Ecologies of Belonging

Human exceptionalism has long prevailed in Western thinking of the social, but decolonial thought and the global climate crisis have together driven a re-thinking our ideas of society, state-drawn boundaries, and boundaries between ‘the human’ and ‘the natural’. Humans are intricately entangled with non-human species and more-than-human natures, forming entangled socio-ecologies. With this in mind: How should we think of mobile belonging and how can we challenge the boundaries of in/exclusion in an era of climate extremes, ecological disruption, and displacement of plants, animals and people? How might humanity transit to environmentally more sustainable and more just possibilities for moving, dwelling, belonging, and commoning within shared planetary socio-ecologies?

Sphere Curator: Bernike Pasveer

Sessions, researchers and papers (in progress):

1. Multispecies kin: re-membering and migrant belonging

• Sophie Battell – Shakespearean Ecologies of Belonging
• Hilal Alkan Zeybek – Finding your place: Plant care, multispecies relations and migrant belonging in Germany
• Symone A. Johnson – What We Offer Each Other: Establishing Belonging Through Exercises in Reciprocity

2. Mobile cultures: participation, affect, transmedia

• Prajwal Nagesh – Annual mobilities: The role of pilgrimage-leisure trips in reproducing culture in urban slums
• Sanderien Verstappen – (Re)making cycling cities
• Vincent Baptist – Mapping Experiences of Gentrification and Senses of Belonging through Mobile Neighborhood Interviews

3. Mobilities, ecologies and power

• Oksana Ermolaeva – Power, Ecology, and Stalinist Ecosystem: Shifting Gulag Frontiers in Russian Northwest.
• Bikku Bikku – Mobile Pastoralism and Conservation in the 21st Century : A Case Study from India
• Bennet Collins – Locating Settler Colonialism in Climate Refugee Discourse

4. Beyond the human

• Ingrid Samset – Decentering the human: Statues in a planetary age
• Laura Katz Rizzo – The Malkuthian Activation Portals: Integrated Praxis, Meaning and Connection
• Eric Lemmon – Politic I

5. New/Digital Ecologies of (un)Belonging

• Moé Suzuki – Belonging, assimilation, and erasure: ‘humanity’ in virtual reality films on refugees
• Mariangela Veikou – Citizenship in the Digital Condition: Between Techno-colonialism and Techno-inclusivity.
• Sandra Ponzanesi – The Role of Postcolonial Intellectuals and their Digital Publics
• Valentina Carraro – ‘Belong Anywhere’: The politics of hosting in occupied territories