Presentation short abstract

This paper proposes animals’ ecological politics that honours and takes seriously the stakes of preserving animals’ sovereign relations with nature - and each other - specifically from human interference, as a form of multispecies degrowth praxis.

Presentation long abstract

This paper proposes an animals’ ecological politics that honours and takes seriously the stakes of preserving animals’ sovereign relations with nature - and each other - specifically from human interference, as a form of multispecies degrowth praxis. To this end, it suggests that we must be guided a central question: what exactly do animals want when they seek sovereignty? Recognising animal subjectivities and agencies as core to environmentalism as a social justice movement, it foregrounds anti-anthropocentrism as foundational liberatory ethics that demands a radical unsettling and reimagining of growth, degrowth and post-growth. Ultimately, the paper speculates on alternative degrowth futures that are shaped by concrete emancipatory imaginaries of the afterlives of animal exploitation, commodification, and coercion, however fleeting or frail.