Abstract
How do social movements respond to the ecological crisis? In this paper, we reframe social movements as ‘more-than-social movements’ to highlight the fact that many contemporary mobilisations do much more than target recognised social institutions and political governance; indeed, they are practically transforming eco-societies with and within both the human and the nonhuman world. What constitutes the core of more-than-social movements’ action is the capacity to set up alternative ecologies of existence, or ‘alterontologies’, as we call them in the paper. In what follows, we engage with the imaginaries and practices of agroecology, AIDS treatment activism and permaculture in order to rethink what autonomy and justice might look like in the context of today's ecological crisis.
Highlights
Sixth mass extinction, climate crisis, soil depletion, oceans acidification, human displacement, forest destruction, coronavirus
As we argue in the conclusion, more-than-social movements’ alternative translocal infrastructures is what makes their social and political autonomy durable
Multispecies commensality, experimental alterontological practice, material justice, and an ethos of care: these are the practical coordinates that define the actions of more-than-social movements, a multitude of material struggles and collective experiences capable of inventing from below practices of imagination, revolt, resistance and reparation
Summary
Climate crisis, soil depletion, oceans acidification, human displacement, forest destruction, coronavirus. In recent years a series of contributions in science and technology studies (Winner, 1986; Latour, 1993; Haraway, 1991), cultural anthropology (Tsing, 2015; Holbraad et al, 2014; Viveiros de Castro, 2015), geography (Braun and Whatmore, 2010a), political theory (Coole and Frost, 2010; Bennet, 2010), philosophy of science (Barad, 2007; Stengers, 1997) and related fields have invited us to take seriously ‘the stuff of politics’ (Braun and Whatmore, 2010b) This expression emphasizes the necessity of developing a fully materialist conception of politics (Papadopoulos, 2010), one that does not separate politics from the socio-material basis of life and from the concrete practices through which forms of life are created. As we argue in the conclusion, more-than-social movements’ alternative translocal infrastructures is what makes their social and political autonomy durable
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