Thinking Multispecies Studies from the Global South. Extractivisms, Territorial Fights, and Relational Knowledges
Guest Editors:
Anaid Karla Ortíz Becerril
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, Universidad Nacional Rosario Castellanos, Kanasín
anaidkarla@gmail.com
David A. Varela Trejo
Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, México.
davidvrltrj@gmail.com
Description and Aims of this Monographic Issue:
Over the past two decades, the so-called multispecies studies have emerged as an interdisciplinary field aiming to challenge human exceptionalism and to examine ecological relationships, distributed agencies and the co-building of world by human and other-than-human species. While many of these concerns had been already studied about by anthropology, political ecology, and political science studies, the dossier on Multispecies Ethnography, coordinated by Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich (2010), had those discussions articulated under a common name, gaining visibility as a theoretical and methodological program in a context of global environmental emergency. This synthesis made it possible to name and bring some order to fragmented debates around relationality, materiality, and the limits of the human, providing them with a shared language.
Their critical power does not lie in the mere incorporation of other-than humans, a topic that is not new to social sciences since their origins, but in the ability to challenge the conditions under which some forms of life, when interacting, create the world and become thinkable, describable, or even valued, according to whether their lives deserve or not being lived, cared for, or on the contrary, it is deemed that they should remain overshadowed or subordinated. The expanded circulation of this field has had, however, an ambivalent effect. While it opened up new questions, it also tended to stabilize analytical frameworks, such that certain concepts began to operate as interpretive keys available in advance, guiding uncritical modes of research with respect to concrete relationships and their situated analysis. In this sense, they risk to obliterate knowledge and semiotic-material modes alternative to Western thought, as is the case with ancestral peoples. In this sense, rather than a closed field, multispecies studies today have become a space of dispute.
Focusing on Latin America, the Caribbean, and other disputed territories, this issue invites readers to challenge the hegemonic modes under which multispecies thinking is constructed in social sciences. In contexts marked by coloniality, extractivism, environmental racism, and structural inequality, we are compelled to examine how multispecies studies are approached from the global South, their potentialities, and their creative alliances. Thus, notions such as species, becoming-with, thinking-with, animal, affections, human, or life, when transferred without critical mediation, can domesticate analysis more than they allow us to understand the effective and affective relationships that sustain or erode life in common. We call for questioning and pushing to the limit these and other categories that have circulated globally without criticism, rather than as a research practice subject to creative, situated, and non-positivist forms of experimentation on the relationships that sustain life. We call to displace multispecies studies from the issues that cut across the different Souths, and which have been the historical focus of attention for committed forms of social science, such as sociology, anthropology, history, or geography.
Within this framework, this does not rely on idealizing certain relationships between forms of life, or on suspending criticism or ignoring power asymmetries in the name of cultural relativism. On the contrary, it aims to uphold criticism even where certain practices have been celebrated, naturalized, or channeled by frameworks that tend to take for granted the value and desire to live of other forms of life. This is an invitation to being-with those other radicals in the fabric of life. Being-with as an active verb where multiple agencies articulate themselves to make life in contexts of resistance and fight.
Thematic Lines:
- Situated knowledges and multispecies relationships in Indigenous and Afro-descendant worlds.
- Interspecies vulnerability, care, and cooperation.
- Multispecies temporalities. Chronocracy and chronopolitics.
- Multispecies studies and fights for commons in the global South.
- Critical animal studies and their articulation to multispecies studies.
- Critical reviews to multispecies theory and methodologies.
To get further information or to submit your complete articles together with an abstract (in English or Spanish), please write to the e-mail: anaidkarla@gmail.com
The due date for receiving manuscripts is June 30, 2026.
Contributions shall be unpublished, the result of research work, and presented in compliance with the journal’s guidelines. See more on this on: Tabula Rasa’s guidelines.
