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Although forest bathing has gained considerable attention as an emerging health trend, the role and related benefits of animals in this context are often overlooked in existing literature. Animals are typically perceived as part of nature, rather than recognized as individual entities with life characteristics. This study adopts an atmospheric perspective, considering atmosphere's potential to explore bodily communication between humans and non-humans. Examining recreationists' experiences with animals during forest bathing, we find that animals shape the forest's impression and atmosphere. Analyzing physical and emotional distances in animal encounters and subsequent behavioural modes reveals their impact on immersive experiences. This offers practical insights for managing multi-species interactions in recreational spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compost Me: A More-Than-Humanifesto speaks to my desire to be composted, exploring what human composting is and how the process works, in addition to what human composting can teach us about being and becoming more-than-human. As part of this more-than-humanifesto, I advocate for an extended sense of self – one that mixes and mingles with other beings and bodies – to compost discourses that present humans as separate from, and superior to, the ecologies in which they are intimately a part. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: A growing body of research has explored the benefits of animal companionship to trans people, yet too often this research reinforces human exceptionalism, and fails to explore what it means for trans people to engage in more-than-human relationships. Conversely, trans theorists have increasingly turned to consider what it means for trans people to lay claim to the category 'human', wrapped up as it is in normative claims to gender and sociality. Aims: This paper aims to investigate how trans people make sense of their relationships with non-human animals, so as to provide a critique of the binaries of animal/human and nature/culture. Methods: 27 binary trans or non-binary people living in Australia were interviewed about their experiences with family, with a specific probe question focused on animal companions. Thematic analysis was used to explore experiences of the more-than-human among the participants. Results: Three themes were developed: (1) Animals as facilitators of connections to the 'natural world', (2) Coming to understand animal ways of being, and (3) Challenging norms of animal ownership. Conclusions: The paper concludes by calling for ongoing theorization about more-than-human relationships as experienced by trans people and their animal companions. Specifically, there is a pressing need to think through what it means to claim the category 'human' when it is so often premised upon exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourses of well-being can direct attention beyond individual bodies, toward mental health and wider social relationships. Paradoxically, these discourses are also applied in contexts where living well is understood in terms of individual responsibility and agency, entangled with the neoliberal optimization of health. Anthropologists have recently argued that it is now crucial to move beyond the conceptualization of well-being as pertaining primarily to individuals. Such a conceptualization, though welcome, can have undesirable practical and political consequences. In this review, I show how well-being intersects with recent work in the anthropology of ethics, how it is embodied and emplaced, and how it is closely intertwined with (rather than simply opposed to) suffering. Furthermore, while experienced as embodied, well-being is deeply affected by the suffering of others—and not only human others. As such, it could fruitfully be understood as a form of affective common. In contexts of complex environmental challenges and changes, inequality, and conflict, I suggest that studies of well-being call for a focus on experience beyond the individual: an affective enlargement entwining forms of care, maintenance, and repair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Animal geography is inherently relational. At its core is curiosity for relations between humans and nonhuman animals. As in other fields, relational approaches are increasingly adopted as conceptual framework and methodology. Two current relational themes of the field are care, killing and ethics; and how humans and nonhuman animals create space, particularly the home and the city. Animal geographies tackle diverse political elements of animals' lives (and deaths), operating at multiple scales, through a variety of approaches. Major current themes include biopolitics, colonialism, state power and (in)justice. Relationality and politics are by no means separate. Relations have political outcomes – notably, in the form of value and commodification – and relationality can open possibilities for reframing political problems; a fitting goal for this time of conflict and dramatic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically reviews geographical scholarship to develop five categories for conceptualising the plurality of zoonotic disease situations configured through infrastructure. These are infrastructures that (1) unmoor zoonoses, (2) mobilise zoonoses, (3) immobilise zoonoses, (4) leak zoonoses, and (5) surveil zoonoses. Our analysis of these categories complicates notions that infrastructure either spreads or stops zoonoses and reveals the varied bio- and necro-politics associated with zoonotic disease situations configured through infrastructure. Before concluding, we review principles of infrastructuring zoonoses otherwise to help mobilise geographical scholarship in support of anti-anthropocentric, care-full, and probiotic approaches to modulating zoonoses in the (post)pandemic era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article elaborates on an artist-in-residence project funded by the Leverhulme Trust in the Geography Department at Durham University in 2015–16. The project confronted artistic and scientific perspectives to investigate how people in the North-East of England perceive and value their river environments and to recognize potential contributions to catchment management. The project identified a variety of disconnexions and hierarchies in the River Wear catchment and formulated artistic interventions for nonhuman audiences. This article reflects on water holistically and explores transdisciplinary views to propose water in its expanded field. Water in the Expanded Field is plural, complex, and aims at decentering the human importance. It promotes water multiple perspectives, including the more-than-human world and acknowledging water's ontological importance, developed by the speculative artistic practice of producing works of art for nonhuman audiences and then transposed to water debates. The article converges distinct evidence pointing to the importance of composting existing knowledge and dualistic reasoning to promote pluriversal ontologies of water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their ubiquity and ecological heterogeneity, non-pathogenic microorganisms are often lacking in accounts of more-than-human and other-than-human urbanisms. This article focuses on the use of digital technologies as practice for sensing and encountering unglamorous microbial ecologies emerging in a polluted urban river in East London. The River Lea has a dense industrial history, but today it is a site of post-industrial disuse, uneven development and burgeoning urban ecologies. In an easily bypassed segment of this urban river, microbial ecosystems bloom in and out of existence, reflecting a confluence of urban political ecological, hydrological and microbiological dynamics. These ecosystems are generally overlooked in accounts of urban ecological value, and are often framed as uncharismatic, accidental or even invasive. The aim of this work is to provide an alternative rendering of these slimy micro-ecologies. To this end, two digital approaches are explored: deployment of in situ micro-videography and attention to historical satellite imagery of the urban ecosystem. Microscopic approaches configure embodied, sensory, aesthetic and speculative encounters with microbial ecologies in urban space. In their temporal configuration, historical satellite approaches glimpse the machinations of urban political ecological dynamics as they contribute to the emergence of, and intersect with, recombinant urban ecosystems. These methods provide tools for cultural geographers studying how urban organisation affects ecological diversity, and for expanding geographic investigation into the more-than-human cultures of overlooked, unglamorous and uncharismatic urban lifeforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Composed between 2020 and 2022 by Guillaume Malaret, Érodé is a musical piece created from field recordings at Eagles Nest, a tidal island in Australia's Bunurong National Marine Park. Based on an interview with Guillaume Malaret, this article addresses several issues concerning digital representations, renderings, and ecologies of geological, hydrological, and sonic spaces, as well as the cultural geographies of landscape, embodiment, and affect. We explore the potentials of sonic composition and geophonic recordings for mediating bodily connections with difficult-to-imagine processes, such as environmental change over deep time. Our dialogue throughout this article contributes to emerging themes in digital ecological research by focusing on the materialities of digitization, digitally mediated creative practices in sonic geography, and the importance of different affective registers for comprehending environmental transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines the practice of a novel digital method in animal geographies: etho-ethnographic citizen science. I describe a project using this participatory method with local residents in inner-city London, where we worked together to use camera traps to record video footage of red fox behaviour. The research sought to build an etho-ethnographic account of fox life by tethering data collection and interpretation to local knowledge. The paper focuses on the familial relations of one particular fox, a young male living on an allotment, who plotholders call Sonny. It begins by outlining how research objectives emerged through the process of collaborative research design with plotholders, premised on their own knowledge of fox personalities, and their storied accounts of individual foxes. It then considers how the practical planning of camera placement was directed through the plotholders own socioecological knowledge of the site. Lastly, it outlines how participants continual use of the traps, and their own analysis of footage, embeds digital data within vernacular understandings of Sonny's world. In doing so the paper outlines how etho-ethnographic citizen science can potentially amplify, affirm and digitise vernacular knowledges of urban fox ethologies and geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First World War created landscapes in which people and the natural world became deeply entangled through conflict in a never-ending cycle of destruction and rebirth. Soldiers renegotiated their understanding of the natural world to survive, which in turn led to empathy for its suffering. After 1918, these more-than-human worlds of war became sites of pilgrimage and remembrance, strictly human places in which nature's war-life was not acknowledged, influencing the post-conflict heritage process to focus on the human cost of war. Nevertheless, some areas could not be salvaged and were designated as 'zone rouge' (red zones), places heavily destroyed and contaminated with war-waste, unfit for human beings. Today, isolated sections of the Western Front retain this status, as do many post-1918 conflict landscapes around the world, with ecologies of violence managed by people, but not controlled. This paper critically analyses the memorial landscape of Vimy Ridge in northern France, comparing its adjacent section of zone rouge with the more manicured publicly accessible ritualised space. In doing so, it suggests these forbidden places can act as memorials to the more-than-human cost of modern warfare and thereby play a pivotal role in the Authorised Heritage Discourse of remembrance as heritage practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The auto/biographical genre offers theoretical and methodological starting points that are key to a just and ecological mobilities transformation. Just as the COVID-19 pandemic response and its impacts made diverse lifecourse visible, climate change and its contingencies will have similar effects. Simultaneously, digital cultures provide new scope for practising auto/biography and telling about diverse life stories. Through a critical review of the literature and drawing on the new insights of this Special Issue, the paper argues that a research agenda grounded in the auto/biographical is a priority. In contrast to some of the anti-biographical positions that have been influential in mobilities scholarship, the paper argues that: i) the feminist auto/biographical genre accommodates a human subject that is social and historical before being individual, with its performativity being a crucial form for unheard voices to be heard; 2) that it plays a significant role in contesting the frameworks of lifecourse that inform institutional and policy contexts; and, 3) that there is scope for a re-engagement of the non-human and the more-than-human within auto/biographical studies, which though contentious, provides a way to radically re-think how diverse life stories are (im)mobile, and the ways that human and non-human lives are valued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

\nContribution to the fieldPractitioners are vital for effective intergenerational practice, but they are often unsupported, untrained, or under-resourced. This paper explores the Care Home Friends and Neighbours (Care Home FaNs) Intergenerational Linking project’s “broker model” as a novel approach to supporting intergenerational practitioners. Between 2019 and 2022, “local community brokers,” or “brokers,” helped link schools, youth groups, and care homes in 11 low socio-economic areas across England. Connecting over 4000 young people (aged 5–14) and 2000 adult social care residents, this represents one of the largest initiatives of this kind in England to date. This paper focuses on a subset of data from a wider study of the project, drawing upon object interviews and observations to explore brokers’ facilitatory role. We highlight brokering as a more-than-(just)human activity involving national and regional guidance, COVID-19 policies, inter-organizational relationships, staff turnover, and resource (un)availability. We suggest that brokering reveals intergenerational practice sustainability as a non-linear process of nurturing. This study focuses on “local community brokers” who facilitated intergenerational links between schools (n = 116), youth groups (n = 2), and care homes (n = 114) in England between 2019 and 2022.Brokers provided non-linear and nuanced forms of support to intergenerational practitioners in each link and were themselves supported by a national team and local advisory groups.This multi-layered “broker model” responded to more-than-(just)human influences upon program sustainability and confirms the need to consider facilitation beyond individual practitioners.This study demonstrates the value of local and national coordination for realizing sustainable intergenerational programming in communities and on a national scale in England and elsewhere.This study focuses on “local community brokers” who facilitated intergenerational links between schools (n = 116), youth groups (n = 2), and care homes (n = 114) in England between 2019 and 2022.Brokers provided non-linear and nuanced forms of support to intergenerational practitioners in each link and were themselves supported by a national team and local advisory groups.This multi-layered “broker model” responded to more-than-(just)human influences upon program sustainability and confirms the need to consider facilitation beyond individual practitioners.This study demonstrates the value of local and national coordination for realizing sustainable intergenerational programming in communities and on a national scale in England and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the scope of participatory design has broadened to encompass perspectives and approaches beyond the human realm. This expansion requires considering multiple aspects to fully capture ‘more-than-humans’ diversity and concerns. One approach to tackle this multifaceted challenge is by examining it through the lens of time. However, the temporal dynamics of more-than-human entities remain relatively unexplored within participatory design. This paper investigates the potential of visual mapping to aid stakeholders engaged in participatory design processes that incorporate more-than-human perspectives in navigating the complex dimensions of more-than-human time. The findings demonstrate how visual mapping can facilitate thinking beyond linearity, developing awareness of workshop-related temporality, making time concrete, understanding the ‘far lense’ through the ‘near lense’, comprehending time’s relationality, unfolding time and considering multiple timespans simultaneously. Based on these findings, the paper suggests that visual mapping can help understand more-than-human temporalities in participatory design by thinking through them as a reflective practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study attempts to answer if yoga practice belongs to environmental education and how it can contribute to the development of ecological consciousness in the framework of a holistic pedagogical paradigm. Twenty-three post-graduate students participated in an environmental education activity based on performing yoga postures inspired by nonhuman creatures and entities. The participants reflected on their experiences by recording their ideas and feelings. The results of the survey revealed that the participants experienced embodied environmental learning, highlighted a healing dimension of the educational process, and experienced a connection with creatures and entities of nonhuman nature at different levels. Yoga philosophy and practice as a contemplative learning method deserve to be explored more widely in the field of environmental education, and especially regarding the development of ecological consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article first suggests that there has been a "Walking Turn" in contemporary socially engaged public art and then considers critically how these practices might be best framed and understood in the context of Aotearoa. There has been a multitude of walking-based artworks in Aotearoa since the second half of the 2010s to the present. In the wake of the global pandemic and natural flooding and cyclone disasters in Aotearoa that soon followed, "going out for a walk" has been repeatedly problematized and reframed for most citizens. This article seeks to establish a theoretical framework that is responsive to Indigenous as well as posthumanist discourse, through which we might best consider walking art practices in Aotearoa. To do this, the concept of walking "with/in" place is employed as an entry point. Drawing on research interviews, a number of culturally informed concepts related to walking are examined alongside notions of countermapping and countermonument. The artwork analysis considers the decolonial, counterneoliberal, and regenerative principles underlining these practices. The artworks discussed engage in histories and contemporary politics of place and can be characterized by quietude, humility, and hyperlocality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For years, design has been focused on human needs, creating human-centred solutions and often neglecting the existence or the impact that design can have on other species. As designers shift from that traditional anthropocentric approach to adopting design practices that include other species' perspectives in the process, there is a growing need for practices capable of providing designers with the right tools to understand non-human needs and design for their inclusion. For this reason, the Beings Activities Context Technologies (BACT) framework is proposed as a theoretical means to support the shift to a more multispecies-oriented approach, expanding the anthropocentric Benyon's People Activities Contexts Technologies (PACT) framework. The methodological implications of the framework have been explored in a case study design project focused on the development of a wearable device designed to support beekeepers during their work. The case study explored the design by taking into consideration both the needs of humans and animals in the context of beekeeping while analysing their interactions in depth. Through this framework, we seek to contribute to the more-than-human turn in interaction design and aid designers in expanding their considerations beyond the person–technology relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study conceptualizes alpine skiing as a troubled and troubling leisure practice in the context of the Anthropocene. It employs a critical feminist new materialist lens and a diffractive methodology to unravel, critique, and undo the multifaceted more-than-human relations with snow and landscapes in alpine skiing. The study contends that alpine skiing is troubled by its capitalist, extractive, and exploitative relations with nature. Diffraction disrupts these relations by cutting through dualities and boundaries. Through diffractive vignettes of contaminating, collaborating, annihilating, and speculating, the findings illustrate the tensions and entanglement at the core of alpine skiing and how they matter for more-than-human relations. The study contributes by demonstrating how a diffractive engagement with leisure can be productive of troubling, caring, and thinking-with more-than-humans in hopeful futures beyond the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the potential role of school garden learning experiences in remediating Environmental Generational Amnesia (EGA). EGA is a generational type of environmental forgetting brought about by prolonged disconnection from “natural” landscapes, with symptoms manifesting as poor motor skills, deficient food origin knowledge, a lack of environmental moral affiliation and undeveloped connections to place. Drawing on interviews with teachers, parents, counsellors, groundskeepers, and administrators at a Far North Queensland primary school, this paper explores how school garden learning experiences foster interaction patterns that combat EGA’s symptoms. We find that urban school gardens offer new possibilities for reassembling students into more-than-human local ecologies in ways that can remediate the manifestation of EGA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article bewilders dominant discourses about child-animal relations by acknowledging and challenging the work of Gail Melson who positions animals as providing emotional, social and pedagogical support for children. Melson's psychological approach rests upon implicit assumptions that shape and support anthropocentrism whilst also critiquing a utilitarian approach to animals in educational learning spaces. The legacy effects of this approach are steeped in neoliberal discourse that entangle with pedagogy and practice. Unless modified these effects pass through generations as sticky webs of knowability that are difficult to contest. Research from Australia and Finland, framed by critical posthuman and relational ontologies, unsettles these effects to reconfigure child-animal relations as fluid and situated. 'Bewildering education' grants insights into historical political legacies that can be traced in education policy, practice and theory preoccupied with knowledge development, relations and meaning-making around the productive 'good' human subject. Child-animal relations expose complex and far-reaching effects of early childhood because processes of becoming and being human with other animals provides spaces for knowing 'difference' as a constituting force that disrupts anthropocentric relations with the world. Building a political history of animals that pays attention to agency and ethical relations reconfigures and reconstitutes animal species, not as objects of pedagogical inquiry, but rather as subjects and fellow earth dwellers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the character arcs of three women characters in Akhtaruzzaman Elias' novel Khwabnama. As Kulsum, Hamida, and Phuljaan navigate devastating personal events and labor to resuscitate or somehow keep alive fraying relationships, the sheer effort required to sustain the domestic alive while navigating potential entrapment spills over in more-than-real ways to shape the world beyond the home in Khwabnama. Potential descent into despair and madness, multiple forms of irreparable loss, alongside desire and exhaustion, become central nodes through which women mediate the novel's broad sweep of events. Drawing on the stories of Khwabnama's women, I argue that the more-than-real world of Khwabnama is mediated through, and secured by, the fraught webs of domesticity and everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore the extent to which applying embodied, 'skin in the game' methods used in infrastructure activism (a contemporary art practice) can help expand the toolkit of methods applied in action research on infrastructures, interactions between humans and more-than-humans and urban socio-environmental processes in planning. In particular, we focus on two cases of infrastructure activism: the Amsterdam Zuidoost Food Forest (VBAZO), in Amsterdam's South East, and the KRATER project in Ljubljana's city centre. In our discussion of these projects, we explore the embodied research practices that infrastructure activists have developed to change not only urban green infrastructures but also researcher-actors' own perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores human, soil, compost and food waste interactions in a community composting initiative in Australia. Drawing on an ethnographic study in 2 Australian cities – Sydney and Canberra, this paper identifies the emergence of a “composting ethic” among participants that is animated by three forms of learning and doing: (1) noticing and attending, (2) embodying and (3) experimentation. Fieldwork analysis is contextualised in relation to literature from the environmental humanities, discard studies and learnings from First Nations Australians and their ontologies. By bringing these empirics, key literature and ontologies together, this paper aims to deepen understanding of the opportunities and challenges of community composting to reduce negative environmental impacts and support anti-colonial practices of discard. It does this by identifying the characteristics of a composting ethic and the contexts and skills capable of nurturing its emergence. Attention is also paid to what may limit realisation of such an ethic. Overall, this paper aims to generate further applied academic understanding about the unique role – and possibilities – of efforts to revitalise and grow city soils and advance anti-colonial food waste management through community composting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last twenty years have seen increased interest in animal-assisted therapy (AAT) and animal-assisted activity (AAA). However, there has been little research exploring these interactions as experienced by the animals themselves. In this paper, we bring a "more-than-human" lens to concepts and practices within AAA/T, synthesizing ideas about animal sentience and subjectivity that have emerged within animal geography scholarship and animal welfare science. We draw from empirical work with practitioners involved in donkey-facilitated learning (DFL) to examine the knowledge base of equine facilitators, including their beliefs, opinions, and assumptions about donkeys, their understanding of animal welfare, and their role in DFL. We discuss how knowledge of donkeys is mobilized to ensure more-than-human welfare during DFL; how animals' "choice" to participate is encouraged and centered; how ideas of nonhuman labor create opportunities for considering more-than-human welfare; and how practitioners advocate for animals and embed practices of care for humans and nonhumans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although sensuous and embodied engagement is an integral part of child–environment relationalities, the intersections of aesthetics, children and environments remain scarcely addressed. As a response, this study develops a concept of 'aesthetic flux' to delve into the sensuous dynamics of matter and bodies in the context of a storying workshop in a forest with first graders in a Finnish primary school. An arts-based, post-qualitative methodology guided our analysis of video recordings from the workshop, resulting in visual-sonic montages that draw attention to the intense movements and sounds of children, soap bubbles, air, a research camera and trees. Thinking through the concept of aesthetic flux, our study experiments with the abundance, indeterminacy and potentiality of sensuous dynamics where bodies (human and otherwise) become together and linger. Thus, our study reconfigures aesthetics as a creative and unpredictable force that materialises in both embodied and conceptual ways in environmental education and research with children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early childhood schoolbooks designed to teach children to read, have been shown not only to shape gendered identities in a limiting, binary format, but to lend the written word the appearance of unquestionable, and restrictive truth about the way the world is. Texts written for adults, too, may similarly limit what can be known, reining in the world's emergent efflorescence. Extending the concept of emergent listening, this paper develops the concept of emergent reading, a form of reading that is intimately and diffractively related to emergent listening and emergent writing. Emergent reading is relational, intra-acting with the emergent efflorescence of written words and with the materiality of the human and more-than-human world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theorising hope in the Anthropocene must take into account the agencies and social actors of the more-than-human world. Here I present a poem that employs a creative and speculative approach to the idea of beekeeping as an assemblage of hope. This emerges from several years of personal/autoethnographic and academic engagement in the topics of ecological distress and climate emotion, through which I also became interested in honeybees (Apis mellifera) as a mobile symbol of both hope and loss in global environmentalist discourse, amid rising rates of hobbyist beekeeping, both globally and here in Aotearoa New Zealand. The poem, and following reflection points, considers the degree to which hope is shared between different (human and non-human) social actors in the assemblage of beekeeping. It explores the ways hope might be temporalised, embodied, relational or political; recognising unequally distributed and shifting agencies, or stakes, in the futures, at a bodily level, both within the colony and between bees and beekeepers. This poetic exploration of the epistemologies and ontologies of hope, based on the overarching question "How human is hope?", spurs a call for critical attention to new ways of both understanding and relating to non-human others, as potential kin and co-participants in world-making, amid uncertain futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on what it might mean to think about archives "beyond" the human, specifically in relation to animals and their archives. Interdisciplinary and disciplinary "animal turns" have brought animals into social science and humanities spaces—as both subjects and collaborators. In archival research and studies, encounters with animals, and more broadly nonhumans, both complicate and extend contemporary debates: on how we research in the archives, on ethics and politics, and even on what constitutes an archive. Drawing from three different case studies from its author's research with historical animals—in a traditional archive, in the digital archive, and in a speculative archive—the article reflects on some of these contemporary debates to ask how we might meaningfully extend archives beyond the human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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AbstractThis paper presents a walking art experiment called ‘Line Walk’ aimed at attuning to more-than-human landscapes. The researchers wanted to expand the methodological repertoires for engaging with contemporary semi-urban and urban living environments. A second goal was to increase attentiveness to multispecies relationality and thus challenge uncritically normative notions of nature in environmental educational research. The experiment demonstrates how a walking art protocol has the potential to work as a catalyst to expose walking human bodies to the material, affective, and sensory relationalities of the landscapes. Additionally, it can generate encounters with ghostly, atmospheric presences of past histories and hints of more-than-human world-making projects and their temporal scales. We suggest that the value of such an experiment lies in its capacity to take researchers from comfort zones to multispecies and multitemporal contact zones and to help them trace back and out the material entanglements of humans with the planet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the importance of sharing and eating in constructing personhood, reproducing social institutions, and reenacting social value. Based on 18 months of fieldwork among the Indigenous Mentawai living on Siberut Island (Indonesia), it examines eating and sharing that hint at food’s importance in the Mentawai’s idea of family, kinship, and mutuality. Eating and sharing food are not merely digestive activities; they constitute a process whereby the Mentawai redefine and remake their mutuality with others. At once material, moral, affective, and symbolic, Mentawai sharing and eating reveals how nourishment is shaped not just by food materiality or mode of livelihood but also by how they develop creative social relations with non-human entities. I argue that it is only by pursuing the Mentawai’s mode of thinking and relating with more-than-human beings that one may understand the centrality of sharing in bringing humans and non-human persons together in a shared world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How might our analysis of fascism be enriched if we turn our attention to how contemporary supremacist movements self‐fashion themselves as more‐than‐human formations? How is fascist politics naturalized through claims that it is fueled by the agency and vitality of not just humans but also other‐than‐humans? How do right‐wing supremacists' assertions that theirs is an indigenous more‐than‐human politics that suffered but endured the violence of colonialism support the framing of fascism as a decolonizing project? In this article, we ground these questions in an ethnographic analysis of what we call the more‐than‐human turn in contemporary Hindu‐supremacist politics in the northwestern Himalayan region, focusing specifically on two political projects: the Hindu right‐wing's rediscovery of "ancient" Hindu rivers and communities in Ladakh and cow protection in Uttarakhand. In contrast to ontological anthropologists who suggest that cosmopolitics is plural and liberatory, we demonstrate how the inclusion of nonhuman entities in political life can serve to naturalize a fascist politics that seeks the extermination of those who are not part of the natural order of life. We urge anthropologists to make room for skepticism and critique in their analysis of cosmopolitical formations instead of prematurely celebrating "ecopolitics" as anti‐Western and anticolonial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of species extinction, ecological destruction and uncertain futures, the separation of nature and culture within conceptualisations of heritage has become increasingly untenable. Although the limitations – and even damage – caused by the separation of these ontological categories is widely accepted within heritage studies, scholarly interventions calling for more connected ontologies are commonly framed within the context of the terrestrial. This article departs from these terra-centric approaches to instead consider the potential of an oceanic imaginary to problematise and even dismantle these dualist categories. With a specific focus on the Belitung, an ancient shipwreck found in Indonesian waters, this paper dwells on the wreck's submerged interlude between loss and discovery. It considers the impact of this millennia-long extended period underwater in terms of marine ecosystems and more-than-human growth and destruction. By attending to the process by which ship becomes wreck becomes reef, this article thus draws necessary attention to the ways in which wreck becomes heritage, thus offering insights into how values are ascribed to underwater cultural heritage, and how this both perpetuates, and disrupts, the nature-culture binary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the more-than-human politics of a community garden in Rotterdam, as an expression of sustainable and resilient city making. Challenging the anthropocentrism underlying most research on the politics of urban sustainability/resilience and urban gardening, the paper proposes a more-than-human assemblage approach to urban gardening politics. I argue that urban gardens can be understood as more-than-human configurations and conceptualised as urban garden assemblages. Such assemblages are processes with different temporalities and types of agencies (insects, plants, soil and fences) and can be analytically understood as more-than-human: (1) relations and performances; (2) power hierarchies/resistances; and (3) ethical co-becomings. Building on participatory ethnography, interviews and (online) documents, the paper then presents an empirical account of the Gandhi-garden, a community garden in Rotterdam, embedded in the global Transition Towns movement. The empirical case shows how mundane acts of pulling weeds and using permacultural planting methods are more-than-human place-making practices. It also highlights how, for example, human–soil, human–seed and human–bee entanglements challenge urban neoliberalism while gardeners experiment with sustainable food and a non-violent economy. The paper illustrates the ethico-political expressions of more-than-human community gardening through solidarity bonds with Palestine via olive trees and non-violence thinking, as well as some human/non-human ambivalences when dealing with dog waste and potentially harvest-stealing birds. Finally, the paper presents some reflections and contributions regarding scholarship in the fields of urban gardening, and sustainable/resilient city making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Commentary offers a critique of an eco-relational approach in robot ethics, highlighting the importance of articulating an ecologically-sensitive ethical orientation that incorporates the entire more-than-human world, including technological entities like forms of artificial intelligence. While the eco-relational approach enhances our understanding of the complex way in which morally significant properties operate on a phenomenological level, it is not without its flaws. In particular, this perspective focuses on ethical concepts when it needs to be rooted in ethical systems, misrepresents the extant literature on relational approaches to moral status, and is insufficiently ecological in a way that would bring machines into the moral universe by way of their location in and importance to the larger environment. At a time when the legal status of robots is being decided before moral questions are settled, it remains important to get the contours of relevant debates right so that the robot ethics discourse brings us closer to developing practical solutions for ethical dilemmas emerging in our increasingly technological age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mawani has penned a breathtaking book that challenges the terra-centric understanding of modern (Western) law through an anti-colonial narrative of a ship, its passengers, and the ambitiously defiant journey they took together across the timespace of the erstwhile British Empire. Five years after its publication, this book review seeks to revisit this narrative and distinguish Mawani's work as pathbreaking for the theorisation of law at a planetary scale in ways that also account for the 'non-human' and 'more-than-human' relations. Unlike many newer strands of scholarship seeking to theorise more-than-human dimensions of law- be it in ecological or technological contexts- Mawani's novel 'oceans as method' approach refuses to erase the centrality of racialised violence to the legal empire, including in law's foundational concepts like time, jurisdiction, object and subject. The last section offers some reflections on how engagements with the contexts of caste could have rendered the work richer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of ongoing but unevenly distributed planetary catastrophe and, in the words of Patricia Reed, an urgent need to 'make inhabitable worlds in common', I argue for listening as a mode of urban spatial practice that offers the opportunity to remake our relations with more-than-human others. Recent work in sound studies has explored the potential of listening to create mutuality, dissent, and agency; here I am interested in how pedagogical tools can be designed to support these more radical modes of listening. Weaving essay writing with transcribed audio from a web tool that deploys field recordings and from staged conversations around food, I share experiments drawn from collaborations over the past two years. This is work developed as an architectural researcher, working with performance-makers, sonic artists, urban curators, natural scientists, and community and cultural organisations who are seeking to make public space for climate. Through this transdisciplinary praxis, listening is deployed to produce personal and social affects, space for political encounter, and attunement to ecological relations. In coming together to listen, we sought to create spaces for co-dreaming climates, where climate is understood as in crisis, as atmosphere, and as potentiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban areas are a messy more-than-human interface for humans and synanthropic wildlife. Norms for what constitutes a 'problem' animal to be culled, a displaced animal to be rescued, or a species nuisance whom one simply has to let live, are undergoing rapid change. We investigate the changing expectations that municipal hunters experience that they have from society in relation to managing problem wildlife in cities. Adding to the literature on the constitution of 'problem' animals in human environments, we show what happens to these animals in the practical sense, and what informs this decision. Our point of departure is to ask by what rationales hunters consider lethal interventions in urban nature to be legitimate, and which they find to be morally problematic. In a discussion, we reflect on what this says about, and means for, multispecies coexistence. Through interviews and go-along participant observation with 32 municipal hunters in Sweden, we show how municipal hunters wrestle with growing unease about new custodial roles they are expected to inhabit, as facilitators of the natural order, as garbage collectors of society for unwanted wildlife, and as enforcers of an interspecies code of conduct for the city. Based on this analysis, we discuss the relative standing of reparative, sacrificial, aesthetic, goodwill, practical, categorical and situational rationales for culling. This paints a picture of hunters as more conflicted about their control of urban nature, in challenge with the stereotypical idea of the professional hunter as a 'natural born culler'. It also shows a city of parallel planes of multispecies coexistence, where some species and animals get a pass more than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the artist Sin Wai Kin's (單慧乾) speculative approach to drag through the prism of 'transgendering-assemblages'. Influenced by the assemblage theory of Manuel DeLanda and Jasbir Puar, I propose that transgendering-assemblages actualize the properties of transness (Marquis Bey) through particular trans techniques (Grace E. Lavery). I introduce Sin's more-than-human trans techniques, from make-up to costume, and approach to nonbinary storytelling to investigate identity assemblages more broadly. With explicit attention to their engagement with Chinese opera and Taoism, the speculative boyband in Sin's Turner Prize nominated work It's Always You (2021) prompts my proposal for 'boybanding' as a technique for investigating identity assemblages. The final section is focused on the genderings of East Asian masculinities in Sin's work to argue how all gender-assemblages are also 'racializing assemblages' (Alexander G. Weheliye). I conclude with a provocation on what assemblage as a nonbinary concept (defined by what it does rather than what it is) can offer studies of gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Answering Huijbens and Jóhannesson's call to investigate tourist destination development through a relational ontology marked by a vital materialism, this paper focuses on the creation of the Muraka. The Muraka is the underwater villa of the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island—an ultra-luxury resort located in Alifu Dhaalu Atoll. No social scientific research has ever been conducted at underwater hotels. Drawing upon fieldwork at the Muraka—part of a broader project on three underwater hotels (conducted in Singapore, Tanzania, and the Maldives), we aim to contribute original knowledge to more-than-human geographies and tourist studies by bringing attention to the architectural relations that entangle underwater hotels with their environments. In doing so we become attuned to more-than-human lives and create narratives that can help us imagine new relations with the planet both within and beyond the realm of tourist encounters. By focusing in particular on the creation of the Muraka through the lens of the original concept of alloutopia, we contribute to non-representational and more-than-human perspectives on tourism [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food tourism researchers are increasingly seeking to question why tourists eat animals, and the ethical dimensions of such encounters. The tourist experience has largely been taken as the starting point in this research, influenced by the anthropological origins of this research field. In effect, human-animal relations, for the most part, remain absent from such interrogations. In this paper we seek to engage with critical tourist scholars who are increasingly turning to post-humanist and more-than-human framings, to move beyond a fixation with human agency in understanding how and why we eat animals in tourism settings. Multi author participant observation is utilised to examine a touristic encounter with smalahove, a traditional Norwegian dish of smoked and boiled sheep's head. Through this case study we argue that future food tourism research ought to shift focus beyond the tourist experience, so as to fully understand the processes through which animals become eaten. In exploring the ways that human-smalahove entanglements provoke consideration for how humans and animals might be-together-otherwise, we call on food tourism researchers to consider what sorts of other food tourism encounters might prompt reflection and how such ethical reflections might be leveraged in food tourism ventures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The Centre for the Social Study of Microbes (CSSM) at University of Helsinki, Finland is a Wellcome-funded hub for creating new approaches to human-microbial relations. Most urgently, the complex relations between microbes, antimicrobial resistance (in its human-health centered definition, understood as infection and disease now uncurable by antibiotics, threatening human life and wellbeing), animals, environments and climate emergency require new theoretical and methodological approaches. These include a variety of research interest from global fermentation practices and cultures to microbial bioremediation techniques, from aquatic microbes to urban gardens. A key orientation of CSSM is also combining ethnography with artistic and performative practice such as felting, painting, installation, sculpture and audiovisual means, to gain a deeper, more sensory and embodied perspective of our shared lives with microbes. As their agency exists outside textuality, new experimental methodology is needed to engage with it. Thinking with microbes invites many ethical issues that often remain unaddressed in medical and scientific approach. As one of such contributions, we suggest a new framework for bioethics. In a conceptual analysis, a queer feminist posthuman framework aims for radical reorientation of human exceptionalism for more-than-human justice while keeping existing social justice issues between groups of people, such as vulnerabilities cascading around gender and sexual variance, in the same framework. Both a theoretical and practical initiative, seeking to forge solidarity between justice movements, this framework could ground policies relevant to a broader bioethical and philosophical research community, and social scientists studying microbes. This open letter discusses this work at the CSSM.

We write about the poetics of kinship with birds, trees, stones, and places as an act of resistance to neo-literal, neo-liberal destruction of refuge for non-human beings. Through research in which we situate ourselves in relation to the more-than-human, we take up kin as a verb. We offer experiences of kinning—that is, being present with that which is alive, has agency, and gives voice—as an invitation to readers to open themselves to listen in life and in research. We write in dialogue, through letters to each other, and we write poetically. With poetry’s attention to metaphor, embodiment, and vision, it is the natural language for describing the experience of kinning. Inquiring poetically helps us regain a communicative being-in-relation with wild, more-than-human others at a time of ecological distress, and to seek to better appreciate mystery and understandings that exceed human forms of knowing. Through this paper, we theorise from within our understandings and experiences about poetically kinning with the more-than-human.