Researching Resistant Politics across More-Than-Human Worlds

Who resists and who is in solidarity with whom? Who is demanding freedom and justice, how and against whom? What rights and responsibilities arise from the recognition of the capacity to act politically? These questions have long been considered exclusively human. However, in the Anthropocene, the age of humankind’s defining influence on the Earth, they are increasingly revealed as more than human. Wars are being declared on viruses. Alliances are cultivated with the beaver to retain water in the landscape. Livestock running wild are tracked and traced to help or prevent their escape from farms and slaughterhouses. “Weeds” or “pests” like the bark beetle are made into heroic conservationists as well as enemies of the Republic. The concept of “rights of nature” is being reconsidered, along with new ways of understanding and valuing non-human labour and property owned by a place or the Earth itself. How to make sense of similar situations, in which other-than-human beings or materials become more often conceived of as not only food, resources or symbols but as allies or enemies in more-than-human struggles?