Exploring Unruly Sites of More-than-Human Entanglements

At a time when everyday life is increasingly affected by and contributing to climate change and biodiversity loss at an alarming rate, it seems pressing to be more sensitive to unintended relations in unfamiliar sites to foster the repositioning of humans in a more-than-human world. A world, that has ever since been more-than-human. Time to approach it. Thus, we want to take these entanglements seriously in the processes that shape the so-called Anthropocene.  

In this context, investigating what Bettina Stoetzer (2018) calls ‘ruderal worlds’ that emerge spontaneously in disturbed environments, can provide insights into the interplay between human-built structures and multispecies worlds, co-constituting the environment we live in. Such intertwined relationalities become particularly tangible in remote and past places, such as brownfields, post-industrial ruins, but also in cracks of sidewalks and along infrastructures (cf. Grime 1997). In this context, ‘unintended ecologies’ (Stoetzer 2018) that are a result of human-built structures that represent order, and what appears to be recalcitrant and unplanned, remain in a twilight zone between wild and domesticated. Indeed, these places exhibit a “(…) patchiness, that is a mosaic of open-ended assemblages of entangled life” (Tsing 2017: 4) that can go beyond the locality of a site. In ruins of progress- and growth-oriented modes of ordering time and space astonishing multispecies connections can be revealed that challenge dichotomies and prevailing classification systems about center/periphery, purity/toxicity and progress/stagnancy.