What is it we actually do when we say we are conducting more-than-human ethnography? What is in the multispecies toolbox? This conversation gathered anthropologists with long-term investments in environmental research to discuss methods and exchange practical field experiences as a step towards addressing these questions. Our conversation centred around the notion of ‘ecography’ as a way to expand how we think about human societies (the ethnos in ethnography), embracing how societies are always emplaced and enmeshed within wider systems of relations (ecos). The concept, with its explicit reference to ethnography, allows us to sidestep some of the thorny epistemological debates around how, or indeed if it is possible and desirable, to cross the species boundary. For some, it remained an open question as to whether and to what extent ecography brought something novel to the table. Our conversation turned into a playful discussion about multispecies and more-than-human ethnography, and anthropology in the age of the Anthropocene.

This Special Issue, The Enemy of Kinship & Kinship with the Enemy, examines anti-anthropocentric ideas of kinship through the lens of the "enemy."It asks how animals conceptualized as "enemies"challenge expanded definitions of kinship. The introduction explores how figures such as parasites, pests, and invasive species disrupt ethical imperatives for kinship and compassion with nonhuman others. These beings often seek contact with humans, who frequently respond with efforts to expel or eradicate them. By rethinking kinship beyond traditional Western paradigms, the issue highlights how different models of kinship create distinct "enemies"and shape actions to counter or coexist with these "anti-social"others. Through case studies from Latin America, Southeast Asia, West Africa, and Northern Europe, the issue explores the complexities of making kin with the enemy while uncovering diverse kinship systems in which such relationships unfold.

An all-hands-on-deck rationality appears to characterize invasive alien species (IAS) eradication. Not only are citizens enrolled in their monitoring and management to extend authorities’ capabilities, but a recent trend in so-called nature-based solutions also outsources labor to non-human species. Within the realm of biocontrol initiatives, these non-human actors are strategically enlisted to counter invasive species through various methods such as predation, detection, sensing, niche occupation, and infiltration for internal destruction. This paper critically examines this conscription of non-humans, including sentient animals, to do the dirty work for us, by synthesizing ongoing cases from each of these categories or careers of non-human labor. These range from metabolic and ecological labor, performed with relatively little human intervention, to contrived schemes of capturing, sterilizing, tagging, and releasing Judas animals to locate conspecifics for culling. In the IAS management context, most of this is a kind of necro-labor, where non-human workers, wittingly or unwittingly, end up as assassins, snitches, moles, thieves and destroyers of their targets, the undesired invasives. We argue that wild animal labor has been invisibilized insofar as these non-human laborers either are said to perform their “natural” behaviors or relegated to nature/property themselves, that is, the product of labor. Our paper further helps de-exceptionalize human labor over nature and make visible the kinds of contracts that we are entering into with non-human laborers and hence also our duties and responsibilities. Our focus on labor specifically in invasive species eradication helps highlight the harms involved in the necro-labor that targets undesirable species.

In the last five years, alien lionfish, pufferfish, rabbitfish and sea urchins have proliferated in southern Crete. They are part of the 600 alien marine species that have entered the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal. Vibrant imperial debris and afterlives of global shipping, the tropical fishes are transforming ecologies across the sea. In this presentation, I delve into feelings of hope and despair when it comes to these processes. I conceptualize my interlocutors’ apocalyptic mindset and its concomitant ethics (which alarmingly is reflected in current biodiversity agendas) as a form of ‘cruel environmentalism’ to zoom into two rather different forms of cruelty. First, this mindset relies on necropolitics, advocating the killing of migrant species to save native ecologies. In this case, the solution to goes via the belly and 'invasivorism', i.e. the devouring of invasive species. Awareness campaigns inform consumers to “eat responsibly” by putting aliens on the menu. Marine biologists underline that endemic fishes need to cultivate a taste for alien inhabitants, turning invasivorism into a multispecies ‘responsibility.’ Second, this environmentalism is a form of ‘cruel optimism’ because of its futility. At its core, Laurent Berland (2011) explains, a psychological or emotional attachment is cruel when your desire (or the object of your desire) turns into an obstacle for your flourishing. The seascapes my interlocutors yearn for and seek to protect are not only landscapes of the past, they are idealized frozen memories of ecologies that only existed for a sliver of time (Kirsey 2015).

The battle against invasive alien species (IAS) rages on, and is being driven by recently articulated global biodiversity agendas. While the current United Nations Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) seeks to ensure pristine, protected areas comprise 30 percent of the world’s total surface area by 2030, there remains much to be done for the remaining 70 percent, areas dominated by human habitat and industrial activities. Many non-native species have partly or wholly naturalized in these mixed ecosystems, becoming entangled in people’s livelihoods. We therefore argue that initiatives to not only aggressively eradicate such IAS but also to enroll the help of citizens in doing so will likely meet with resistance. Biodiversity dilemmas may arise where the cure may be worse than the disease; animal welfare standards may have to be sacrificed; and socioeconomic utility may have to be set aside. We therefore advocate the need for an alternative perspective on biodiversity justice and the proper place of IAS.

This first presentation introduces the themes and conceptualisation of the panel. 

If anthropology were to burn, the sea is already on fire. Due to warming water, oceans are experiencing mass exodus of marine life and species “out of place.” While mobile species and migrant humans claim rights to belong elsewhere via the ocean, states, corporations, and environmental organizations lay their own claims: as a space of movement, capital accumulation, extractivism, and sea-grabbing, the sea becomes the front stage for new forms of expansion, control and bordering practices. Focusing on disparate movements currently unfolding in our oceans: human and non-human mobility, sea grabs, and their concomitant regulations, this panel traces nativist, capitalist and colonial legacies in anthropology and beyond.

Approached as archives of the past, oceanscapes and sealives provide new stories about the world we inherited from the colonial era. Through this colonial framework, early anthropology was dominated by a terracentric and anthropocentric gaze, viewing humans and non-humans as sedentary subjects. While the 1990s “mobility turn” challenged this paradigm when it came to humans, oceans continued to be treated as transit spaces, not as social worlds made up by moving people and sea creatures. Water cannot easily be fenced, owned, territorialized or captured. A focus on attempts to regulate and control the sea, mobilites and resources through governance or ocean grabs teaches us how the logics of capture and control underpinning colonialism and capitalism have been premised on the qualities of land, and are being rescripted for the element of water.

This talk thinks through multispecies invasivorism (eating invasive species) and the politics of eating in the context of alien marine species in the waters of Crete. In the last five years, alien lionfish, pufferfish, rabbitfish and sea urchins have proliferated in southern Crete. They are part of the 600 Lessepsian species, i.e. alien marine species entering the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal, which are now transforming local marine ecologies. Why these changes are unfolding now, 150 years after the opening of the canal, is a complex story of entangled human, biological and geological processes. My current research project explores the unruly environmental afterlife of the Suez Canal on land and under the surface through ethnographic work with humans and fishes across the Eastern Mediterranean Basin. 

In Crete, invasivorism is increasingly being advocated as a solution for controlling alien populations in the future. Awareness campaigns inform people to “eat responsibly” by putting aliens on the menu. But invasivorism extends beyond human appetites. Marine biologists underline the need for endemic fishes to cultivate a taste for alien inhabitants. This is challenging. Fishes’ learning processes are little-known and local species have highly specialized feeding habits. In contrast to their distinguished taste, alien species are understood to undermine the food chain by “eat everything: juveniles, fishermen’s catch and each other.” Is their unsatisfiable appetite crude cannibalism or diligent invasivorism? To disentangle the meanings and politics assigned to more-than-human eating in this case, I think through concepts like distinction, gluttony, food chains and belonging.

No time to waste. The predicaments of the third-tier academic track are daunting: a heavy teaching-load as you get the classes no one else wants to teach, expectations to teach already designed courses with little introduction as to the logic behind the curriculums, and little possibility to influence literature lists or courses since short-term employees are not part of the departmental board. You are expected to behave like a teaching-machine. exceeds the stated hours in your contract, the teaching-gig ends up eating up the precious time that you have for publications and research applications. And it really doesn’t matter, because you spend most of your hours on cumbersome job applications that have inflated in absurdum: how did we end up in a system where a job application can take up to a week to prepare?

The third-tier precarious academic could be understood as the ultimate hustler from the university underground as they navigate these conditions. But why don’t precarious academics revolt or give up? That is the most puzzling question, given that a permanent position still entails significant workload and a pay that is lower compared to the private sector. Improvisation hinges upon imagination and creativity. Overwork, overstress and exhaustion severely undermine the capacities for imaginative play and thinking outside the box; and so does being a teaching machine. Has our imagination been stifled to such a degree that we only improvise and hustle within the limited frames of the iron tower?