Multi-Species Commons

Deadline: 10 December 2022
Contact: Tobias Menely
Email: tmenely@ucdavis.edu

Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”

July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

There is an implicit (and sometimes explicit) anthropocentrism in many accounts of the commons, understood as a place of shared resources. This panel will ask whether the commons can be reconceptualized, in ecological terms, as a space of multi-species relations. What is the connection between commons and habitat, nonhuman life-worlds, or Umwelten? How might theories and historical examples of commoning practices help us to rethink conflicts over wilderness conservation and rewilding, biodiversity and extinction in the Anthropocene? For whom does the multi-species common exist? Can territory, as a site of sovereign governance, be conceptualized in non-anthropocentric terms?

Please send 300-word abstracts and a short bio (100 words), by 10 December 2022, to Tobias Menely (tmenely@ucdavis.edu) and Jesse Oak Taylor (jot8@uw.edu).

Posted on October 20, 2022