This panel attends to practices of placing and ordering more-than-human beings across a diverse set of more-than-human ecologies that are differently situated within complicated histories of settler colonialism, violence, and captivity. These presentations engage analytically across scales of granularity including the intimate pruning practices of cultivators of olive trees in Italy, the relations among humans and individual elephants in Northern Thailand and possibilities for plants to serve as allies in struggles for Tuscarora sovereignty in North Carolina. Panelists interrogate institutionalized practices of delineating space and ascribing values to groupings like the Sage Grouse population in the western Great Basin of the US, Burmese Pythons in the Florida Everglades, and captive domestic chickens raised on an organic farm in New York. In noticing both familiar and emergent practices that cultivate belonging and exclusion panelists interrogate the production of environmental and ethnographic knowledge and reflect on some of the potentials for a capacious, more-than-human ethnographic practice.
Keywords: more-than-human ethnography, contaminated ecologies, indigenous ontologies, captivity, wildlife conservation, companion species, care, ethics.
Talks & Panelists:
Captivity and the Limits of More-than-Human Ethnography, Daniel Schniedewind (he/him), UC-Santa Cruz
Whither the Sage Grouse? Belonging and Nonhuman Placemaking on Anthropogenic Landscapes, Paul Berne Burow (he/him), Yale University
Tree Pruning as Ethical Doing: Practices for Listening to and Living with Trees, Angelica Calabrese (she/her), New School for Social Research
Seeing the People for the Trees: Acknowledging the Place of the Tuscarora, Sara Maxwell (she/her), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Department of Socioecological Corrections: Carceral technoscience and the criminalization of Burmese Pythons in South Florida, Christopher (Chris) Reimer (he/him), University of British Columbia
Labors of placemaking and acts of placing: Interspecies intimacies in Northern Thailand, Rebecca Winkler (she/her), University of Pennsylvania
Discussant: Dr. Naisargi Dave, University of Toronto
Moderated by Rebecca Winkler