, the paper situates these encounters within broader critiques of urban temporalities structured by accerationism, productivity, and extraction. I highlight that centring the ambient forms of emotions, offers insight into how relational thinking and practices, repositioning everyday experience as multispecies co-becoming. Through attending to these emotive flows, the paper highlights how emotions can open alternative ethical orientations and balancing, more reciprocal futures for living-with urban environments.