1st Edition
Nurturing Alternative Futures Living with Diversity in a More-than-Human World
Introduction: Storying Cultural and Biological Diversity
Muhammad A. Kavesh and Natasha Fijn
1. Blood Ties: Kinning and Killing on Australian Heritage Breed Farms
Catie Gressier
2. Demystifying the Promise of Sustainability through the China-Pakistan Donkey Trade
Muhammad A. Kavesh
3. Of People and Peccaries: Perception and Politics in the Texas Hill Country
Adam P. Johnson
4. Mongolia’s Biocultural Landscape: The Importance of Domestic and Wild Multispecies Diversity
Natasha Fijn
5. Cultivating the Ocean: Reflections on Desolate Life and Oyster Restoration in Hiroshima
Mariko Yoshida
6. Entangled (After)Lives: Naturalcultural Matricides and Reproduction in Northeastern DR Congo
Catherine Windey
7. Threatened Maize, Threatened Language: Indigenous Engagements with Biocultural Conservation in Yucatan, Mexico
Eriko Yamasaki
8. Ecotones in the Emerald Triangle: Zones of Multispecies Co-Occupation, Coexistence, and Conflict in the California Redwoods
Gordon Ulmer, Dara Adams, Rhiannon Cattaneo and Ricki Mills
9. “Cheese” and “Cheez”? On the Relation between Plant-Based and Dairy-Based Cheeses
Sarah Czerny
10. Microbes and Biocultural Diversity in the Ganges: Antibiotic Modernity and the Revival of Phage Therapy
Victor Secco
Afterword: Rethinking "Green" Energy Futures through Avian Landscapes
Sara Asu Schroer
Biography
Muhammad A. Kavesh is an Australian Research Council DECRA fellow, affiliated with the Australian National University’s School of Culture, History, and Language.
Natasha Fijn is Director of the Australian National University’s Mongolia Institute. An ethnographic researcher and observational filmmaker, she is recipient of a mid-career Australian Research Council Future Fellowship.
“Nurturing Alternative Futures engages in uniquely creative and critical ways with the situatedness and interconnectedness of more-than-human entanglements in an age of planetary unravelling. Centring the dynamics of proximity and distance in the (un)making of biocultural lifeworlds, its richly textured and varied contributions offer urgent avenues for nourishing alternative futures, anchored in an atmosphere of multispecies care, concern, and justice.” – Sophie Chao, author of In the Shadow of the Palms (2022)
“This critical and imaginative collection invites us to embrace futures that are teeming with probiotic viruses, Indigenous companion species, donkeys, peccaries, microbial cultures, aquatic multispecies assemblages, and forested ecotones. As market forces destroy cherished lifeways, this collection invites us to make worlds with new generative stories.” – Eben Kirksey, author of Emergent Ecologies (2015)
