Re-imagining Posthuman Geographies: Political Struggles in Ecological Crises

The proposed project contributes to debates in posthuman geography and has theoretical, empirical, and policyoriented dimensions. The project responds to critiques of posthuman geography, a field of study that attempts to account for nonhuman agencies in the production of space. The field faces ongoing concerns over its political efficacy and depoliticisation. This is a particular problem in the context of proliferating ecological crises, where dominant human practices with the nonhuman have grave consequences for human and nonhuman life. In this context, how we account for nonhuman agencies is an urgent political problem. The study will address this problem by developing a new political approach to posthuman geography, theorising the nonhuman as both the central stake and an active agent in processes of political litigation. This framework will then be deployed empirically to speak to the political problematics of proliferating ecological crises. It will do so by critically examining dominant ways of accounting for the nonhuman, represented by three policy regimes; biodiversity offsetting, natural capital accounting, and the provision of legal rights for the nonhuman. The project will situate analysis in the contested geographies of Hambach Forest in Germany, the UK-wide protest network Extinction Rebellion, and the legal personhood of the Whanganui River in New Zealand respectively, where these policy regimes face political movements that make vying accounts of the nonhuman. Focusing on the relationship between human and nonhuman agencies in these contestations, the project will examine the limits and problematics of these policy regimes and explore alternatives.